Grandchildren, not mine May 25, 2017

Most folks who make it to retirement age have grandchildren on the brain.  They either have grandchildren and dote on them, or they want grandchildren to dote on.

I have to confess that until recently the idea of a grandchild was not something I spent time pondering.  After all, my own daughter is only 23 and not yet in a position to take on this challenge.  But I am starting to appreciate how powerful this draw can be, and I am letting in a little hope - just a little - that maybe someday such a blessing will come my way too.

My sister Mary has two grandchildren now, Misha, age 4, and Sula, about to turn 1.  Mary lives about 15 minutes away from them, by choice, and is able to see them several times a week.  I see how these little ones have taken hold of her heart and how such joy has enabled her to weather a divorce when it moved her to be closer to them. 

Last weekend the nephew of my first husband visited Point Reyes with his wife and their two-year old son.  How fun to see the little guy pet and feed horses for the first time, to go to the ocean, and to run away from the waves.  And how odd a feeling it was to be there with my first husband, with whom I had no children, waving goodbye to that next generation and the next after that – not ours to claim as our own, but with love and hope for their future.

Time to Travel May 15, 2017

I made a commitment to myself for 2017 that I would travel, no matter what else was going on in my life.  The prior three years had been fallow, but Peru over the winter holiday reacquainted me with my wanderlust.

Over spring break, my artist friend Gail and I journeyed to Mexico for a week.  We began with four days in Mexico City, followed by two days in the Yucatan.  The plan from my point of view was simple:  architecture, architecture, architecture. 

I don’t know why it has taken me 60+ years to get to Mexico City, but it won’t take that long to return!   What an amazing and exciting city this is!  With only a 4-hour flight from San Francisco and a 1-hour time difference, visiting is as easy as going anywhere in the US, yet more exciting because of its different language and culture. 

Gail and I made the pilgrimage to three Luis Barragan structures, including his home and studio and the very impressive Chapel and home of the Capuchin sisters.  We went to the obligatory Frida Kahlo blue home and the amazing anthropology museum.  I dragged Gail to the Unesco World Heritage site of UNAM, the University, with its 60s architecture and glorious murals (not to mention Candela’s Cosmic Ray Pavilion!).  We schlepped out to Teotihuacan on what proved to be the equinox, accompanied by half the population of Mexico City who came too to climb the Pyramid of the Sun on this important day. 

Perhaps the most fun of all, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, was our inn, the Red Tree House, located in a lovely residential section with good restaurants. Each morning we were greeted by mouth-watering breakfasts and other guests as we discussed our plans for the day, and each evening we returned to a few glasses of wine and conversation.  We made new friends.

From there, we flew to Merida for two days of Mayan ruins –Uxmal and Chichen Itza – and some obligatory last minute, late-night shopping. 

A few weeks after the Mexico junket, my friend Janie and I drove down to LA to meet our buddy Chieko for the weekend.  This trip was art, art, art!  Actually, there was quite a bit of food too, and of course, a lot of talk. 

Now I am gearing up for two big architecture trips, first to Rome (drawing) and then to Japan to study residential architecture.  I’m very excited and very grateful to have these opportunities. 

Taking it slow April 6, 2017

After reluctantly dropping out of Studio 2, I met with my advisor Andrew to plot out a strategy so that I might stay on track with my class.  I had already deferred for one year to recover from my daughter’s trauma, and I was hoping to not lose too much more time.

He said that perhaps I should take it more slowly, that the turbulence of my daughter’s disease might continue, and that fewer courses could be enough to handle. 

I think this was very wise advice.  I am now slated to take only three classes in the fall, and I will not be joining my classmates with Studio 3.  I will be a year behind as they charge ahead.  But I am beginning to think that Andrew has thrown me a lifeline – indeed this is exactly what I wanted, a way to study architecture at a slower pace that dovetails with my full life and my responsibilities as a parent.

Thank you, Andrew!  Thank you, CCA. 

Living a life imbued with grief March 6, 2017

There is a lot on my mind, and it has to do with grief – protracted, relentless, soul- and sanity-piercing grief.  Few among us who have reached retirement age have not come face to face with human loss, and in my particular path, dealing with loss or the threat of loss are sadly recurring themes.  These thoughts and feelings, and my need to write about them, stem from the recent relapse of my daughter.  They are heightened also by two books I just read, which I’ll get to in a moment.

A little background:  my daughter had been clean and sober for about a year and a half, and we were living together quite contentedly for four months while she worked at a good job and took one college class.  But in the new year, I became concerned that she was not holding her own.  Her comings and goings became erratic, she occasionally evaded my texts and calls, she opted not to enroll in the spring semester, and she started losing her patience.  In early February, I sat her down and said, “I get the sense that you are not very happy, and I am suspecting that it has to do either with a boy or drugs, or both.  Do you want to tell me what is going on?”

She rolled her eyes in that “Mom, you are such a dick” look that I have come to associate with teenage denial of an obvious truth, so I knew, sadly, that I was onto something.  Eventually, she came clean, revealing that in December the ultimate bad-boy drug dealer had re-appeared in her life and that she had “engaged” with him and started back in on her toxic assortment of drugs, including meth and heroin.  To those of you who might feel that I am betraying a trust with my daughter in posting her personal life online, I assure you that her own posts on numerous social media outlets tell the same story.

I was quite calm when she told me, since I had suspected it anyway; also, she said that she was working hard to get back on track, surely an exaggeration, but one I chose to take as hopeful. However, the very next day she main-lined a mix of heroin and meth – twice! – during her breaks at work.  I lost it, but I needed to take some time, as Suzuki Roshi wrote, “to discover how to respond”.   

Within the week she disappeared completely, and it was then I knew how to respond. 

First, unlike my previous numerous Annie rescues, I made the decision to simply not track her whereabouts.  I did not look into where her texts and phone calls were going.  I did not call her place of work to see if she was still showing up.  I did not look at her FasTrak record to see if she was in San Francisco or Marin.  I did not hack into her account to “find her phone”.  I did not contact any of her friends.  I did not look at her facebook or instagram.  Letting go of “need to know” was incredibly powerful and allowed me to maintain my own calm.

Second, I had to decide whether to let her continue to live with me.  A month ago, I had hoped that allowing her to stay at home while she tried to get back on track would at least prevent a desperate relocation to the drug dealer’s lair.  Giving her the opportunity of a stable and safe home, as the mother of another recovering addict counseled me, is the “least bad of a list of bad options”.  But as her yoyo life continued, I had to acknowledge that attempting to live with her was not good for me, and maybe not good for her.  She needs to take full ownership for her choices and actions.

I am done.  I have spent 22+ years of my life nurturing, loving, teaching, supporting, and ultimately rescuing a daughter who now seems hell-bent on her own self-destruction.  Yes, I know addiction is a disease.  But I also know that she knows how to get well and how to keep well.  Two years in rehabs and intensive therapies have given her all the tools she needs to heal, if she chooses to do so.  And as she is covered under my health insurance, she can access any psychiatric/psychological or de-tox assistance she needs.  As one of the many sage parents in my Alanon support group commented recently, “I cannot love my child to wellness” and “I need to stay on my side of the street.”  Another said, “Never do for your child what he can do for himself.”

So I am now fully letting go.  I am no longer checking in with her, or buying special foods she enjoys, or nagging her about seeing her shrink, or reminding her that it would be a very good idea to get that broken car window (smashed while she was out doing drugs in the Tenderloin) fixed because we are in the midst of the rainy season.

And yet, as those daily sores of worry start to heal, the grief is ever present.  I grieve the daily pain she must feel.  I grieve the loss of the person she could have been.  I grieve the loss of our relationship.  The questions for me are no longer what to do for Annie, but rather, what to do for myself.  How can I weather this grieving process?

Twenty years ago my husband, Annie's father, died.  After six months, I took off my wedding band and that had a profound effect on the healing process.  No longer was I reminded of my loss every time my hand passed before my eyes.  And so, I recently set to work on putting away the many photographs I have of Annie, most of which were taken when she was younger, as a way of simply letting go.

This putting away of the photographs isn’t just a practical move, it is symbolic of the larger shift that I need to undertake for my own happiness.  And now to the books:

“Designing Your Life” is one of those ubiquitous self-discovery books on the market, and I have been checking it out.  About half-way through, the authors recommend keeping an activity journal, while noting whether you feel “flow”  or are energized in the process.  I did so, and after two weeks I realized that although my individual activities were plenty “flow”-ful, the whole thing was wretchedly depressing!  I was alone about 95% of time.  I was deadened into solitude – reading, doing challenging cross-word puzzles, working on school projects – all of which were interesting and meaningful, but the steady diet of which was simply not so healthy for repairing a wounded heart. 

I started to wonder where the younger me had gone.  I was unrecognizable even to myself!  Whereas earlier I had felt joy and even exuberance at life, I now felt shriveled up, defeated, and sad.

So I started to think about letting go of the current me and cultivating a “restored” me by tapping into the roots of previous happiness and meaning.  I signed up for a day-long choral festival – and went!   I watched a performance of Rusalka on live-from-the-Met at a local cinema.  I went to the symphony one night and the ballet the next.  I had dinner with friends.  I joined a yoga class that I hadn’t attended in a very long time.  I spent a little more time at school to work on projects and hang out with fellow students.  I registered for a painting class.  I decided to write this blog post.  Indeed, I started to feel more alive, and I was grateful.

The other book that provided some insight into my grief and a way to move forward was “The Little Paris Bookshop”.  This short novel is a story about a man who runs a bookstore on a Dutch barge in Paris.  He calls himself a literary apothecary, doling out books to heal his customers like doses of medicine.  I immediately fell in love with this fictional character, tall, green-eyed, neatly dressed, compassionate, and intelligent.  The trouble is that he too needs to be healed, having grieved for 21 years by the end of a relationship.  The bookseller impulsively untethers his barge from the quai and heads south on the Seine, following canals and rivers on a journey of discovery. 

I’m not quite ready to pull up anchor altogether, but reading about another human being in a perpetual state of grief was impactful to me.  I now appreciate how much of my own life has been hijacked by grief. 

Every moment unfolding February 3, 2017

I am coming to realize that January is often jolting. 

Starting on New Year’s Day, my attention is drawn to the inevitable tick of the calendar.  1/365, gone.  1/52, gone.  1/12, gone!  Stop, stop!  It is all passing too quickly! 

But this awareness also causes me to re-evaluate how I spend my diminishing days, and upon reflection, I realize that the choices I have made in January are good ones.  Take the decision I made, out of desperation, to send Annie to rehab in Colorado.  Or the decision to quickly abandon a visiting professorship in another city.  Or the tipping point last January that prompted me to just “be” for six months.  It is as though my mind is made up of a bunch of balls in an obstacle course, and January gives me the temporal permission to shake the globe and let them all settle into a new arrangement.

This January was no exception.  Two weeks ago, I started my second term in the M Arch program at CCA.  I had loved the first semester there and anticipated the second to be equally stimulating and rewarding.  [As an aside, I also discovered that I satisfied the requirement for a course in “structures” by my three terms of engineering mechanics, taken…44 years ago!] 

Yet within the first meeting of studio 2, I began to suspect that it was not going to work for me: the timing late in the day, the demanding expectation of a new body of work every two days, the sterility of the instruction.  I had to quickly assess whether this class was going to be a good use of my time in terms of learning, creativity, and joy, and I concluded it was not.  Despite its being a required class in a sequence of studios, I chose to drop it.  In fact, I dropped it twice, because the Dean had encouraged me to give it a second chance, and I did.

Now it is Friday, early afternoon.  Instead of scrambling to have my model and drawings ready for a 3pm studio, I am writing.  I woke up to the patter of my daughter and had a conversation with her.  I meditated and read.  

I don’t know what impact my withdrawal will have on my future in the graduate program here at CCA.  I am still loving my Design Media class, and I will probably pick up a painting class.  But it is reminding me that I need to follow my own path, to sort out what is stimulating and useful, and to let go of what is not.  

For now and for me, this was the right choice.

A few thoughts for a New Year January 9, 2017

My daughter Annie and I just returned from a hiking trip in Peru.  We followed an old Inca route through the Salkantay pass (more than 15,000’) into a cloud forest in the Andes, then dropped back down toward the Urubamba River and Machu Picchu.  This was a “bucket-list” trip for me, and it was as breathtaking as I had imagined. 

The experience at this sacred stone city was one of those magical “peak” experiences in the loosest sense of the expression.  To walk the paths of this unfinished marvel, engineered for worshiping the sun and in doing so, communicating with other Inca villages on other mountain tops, is to lose one's own sense of self. 

When I returned from the top, I started to call up other magical moments I have had in my life, and some immediately came to mind.  There was a trip into a cave in the Basque region of when I saw an ochre imprint of a 40,000 year-old hand from another human being who could not have imagined the resonance of this simple act.  There was an aurora borealis that I enjoyed from my airplane window during a trip over the Arctic Circle.  There was Herculaneum near Naples, whose ancient frescoed homes were preserved by the ashes from Vesuvius.  There were the Viking ships in Roskilde, Denmark, being excavated and restored from a millennium ago.  There were the fairy penguins on Phillip Island in Australia who return each night to exactly the spot they had left a week or two before.  There were Stonehenge and the chalk horse in England.  There were the heavily salted grilled green peppers in Cordoba followed by entry into the mosque of endless arches. 

As I worked my way back, I realized what a long and rich life I have indeed had.  And how many “peak” experiences are ones that are readily accessible, if we pay attention. 

There is, for example, the whisker kiss and raspy lick of my cat Pogo, whose soft and commodious black form drapes over me as I prepare to sleep.  There is the patter of my daughter’s feet every morning and the sunset over the Inverness ridge every evening.  There is the joy of reading a book so good that you stall and stall so as not to finish.  There is sculpture of Richard Serra and the painting of Mark Rothko.  There is the thrill of the opera overture just as the maestro strikes his baton.  There is meeting a friend for coffee or dinner and sharing our most intimate concerns. 

Life can be long, but it can be hectic, and we can fail to pause long enough to taste the daily sweetness of our existence.  Getting older and being retired has allowed me to be better at this.  How about you?

Pinching Myself in Astonishment November 5, 2016

2016 has been a remarkable year for me, yet I have posted very little, and I’ll endeavor to fill in the blanks before the year is out!

As I write this, I am now in the second half of my first semester of a Masters of Architecture program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  It is the proverbial “drinking from a fire hose” situation, like the first year of medical school I suspect.  Relentless, exhausting, and wonderful.

The CCA first semester is beautifully laid out, as each of my three classes – Studio 1, Design Media, and Materials + Methods – are coordinated.  Studio 1, for example, takes the lead, in which we immerse ourselves in a design concept while also learning about materials.  The past eight weeks involved four such concepts and projects, each two-weeks in duration and each resulting in a 10”x10”x16” high “cube”.  First:  solid/void was manifested in concrete, the foundation of the project; yes, I learned to make and pour concrete into a perforated form I had constructed!  Second: part/whole in which we had to assemble at least 200 identical wood pieces into a structure; this involved the wood shop and a lot of gluing.  Third: frame/mass involved a metal framework – metal shop and welding! – and a mass of hard wood, with some black string thrown in as filigree for good measure.  Fourth: surface/depth in which we were given free rein to explore materials for enclosure; I utilized clear acrylic onto which I sandblasted patterns on both sides and then backed with an additional layer of cut black acrylic.  The whole thing was precariously piled up onto itself but looked pretty stunning by the end, as did those of the 21 other students.  Now we will endeavor to make this into a “real” habitable tower at ¼” scale by adding pathways, stairs, and an elevator.  Pretty wild.

Every once in a while, I catch myself at my studio table and mentally step outside myself to my own astonishment, “Wow, I am really doing this!”  Even as overwhelming as it all is, I am so grateful for this opportunity to engage in a field that has always interested me and so happy to be a part of a creative community with shared interests and goals. 

The End of Interviews July 6, 2016

This is a neglected passage that needs posting, as it belatedly marks the end of an important era for me.  For ten years (2005-2015), I conducted and wrote interviews for the open-access genetics journal PLoS Genetics.  What a rich and meaningful experience this has been!  The Journal’s editors gave me free rein to contact and interview anyone who happened to interest me and who had somehow impacted the world of genetics – scientists, writers, technical innovators, administrators, even an architect and a judge.  These interviews involved deep research, a bit of extra travel, transcription, editing, and negotiating, not to mention the joy of face-to-face encounter with so many fascinating subjects.  As a Buddhist acquaintance of mine, who was also conducted interviews, once commented, “To give someone else your full attention is a gift to them and to you.”  Indeed.

When I retired, I made a decision that I would continue this journey until its decadal anniversary in 2015.  To meet that goal, I struggled to re-write and publish a long languishing interview as well as meet with a local interviewee whom I had long held on the back burner.  These interviews saw the light of day a year ago.

But there were a few other loose ends that needed knotting.  First, I had in my hands the audio tapes that will be important archival material for future historians of science, and I knew I didn’t want them just to languish in my own study.  I contacted the American Philosophical Society who has a special interest in Genetics.  (They are the reservoir for audiotapes conducted by Horace Freeland Judson who wrote “The Eighth Day of Creation”, for example.)  Fortunately they seemed eager to archive my collection as well, and we completed that transfer this past spring. 

A second lingering project involved publishing the complete collection in a book format.  The first five years’ worth had been published by Cold Spring Harbor Press under the title “Speaking of Genetics”, but CSHP was not interested in a second volume.  As a budding designer, I decided to produce my own book, possibly under the title “Cross Talk” and found a local book designer who offered to take me under his wing.  Once I fell into the mode of taking it easy (see previous post), however, I let the ball drop, but I fully intend to pick it back up.

My editors, fondly referred to as “the Gregs”, tidied up the third loose end in writing a lovely piece for publication in PLoS Genetics to mark the end of my oeuvre, and it felt great.  It was another body of work nurtured, loved, and completed.  The end of an important chapter and one I cherish and am proud of.  Time to move on.

The Hand You've Been Dealt June 30, 2016

Tomorrow three years will have passed since I retired from UCSF, and perhaps it is a good time to pause and reflect on this period.  First, though, a little catching up is necessary since I haven’t written since February.  

By mid-January of 2016, I felt that I could no longer continue to run my life the way I have been since I retired.  This wasn’t really a plan or a problem of my own making, it was just the way I responded to the challenge of loving and attempting to help a daughter whose life had become derailed by drugs.   After witnessing her cycles of rehab, relapse, disappearance, and trauma, I was utterly exhausted.  In those 20 months, I had slept through the night only twice.  Otherwise, I woke up each night in a panic attack, heart racing, mind in agony, and then awoke again in the morning with terrifying thoughts born from this tragedy:  Is she sober?  Has she fallen in with some creepy guy?  Has she disappeared?  Is she still alive?  I found myself in a pit of despair and anxiety and was heading toward a complete collapse.

To those of you who might be reading this blog in hopes of some insight into retirement, my posts during this time period may not be what you were expecting or hoping for.  That makes two of us.  My life, which was supposed to be a template for the joyful struggle of establishing a “brand new me”, instead turned into a struggle, full stop.

And yet, as I have indeed changed the way I live my life, I realize that perhaps I have done something more powerful than even I was hoping for.  Let me explain.

By the third week of January, I had enrolled in four classes – two at College of Marin and two at California College of the Arts.  I belonged to two singing groups.  And I got sick with something that wasn’t terrible, but was painful and left me with the inability to eat very much.  All this on top of no sleep and nightmares.

As it happened, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to visit a friend from chorus who does grief counseling, and she said, “I know you’ll think this is hokey, but think about doing the 12 Steps.”  She was referring, of course, to the 12 Steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which are also used for recovery of relatives of alcoholics (and addicts) in their own recovery from this disease. 

She was right, though hokey may not have been exactly the word that described my feeling about it.  Some of the 12 Steps involved taking a deep inventory of the wrongs you have done and then make amends to those you have harmed.  What?  Why do I need to do that?  I wasn’t the one who got us into this mess, so why do I have to make amends?  I haven’t done anything wrong!

But wait, I thought, what does it matter if this isn’t my “fault”?  The point is that I am in this quicksand of despair that is powerfully sucking me down and suffocating me.  I may not have made this mess, but only I can pull myself back out.  And with that, I realized that I would need to do everything I could to question my own choices.  I realized that I indeed I had a choice!  What a concept.

Since I was already behind in schoolwork and singing because of my illness, I decided in late January to drop three of the classes and one of the two music groups.  Then I committed myself to waking up each morning to meditate, followed by writing in my journal, followed by reading something inspirational.  Next, I decided to go on an anti-anxiety medication to simply start getting some sleep again, so that I could establish a good cushion for all the work I needed to do.  I already had established a relationship with a therapist to help get through this painful period.  And then, there was Alanon.

I tried to get a bit more understanding about this 12-step business, and I found a Buddhist perspective on the 12 Steps on the San Francisco Zen Center website.  I was blown away by their interpretation and analysis.  It made actual sense.  Step 1: have come to believe that your life is unmanageable.  Check.  Step 3: have made a decision to turn your life over to God as you know him.  Well, for me, the God part wasn’t the point, but that word "decision" was terrifying.  You mean to say, I will make a decision to let go of my old ways, when perhaps what I really want to do is to nurse my old grudge, to continue to feel sorry for myself, and to remain paralyzed with fear about something that may or may not ever happen?  And once I realized that through my resistance I was choosing to hang onto all that crap, and that another approach might be possible, I came to appreciate that I had already made the decision to let go. 

I was quite skeptical, despite my friend’s encouragement, but I then met a man who told me (without my even bringing up my daughter at all) that his partner’s son was a heroin addict and that he had spent a year and a half going to a particular Alanon meeting in San Francisco.  He said it was transformational, so much so that he actually came to believe that everyone should go to Alanon.

This got my attention.  In truth, when Annie first was in rehab, the advice given to me was that I should go to six different Alanon meetings before deciding whether it was for me.  Which I promptly and obediently did, but none of them seemed like a good fit.  So I asked someone else who seemed to know a lot about recovery for a suggestion, and she told me to go to a Saturday morning meeting designed specifically for parents of addicts. 

The “penny dropped”.  These were my people.  The room held 200 grieving parents who had been through everything I had been through, sometimes more than I had been asked to handle, including death of their child.  Here was understanding.  Here was advice.  Here was encouragement.  Here was love.  I have gone every Saturday since then, and I can certainly feel profound change in my attitude, in my resilience, and in my overall ability to once more enjoy life.