When you care to send the very best?

Has the digital age brought about the demise of greeting cards? Is it really that gauche or antiquated or wasteful or silly to spend a few minutes to pick out a card, sign it, and mail it? Or are we back to the "save a tree, save the earth" rhetoric? What if I buy a card made of recycled paper, designed by the blind, with proceeds going to starving children in South America? Is it okay then? Regardless, I love getting cards, picking out cards, making cards. I even participate in helping make cards for the shut-ins in nursing homes and hospices and assisted living facilities here in our little town; when I started and wanted to know what kind of card to make, the organizer told me, "Make it a visit in an envelope." Those folks cherish their cards, read and reread them, and hang them in their rooms. If I was a shut-in, that'd be me.

You see, we grew up sending and receiving greeting cards to mark special occasions and  express thanks, sympathy, congratulations. Our parents never forgot a birthday, anniversary, or Christmas, many times tucking cash or even checks in those cards. We raised our kids to write thank you notes for Christmas and birthday gifts before the wrapping paper even made it to the trash bin. As our kids grew older, we sent birthday cards, notes, and yes, we were now the ones to tuck cash and checks (and later, gift cards and iTunes cards) into the envelopes; gifts were always accompanied by a personalized card, neatly tucked under the ribbon, and at family gatherings everyone would sit and listen to the gift recipient reading each and every card before opening the gift. Prior to big holidays (Christmas, Mother's Day, and Father's Day), I would make a list of folks for whom we had to buy cards; we would spend lots of time in the greeting card aisles finding cards with just the right sentiment for each member of the family at Christmas, buying cards far in advance of everyone's birthdays so we would have them on hand and get them in the mail on time.

Yesterday was my husband's birthday--his 55th, as a matter of fact. Last month we celebrated our anniversary, Father's Day, and my birthday. Guess how many cards we received for all of these occasions, not counting the ones from each other and from our church? Yeah, not many. And yes, we adore the phone calls, the videos, and the live video chats--we would not trade those for the world! But there is just something about checking the mail and seeing a colored, hand addressed envelope with your name on it, and even better are those precious handmade, handwritten cards and notes from children and grandchildren. When we do receive them, they are proudly displayed in a prominent location for days, many times getting moved to the laundry room to hang with the grandkids' artwork. And the VERY special ones? We wrap them up and put them in the keepsake box.

Our parents loved receiving cards; when we called to wish them Merry Christmas or Happy whatever-day, they would thank us for the card, and comment on how pretty or heartfelt the card was, and it warmed my heart. My dad especially loved cards, and he would proudly display each and every one on the TV in the living room, picking them up several times and re-reading them; he would wait expectantly for a card from each of his children, then grandchildren, at those special occasions.  And if one of his children did not send a card, he was crestfallen. After my dad died, I found a huge box on the top shelf of their spare closet; in it was every single greeting card my dad had received from his wife, children, and grandchildren. I cried as I looked through the box and spied cards I had sent over the years, and, realizing how much they meant to him, I was so glad I spent so much time selecting each and every one. After Alex's mom died, he retrieved boxes upon boxes filled with thousands, yes thousands, of cards and letters and postcards, some in English and some in Spanish. After almost two years of poring over each and every one, he has finally succeeded in sorting them out, sending only a fraction of them off to various family members.

All of our parents died in the last three years; maybe it is the newness of not receiving that familiar card with that instantly recognizable scrawl that makes it so disappointing when the mailbox is empty. This past Christmas was especially difficult, as it was the first one without our parents; both Alex and I could not even bring ourselves to celebrate our birthdays and anniversary last year--they just seemed hollow without the well wishes of our parents.  Maybe as time goes on, we won't miss those cards so much. Maybe we will get used to FaceBook posts and video chats as the new means of heralding another special occasion. Admittedly, I have my own box of memories, and although I'm a tad more selective in what I have saved over the years--not saving every card like Dad--there are a still a substantial amount of cards and notes from children, grandchildren, and of course from the love of my life. And I am not alone; Alex has a military duffel full of letters I wrote him during his long deployment during Desert Storm--every single letter I wrote. As we get older though, we are adding fewer and fewer keepsakes to my memory box because we just are not receiving as many tangible, physical things; videos and phone calls and FaceBook posts cannot be placed in a box or slipped into a photo album. Hmmm....perhaps I will start just printing them off so as to not have decades not represented by memories and cards.

I know, the pragmatists out there will shake their fingers at me and tell me to live in the present. "You're making lots of memories," they'd shout, and the majority of those memories are intangible; cards are only paper and ink after all. Nevertheless, the romantic in me retorts there is just something about a box of things--buttons, stacks of cards tied with ribbon, old report cards, scout badges, even baby teeth--things you can touch and feel and read and laugh and cry over. After all, when we go on to that great beyond, and our children and grandchildren find our keepsakes and cards and letters we've gathered over the decades,  how they will react? Will they cry? Laugh? Put everything in their own memory boxes?

Hopefully, just hopefully, each of them will know and see and feel how much they were loved. How much they ARE loved.

Frustrated

Me and David, 1959

Being the guardian of my brother is hands down the most frustrating, exasperating job I have ever had; although I know more now than I knew three years ago when he moved in with us, I feel completely inadequate to handle life as we now know it. I cannot even really explain what our life is like 24/7, because no one would believe it. I thought I had seen it all, that the trials and surprises and difficulties were over, that we (Alex and I) could finally get on with our retirement, and enjoy our lives and each other. If you follow this blog, you know the story; if you don't know, well, here's the Readers' Digest Version: Crazy mother, depression, estranged siblings, false charges, lawsuit, caregiving of and then deaths of all parents, culminating in caregiving of mentally handicapped older brother. In four years. And we figured we could handle the last one. We cannot. It is a Herculean effort that has me on my knees and in my Bible on good days, and in tears and not sleeping the rest of the days. I have felt my psyche and my soul slipping away as I try in vain to tackle this insurmountable task of caring for my brother in our home, while still trying to retain some sense of normalcy as a wife, a mom, a nana, and a sister. Instead, all those other roles are subjugated to the role of caregiver. A caregiver who does not have any hope of conforming her brother to her ideas of how to act in her home, or to understand the rules of proper adult social behavior. I was not trained for this, my husband was not trained for this, and we are at an impasse. Each day is a new horror, a new realization that no matter what we say or do or demonstrate, it is all lost on my brother. It is as if we are speaking a foreign language to someone who cannot hear, or trying to adapt a wild thing from another culture to live in our home and comply with social mores that he will never comprehend.  Like some crazy, mutated version of Jungle Book.

And it is not merely the diminished mental capacity or behavioral issues we must face--he is also scarred (and still scared!) by the abuse he suffered at the hands of his (and my) biological mother. I, at least, can work it out through prayer and counseling and reason, but he is imprisoned in a world of torture and abuse that to him, never ended. So the behaviors, the coping mechanisms he learned as a toddler--lying, hiding things, obsessive compulsiveness, inability to cry, anxiety, cussing and yelling at inanimate objects, insomnia--these behaviors continue, and grow more embedded in his personality year after year, until they are habitual and automatic. And unchangeable. We see it in full display when we ask simple questions and he shifts his eyes and makes up a story, and will stick with that story regardless of reality staring him in the face. We have tried, God we have TRIED, to help him see we are not my mother, we are not going to punish him; we have tried millions of times to teach him the value of truth, and the safety there is in knowing and sharing truth. And, most of all, we have  spent countless, exhausting, emotional hours upon hours impressing upon him how much we love him and care for him and have his best interest at heart. All to no avail. I am so lost, so defeated, so darn, yes, frustrated in my inability to reach him. My failure to prove I love him, to have him see and feel and experience our love. And yes, of course, the selfish human desire (no, need) to be appreciated for what we are doing, that is always there, lurking in the background, demanding attention for our efforts. Mostly, though, I am frustrated in the loneliness I feel, the sheer overwhelming frustration in not being able to explain why I feel this way to outsiders, and I am angry  at my dead parents for not having prepared us better for this task. We are not psychologists or social workers or therapists or mental health professionals; we have no degrees or training or even an online course in special education and special needs challenges. We are merely a married couple with grown kids and a desire to help and to love and to take care of our family. It is not enough. Yes, through Christ I can do all things, but the method I use to accomplish those things may not be the method I thought we would use. 

And you know what makes it so infuriatingly harder? Two things--folks telling us what great people we are for caring for our brother despite his challenges, and folks who only have to interface with David for short periods of time telling us what a joy he is, how blessed we are to take care of him, and how lucky he is to have us as his family. Yeah, both those viewpoints only serve to make us feel even more trapped and more inadequate than before, and when we try to explain, to provide anecdotes and vignettes of what our days are like now, we get one of two looks: the "deer in the headlight" or the "shocked yet benevolent" look. Alex and I could relate a zillion examples and reasons why our situation is so untenable, yet when we tell folks the stories, they either sound inane and silly (even funny), or so outlandish as to not even closely resemble the truth. So how do we communicate the exhaustion, the stress, the utter monotony of living with an adult who ignores common rules and social values, has no personal space, or sense of right or wrong? An adult who cannot really clean himself or take care of brushing his teeth or wipe his butt or remember to wash his hands? A 68-year old man who talks to himself and feeds himself and dresses himself but who becomes catatonic when asked a simple question or has to go through the TSA checkpoint at an airport? A man who merely says what he thinks you want to hear because he just repeats phrases and responses he has learned from his parents for the past 50 plus years? An adult living with us in our home who truly lives in his own world where his rules and his beliefs are paramount, who moves things around or throws things out or sneaks down in the middle of the night to binge on whatever food he can find? An adult who will perseverate on a hangnail or an imaginary injury for days, but who cannot or will not or just plain doesn't understand the need to let us know he has been peeing blood for two weeks and probably has a severe infection? The daily litanies we repeat are obeyed (sort of)--brush your teeth, wash your hands, here are your pills, chew your food, tell us what is hurting--but they will never be learned. Then there are the safety issues--picking up snakes (thank God it was not venomous), eating food from the trash, walking across the street without looking, carrying too many things down steps, picking up broken glass, walking backwards up stone steps. We are always on our toes, trying to prevent the next emergency. Most of all--David is 24/7, no breaks, no quick trips to the store without him, no date nights, no 30 minute walks while I leave him at home. Every minute, every day, 365 days a year. 

Yes, we love him. Yes, we will take care of him always. Yes, we know he is made in the image of God and that God has a purpose for him as well. He is my brother. We promised we would care for him. We know God has a plan for us. We just want to know where it all fits together. So, we asked. We prayed. We waited. And asked and prayed some more. For God to close doors and open others. Friends prayed. Family prayed. 

God answered prayers, as He always does. In His time. And I am trying my hardest to trust His answer, and to not become frustrated.