The STUFF Sisters

The Weight of The World

My younger sister believed in angels. Since her death over 20 years ago I too like to think they exist and that she is now among them.

My younger sister believed in angels. Since her death over 20 years ago I too like to think they exist and that she is now among them. When I see a white feather on the ground or blowing by I like to believe it has fallen from an angel’s wings. That maybe my sister or her winged friends have passed my way.

My parents are both terminal cancer patients. Continue reading “The Weight of The World”

Rest In Peace

School photos? Unruly cowlick? He cut my hair until my fifty-first year. No one else did. Not ever in all those years. Not even when I moved whole states away.

Almost thirty-five years after leaving junior high school, my French teacher walked into our business this past weekend and told my sister the saddest news of our year. A dear friend – an acquaintance, a confidante, a secret keeper – had died. And not recently, but six months ago. Unbeknownst to us all, and a shock.

John Creighton started cutting my hair when I was ten years old. I probably sat on a phone book in his chair at the swanky Salon Klaus on The Plaza. He cut the hair on the heads of my parents first, and what propelled me to follow suit is unknown. School photos? Unruly cowlick? He cut my hair until my fifty-first year. No one else did. Not ever in all those years. Not even when I moved whole states away. Continue reading “Rest In Peace”

She Was Seventy Feet Tall

I looked up that day into the far distant branches of the tree above him and noticed I could see more of the sky than ever. The leaves seemed smaller, and the branches less full.

“I…can’t…talk…about…this…right…now.” My words were choppy as I tried to catch my breath with my voice wobbling into sobs.

In my marriage, we divide and conquer. We share a great deal of the responsibilities of owning a home that’s over a hundred year old. In fairness, my husband takes on more of the burden in the fourth quarter, my busiest. I, however, rule the other nine months.

Coordination of the trimming of our three large, old trees fell to him. He called the arborists, set the appointments, kept the appointments, and booked the work.

Continue reading “She Was Seventy Feet Tall”

The Thick and The Thin

I have lived the last week with my eyes and my hands. My eyes and the hands of others. My hands holding the hands of others. In silence and in noise.

Yesterday I attended the funeral for a friend’s mother. I had a seat that afforded me the view of my friend’s right hand. I could see no faces, having only a limited view from several rows back. Her hand rarely left her father’s right shoulder. It gripped him to hold him up, with every muscle in her forearm defined. It caressed his back gently and then returned to its grasp. Nails polished a burnished steel, her hand told a story that left me in tears. The quiet kind that slips out while your eyes are wide open and you are unaware until you swipe them back.

Not a week before that, I was standing in the living room of a friend in the company of many. I was listening intently to the quick speeches of two other friends when I realized one of them was veering into speaking about me. I reached immediately for the arm of a dear friend to my right, and his hand found mine and never left. Having been summoned, I left him to walk into the realm of the speakers. I can still feel the comfort of his grip. The knowledge that he was there for me and would have held on through thick and thin was transforming.

I know that my friend’s dad felt that from his daughter. The thick and the thin. Through the liturgy, the Eucharist, and the final hymn.

The gentle power of the human hand has been a wonder for me to behold.

Sloane

Motherhood & Game of Thrones

I want to believe that if a hater comes to end my life or the lives of those I love, it will be like the distant past – like ‘Game of Thrones’. I want to believe that I will see them coming.

I will not deign to believe I hold more than two things in common with Mindy Corporan, the woman who lost her son and father in the senseless shootings in Overland Park on Sunday. Number 1: The honor of sharing a small business award three years apart. Number 2: Motherhood.

It’s the motherhood part of our commonalities that had me thinking about “Game of Thrones” – a show I have never laid eyes on and never will – as I drove down Main Street yesterday with my son. We were on a mission to rent a tuxedo for prom. We were laughing and smiling and telling stories of our day apart. At 17, he is a joy to be with, and he opens up to me often but stays within the privacy confines of the deep friendships he shares with others. Of this, I am proud.

Senseless violence did not visit us at all yesterday on our journeys. A person reared and saturated in hate did not keep us from living our lives. Of renting suits, meeting new people, making deposits, planning dinner, finishing homework or reading our books.

I never want to have violence touch my family as it touched that of Mindy, a woman I shared a cocktail with the year she won a local small business award. I never want bullets to end my father’s life as Mindy’s ended. I never want to wonder why my son is lifeless beside the open door of a car as Mindy did.

I want to believe that if a hater comes to end my life or the lives of those I love, it will be like the distant past – like “Game of Thrones”. I want to believe that I will see them coming. I want to taste their hatred on the wind, and I want them to smell my fear. In other words, I want no guns involved. I believe that when the words a weak person lives by are too strong and hateful, that person can hide behind the power inherent in a gun. I want to believe that I will have the opportunity to physically fight for all that is right when I am attacked by all that is wrong.

“Games of Thrones” is a fantasy, and I know that. I abhor violence deeply. It makes me nauseous and unable to watch it on small or big screen. I cover my eyes, cower, and wait for it to end.

I refuse to live in fear. I will continue to drive down roads with my son in the sunshine. I will continue to fight for justice and equality. I will continue to work for a world where mental illness is taken seriously and doctored accordingly.

I will not cover my eyes, except to weep for a woman who has lost so much at the hands of a hater. I will learn from her and do as she asked us all: I will live.

Forever Haunted

I will forever be haunted by this photo of garment factory workers in Bangladesh. I had an early hand in their death.

I will forever be haunted by this photo of garment factory workers in Bangladesh.

I had an early hand in their death. Years ago I shopped for clothes for my young son and was always searching for the “cheap tee”. He ripped through them by using them – painting in them, playing in them, using them to their fullest. I can remember actually saying to a friend of mine while standing in a big box merchant, “How can they afford to sell these shirts for four dollars?”

Now I know they – we – can’t. The cost is too high, and these two people – and upwards of 1,000 others – paid the price I wasn’t willing to pay for expensive clothing.

My friend Missy stated it loud and clear at a charity event a few weeks ago when she was telling us all about the sponsors of the event and how we “vote with our dollars” and should “consider moving our money to the businesses who care about what we care about.”

Done.

Photo credit: Taslima Akhter, Bangladeshi photographer and activist. Retrieved from: lightbox.time.com.

A Prime Minister, a Secretary of State and a Retailer Walk Into a Bar

I have had mixed emotions since learning of Margaret Thatcher’s death.

I have had mixed emotions since learning of Margaret Thatcher’s death. I was raised with strong feminist tendencies, and I am co-raising a son in the same vein. I think a lot about issues that women and girls face, and I have built a business with my sister that does what it can to help women succeed. I march, speak up and act up. Regularly my voice breaks at the microphone due to my passion running so swiftly.

Mrs. Thatcher clearly shattered the glass ceiling in British politics, but in getting there she pulled up the ladder for the other women waiting to lead by following in her footsteps. I honor her ability to forge into a world unknown to women at a time when that could not have been easy.

And, yet, the woman that keeps popping into my mind when I think of the opposite of Mrs. Thatcher is Madeleine Albright.

This quote says it all for me.

Rest in peace, Prime Minister. You may not have directly helped a woman standing near you, but there were hundreds – maybe thousands of us – watching and learning from you. I pray we took the best and left the worst behind.

p.s. This is one of my favorite articles this week. It involves women and girls.

Health and the Human Heart

Yesterday I walked into Truman Hospital for the first time in 16 years – since the night my youngest sister died with dignity in their care. I haven’t been ignoring the place. I just haven’t had a reason to stop in.

You see, I have health insurance, a part of group healthcare from Taylor Benefits Insurance, and no recent need for hospital care. So as not to be confusing, my sister may very well have had health insurance but her auto accident placed her in their amazing hospital by proximity. It was her closest and best hope.

I went to Truman to show my support for the health levy campaign, which Kansas City voters will vote on in April. I wanted very much to stand there with my friends from the Kansas City CARE Clinic and continue to share with the world the need for safety net providers and all that they offer to those without insurance. Truman Medical Center is another place where those without insurance can always find care. Always. Politics is a funny business and has never had a big place in this blog I share with my sister. If you want to know more, click here.

On my walk alone back from the board room, I was transfixed by the art in the hallways, waiting rooms and sky walks. Gorgeous. They were all well lit and very, very pleasing. Wood cuts, prints, water colors, pastels. Wonderful. I have a true love of public art and tried to take time to absorb. But I needed to get back to work.

I made myself exit through the emergency waiting room. Our family was never made to wait the night my sister died – we were swiftly escorted back to a room without her in it. I did not dwell in the daylight, but I did take a moment to take in the art, the upholstered chairs, the seating arrangements, and the kind staff. Good things, sad things, and amazing things happen every day in the buildings on Hospital Hill, and I found myself there on one of those days with a full heart.

I left, got in my car, and pulled half a block down the street to take in, again, one of my favorite pieces of public art in Kansas City.

It reads: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesses him that gives and him that takes.”

It stops me in my tracks every time. What started as decorative architecture has a home in front of one of Kansas City’s premier care facilities. Yesterday I walked even closer to it than I ever have. I noticed the chisel marks near the 5 on the “1905” curving edge. A human may very well have carved this piece that hung over Kansas City General Hospital all those years ago.

How fitting.

p.s. I am including a closer view below. You can’t see the chisel marks, but you can read the words and see better the carving and design. This is on Holmes right before you get to 20th Street.

Packing It All Away

I was packing the last two boxes of holiday decorations. I save the packing of the ornaments for last. They usually come off the trees on a Sunday, migrate to the dining room table for removal of the hooks, and, a few days later, I start putting them back into the tissue paper they hailed from just a month and a half before.

I was putting the finishing layers – three per box – into both boxes at once and said to my husband and son, “If I dropped dead tomorrow, you guys would never open these again, would you?” They were only one room away, clicking busily on their computers, when the dove-tailed answers hit. “No.” Maybe one of them mumbled, “Probably not.”

These boxes hold memories. When I unpack them right after Thanksgiving, they rest on the dining room table – out of their protective wraps – while I stare at them and repair unglued joints. I remember tiny hands that made some, and this year I revisited memories of a long gone sister and the two things I have that she made as a child. I walk leisurely down memory lane during the busiest month of my year.

A few days later, when the three of us go to hang them all, I take a few minutes to point out several to my son that have real significance – my grandmother’s stitches, my great-aunt’s crochet work, his grandfather’s paint strokes, and his aunt’s ability with clay. I try not to overwhelm and have learned that four shout outs one night a year is the maximum for possible retention.

I don’t really know if the boxes would ever be opened by the two men I live with. A woman would open them if left in her care. She would wait a year. Or more. Then, one cold morning, she would brace herself with a box of tissues and her courage and rip those suckers open. She would visit each piece like a tongue lingers on tooth pain. Delicately, so as not to wince, moan or cry out.

I packed it all away. Again. The entire process is cathartic to me. I have many people to visit with at my dining table all year long at a myriad of events, celebrations and holidays. But the places and the people I can’t have back come delicately to me in December in the form of pinecones, angels, dogs, and snowmen. I touch them all. Hang them up to breathe. Live with them. Then, I let them go.

p.s. Full disclosure: This is not our tree featured with my son and me in the photo. This tree graces the lobby at The Rep every year during the seasonal run of “A Christmas Carol”. We visit it.

Power of Transference

I have never been one for morbid sensibilities. I don’t dwell in sadness, nor do I dabble in unwholesome thoughts. I am not gloomy.

Early this morning, before the sun was up, cancer consumed the life of a friend’s father. I had time last night to hold her and sway a bit in a hug that didn’t want to end. She was moving quickly towards the silences that would come with her father’s death, but we were taking a few more minutes to talk about things that had nothing to do with the tasks at hand. Several good laughs, a few inappropriate comments, a touch of bad behavior and moments of quiet in an overly-bright waiting room.

I have small town ways about me. They have to have come from the branches above me in my family tree, as I was not raised in a small town. One of those “ways” is that I stop for funeral processions. I pull over. No matter what. When they are coming toward me and when they are on my tail. I take these moments for contemplation about the people I have lost in my life. I remember myself in dark and quiet limos. I remember deep sadness and overwhelming relief. I give these moments time, because it’s what I have to give. Time. What can my hurry possibly be that I can’t stop to honor a family in pain? It’s minutes, really. Blinks of an eye.

So, this morning, I took a moment and spent time looking for pictures of my father. He is living with cancer and doing a bang-up job at it. It’s hard, and it will be his forever. My friend’s father has just ended a very short dance with a wicked disease.

I ache for my friend. I can never feel her pain, but, through the power of transference, I can weep for her loss and be there when the smiles return.

“Hold ’em tight,” I said to myself and others this morning. “Time is fleeting.”

p.s. Here are photos of my Dad and members of my family over the past year. Some of these I have used in previous blogs, and some I have not.