Lee Woodruff's Blog, page 8

THE PROPOSAL

As mothers — we want to make it all perfect.  And so when my daughter started looking at prom dresses before she had the date, well, I was a nervous nellie.  What if she didn't get asked?  It wouldn't be the end of the world, she could go with a group as they all seem to do today.  But it's her senior year.   As a Mom you want everything to be just so.  And yet with matters of the heart, you really don't have any control. Ok, I suppose I could pay some boy to ask her, advertise on Facebook and offer $100 in I-tunes certificates for someone to be her escort.  But that one aint gonna stay secret for long. That kind of subversive activity could go south pretty quick.

I'm just about to head to the airport with my little girl as I finish writing this.  I'm taking her away with me for the weekend— just Mom and daughter.  It's my graduation present to her.  She doesn't need clothes or stuff or one more gadget.  The girl who could be a little more forthcoming in the communications department is going to make some memories with her Mama.  And I can't wait.

So imagine my surprise today, while packing for what I hope will be a perfect four-day weekend, to get a phone call from my daughter's girlfriend.

She wanted to drop off a letter that she has been helping a young Romeo polish.  It's an invitation to the prom.  She need to come up with a ruse about why she would be dropping an envelope at the house for me.

But this Romeo doesn't just want to give her the letter.  He wants me to give it to the pilot to read on the plane.  And he wants it all to happen before they take off so she can text him her answer.

Even my old, jaded 50-plus-year-old heart skipped a beat.  Not only was my baby girl going to go to the prom, she was getting a "Fantasy island" proposal.  Complete with da plane…..  who says all these kids want to do is find friends with benefits?

"Is she going to be happy that this guy is asking her?" I said, displaying my ignorance at my daughter's social life and inner workings.

"Oh yeah," said her friend.  And I smiled.  A big, long wide, Cheshire cat smile.   Don't you remember the heart thumping sweetness and thrill of a boy you liked asking you to something.  Well I do.  I may be old, but I'm not senile.  There are no words to accurately describe that kind of emotion.  It's all gut-feeling and tingling nerve endings and blushing capillaries.

So sometime in the next few hours, a little girl (who is now taller than me) will be smiling.  And her Mom will be smiling too.  Not just because she is happy. But because I am happy that I'm with her, that I get to be with her like this, like the days when she was little and she was all mine.  And I'm so happy that she gets to be on the receiving end of a proposal from a boy who thought this out- who wanted to make it special for her.  Thank you God up in heaven that YOU are still making boys like that for our little girls. Can you go into mass production please on that model number?

We're only as happy as our happiest child—wasn't that the famous Jackie O quote?  Or maybe I got that backwards.  In any case, I couldn't have scripted this better.  Just keep your fingers crossed it all goes right!

A FUNERAL, A BIRTHDAY AND A DOG

 

I had one of those days yesterday where I bumped up against the goal posts of life.  One announcement of the sudden death of a little boy, another old friend's funeral and then I capped it off with a friend's 50th birthday party. 

The vicissitudes of life.  I like that word, not only because it is chock full of consonants and sibilant sounds, but it captures exactly what it means to be in this middle place in life.   The dictionary defines it this way -- "of constant change or alternation, as a natural process, unpredictable changes or variations that keep occurring in life."

I didn't know the little boy.  I only know his grandparents and I know that kind of pain has no words attached to it.  There are no dictionary definitions that can accurately describe the loss of a child.  It's not the natural progression of life.  No parent should ever outlive his or her children.

As I watched the elderly mother of my friend Jeff, whose funeral was yesterday, I saw the pain etched there too.  He was 52, had made it through the better part of his life presumably, the parts where he'd filled in most of the blanks.  He had wonderful friends, a successful career, had married a great gal and been the father to three beautiful and generous daughters.  But there was so much he wouldn't get to do now.  And that pain was just as fresh and as real for that mother as it was for the mother of the 11 year old.  A child is a child.  And a mother's job is to protect, even though none of us can fashion armor against the randomness of cancer or a drunk driver, a blood clot or an accidental fall.

As we all remembered Jeff yesterday, some of us who had not seen one another in too many years, it was really what all good funerals are supposed to be – that clichéd celebration of life.  And so it was. 

Later that night at the birthday of my friend David, we raised a glass to his life.  A birthday is less about looking back than it is about looking forward.  Yes, we celebrated his three beautiful sons, his wise choice in a wife, his accomplishments.  We roasted and jabbed, poked at self-confessed weaknesses.  But a birthday says, "I made it this far and I'm still going strong."   It was hard not to see the juxtaposition as I thought of Jeff's family, sitting, I imagined, with the left-over's from the funeral reception.

There is no takeaway from a day like yesterday other than the old chestnut about living life in the moment.  It's a lot harder to do it than to say it.   But those of us who've made it this far have to give it the old college try.  Loss is something we get more comfortable with over time.  We respect it.  And if we're good and wise, we let it remind us to live a little lighter, worry a little less about the silly things and tell the ones we cherish how much we love them.  Whenever we get the chance.

Our little dog Tucker was hit by a car three weeks ago.  It was very traumatic for everyone and it happened in front of my eyes.  I had to wake my girls that morning and tell them.  At 10, they haven't really experienced much loss.  They have all four grandparents and all of their aunts and uncles.  They were too young to remember the scary parts of their Dad's injury.  They only see the recovery.  Today we will plant a bush in the yard to remember Tucker and his absolute zest for life and unconditional love.  My girls will each read things they've written about how much they loved him.

Today will be a lesson in celebration, like all rites and passages are.  Today will be an opportunity to remind them that they, too, can survive the vicissitudes of life.

Article in Parade: Coming Back to Life

Hi there!  I recently published an article in Parade on the importance of struggle, survival, and staying positive.

As the nation roots for Gabrielle Giffords's recovery, the wife of ABC's Bob Woodruff talks about the long road back from brain injury

By Lee Woodruff 

After my husband, Bob, called to tell me about the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 bystanders in Tucson on Jan. 8, I stopped and said a prayer. Then I immediately thought about Mark Kelly, Giffords's husband. In 2006 I was the one who got that phone call out of the blue. While on vacation with our four kids at Disney World, I learned that Bob, an ABC news anchor on assignment in Iraq, had been riding in a vehicle that struck a bomb. Shrapnel was lodged in his brain, and he lay in a coma. Doctors didn't know if he'd survive, much less function normally. 

Today, though, he's back—back at work and back in my life as a husband and father. Many Americans are hoping that Giffords has a similarly successful recovery. We're thrilled by every positive report—she watched an hour of TV! she spoke!—and devastated by the setbacks. 

Still, she and her family may be in for a long haul. In the world of brain injury, the work is hard, the recovery process painful and painfully slow, and the miracles few and far between. Progress comes in blink-and-you'll-miss-it increments. 

Keep Reading on Parade Magazine

The Pang

"I still get that little pang when I see you."  That's what my husband says to me every now and then when he walks in the door and sees me.  And even if I'm mad at him -- even if I'm standing there with my hands on my hips, head cocked to one side--- it still makes me smile.  It stops me right in my tracks because there really isn't anything else he could say that would make me feel so completely …. loved.

The "pang" is the equivalent of a schizzle.  You know that feeling.  At least I hope you do.  It's the sensation of things flipping over a little bit inside you, somewhere down below your belly button.   It's what happens when you think about him or her, when you contemplate and anticipate the night to come or replay the one you just had.  At my age, maybe the pangs aren't quite so dramatic.  They're more like pulse points.  They simply let you know that the heart is still alive and kicking.  

The fact that my husband and I have been married for 23 years and he is still "panging" should be reason enough to keep him around.  Whatever he's done, like leaving his dry cleaning stubs on my dresser (two feet from the wastebasket) or making me repeat something for the third time because he is only partially listening ( my voice is white noise), these things seem vastly less important when he pangs.

Marriage is a tough gig.  Take two people who are desperately in love and full of lust and then shackle them together through the years.  The "I can't wait to get him in bed" feeling begins to evolve into "if that bastard snores again I'm going to stuff the pillow down his throat."  The candlelit meals and champagne toasts with entwined arms ultimately give way to the routine of unloading the dishwasher. It's inevitable.  Marriage is about the business of living; of living together and making it work.  There is nothing romantic about a clump of hair in a shared bathroom shower drain or feeding a family of six night after night.  But this routine becomes a kind of necessary glue that helps it all hang together.  For most of us anyway.

My husband is easy on the eyes.  People are always telling me how handsome he is.  And as smitten as I was by all facets of him when we first started dating, I chose to give my heart to someone who would always challenge me intellectually, who got my sense of humor and who could, in turn, make me laugh.  I married a kind man, which was vital to me.  But most importantly, I married someone with whom I imagined I would never, ever, have to sit across from 45 years later at a Denny's buffet, chewing slowly and with absolutely nothing left to say.   And after all, handsome is as handsome does.  You stop seeing the outside after a while, so you'd better love what's inside.

So how do folks keep a marriage going?  What are the secrets, the keys, the things people do?  I get asked this a lot, especially from younger people who seem to think that Bob and I have it all figured out.  But I'm loath to be a poster child for matrimony.   I know this: there is no perfect marriage.  You need mutual respect, the ability to compromise and negotiate, love in all kinds of doses, a few shared dreams, a long leash and a big sense of humor.  Laughter is key.  Laugh together, laugh often, laugh when you want to cry, and laugh at yourself.   When you are in it for the long-haul, self-deprecation and a dose of humility become as sexy as George Clooney. And when the chips are down or you hit a rough patch, gallows humor can ease you through many of the tough times.  It's much harder for the heart to break when you're laughing out loud. 

I think in the end, as my husband says, you can simply get lucky.  You can't possibly predict how someone is going to grow or evolve (or not) in the years to come.  You don't necessarily think about the genetic time-bombs of cancer, Alzheimer's or depression that can lurk in the ancestral closet of your combined gene pools or the way your lover was parented (or not) as a child.  These are things that will occur to you later.  Sometimes, they'll be enough to stop you in your tracks.

It's fairly easy to trace the ways that love can erode.  Being a responsible adult is sobering.  There are taxes and credit card bills and mortgages, and then you add kids and dishes and laundry and you find yourself talking out loud about "pee" and "poopy" and germs and telling everyone to "wash your hands" or "it's only funny until someone loses an eye."  You begin repeating the inane phrases your mother did - - the ones you swore you'd never say -- until you realize you've somehow managed to become your mother.

With motherhood comes the amazing physical ability to love, nurture and parent, and you discover that your body is a harbor, a food source, a shelter… but a Wonderland?  Not so much.  You are all touched out.  You have held and coddled and consoled and nursed and hugged and physically cajoled and by the time your man comes home at night searching for a little nookie, offering your body to one more human feels akin to organ donation.

With a job, four kids and two dogs, there are nights now at age fifty that I'd rather lower myself into an aquarium of hungry piranhas than offer myself up to this man I love.   Getting eaten alive by fish is at least passive.  It requires very little exertion on my part.  And this from a woman who loves her husband.  Okay, maybe that last part was a little harsh, but getting down on all fours and purring like a kitten is about the last thing on my list after a long day of taking care of everyone and everything else. 

In the beginning you might believe that love has the power to help you change someone; make them better, deeper, more sensitive, more compatible.  You believe there is a perfect yin to your yang.  And love does have power to change some things, at least to a degree.  But you can't really change them deep down.  Not fundamentally anyway.  That part has already been molded, the foundation laid years before you came on the scene. You might train them to hang up their clothes and make their beds, to grill and take out the garbage.  But the really important stuff, like your philosophy on raising kids, you'r your religion, or your desire to backpack in third world countries, those things can be harder to compromise on.  So you'd better look closely and hopefully you'll get lucky too.  After all, there's a big does of luck in this "forever after" stuff.

Time, life, routine and details become the sand paper, the Emory board that can wear love down in a marriage, leaving a couple shaking their heads and wondering how it slipped away.  And so every once in a while you need to pick your marriage up by the seams and shake it, examine it, talk about it, worry about it.  You need to face it down.

As hard as it may be to find the time, it's important to set it aside, draw a circle on your calendar, put in the hard work to buff up the mutual respect, the sense of humor, the ability to admit when you're wrong and say "I'm sorry" when you are. You need to systematically interrupt the business of living and go to work to shore up the edges—before it gets to the point where it's irreparably injured, before it has no heart beat and can't ever pang again.

My husband was critically injured by a roadside bomb in 2006 while covering the Iraq war for ABC News.    That was a wake up call --  literally at 7:00 am --  that no family should ever receive.

Bob had just been named co-anchor of "World News Tonight" and he was reporting from Iraq for the eighth time.  Our life leading up to that phone call was in a good place.  We were happy and content, and although we knew that his job would require increasing amounts of travel, we also knew we would find a balance.

Even before the injury, I would have described us as a family who already "got it."  We understood life was precious and short.  Maybe we didn't live embracing that credo every single day, but who really does outside of an ashram?  We tried.  We'd been through miscarriages, losing a child during pregnancy, a hysterectomy, the heartbreak of a child with a hearing disability, the tragic death of a close family friend. Together we had fingered the tenuous threads that hold us all here on earth. And these things had strengthened us as a couple in their aftermath.

A crisis often has a way of reprioritizing everything.  In an instant, my world was rocked with the sudden news of Bob's injury.  And as I stared at him in his coma and listened to all the pronouncements of what the doctors thought he would and wouldn't be able to do, I wanted more than anything else in the world for him to wake up, to talk to me, to make love one more time.

Over the next year I would become a devoted caregiver.  Our relationship had gone from equal footing to one that wobbled unevenly.  All at once I was mother, nurse and therapist.  I was grieving the loss of someone who was still alive, someone who had an uncertain future.  With a head injury, no one can tell you how it will turn out, how much they will recover.  What would this new man be like?  What if, in the process of caring for him, I began to lose love?   What if he remained broken and all of the things I respected—his intelligence, his ability to care for me—what if all of that was in jeopardy?

I never thought for a minute about leaving.  Not once.  Maybe that's hard to believe, but I loved this man and I assumed that if he never returned to his former self, I would learn to love him in a different way if he never returned to his former self.  I created a back-up plan just to ease my anxious mind during those regular 3:00 am wake-ups.  I would go back to work full-time, sell the house, celebrate the things that were still there, the parts of my life that brought happiness.  I would find ways, if I needed to, to fill the gaps in my soul with close girlfriends, stimulating conversation and the escape of my writing life.

I had taken my wedding vows seriously and we'd enjoyed some amazing years together, full of extremes – both adventure and routine.  We'd produced four terrific children.  I would make our new situation work and honor him if he never really recovered.  I would give him his dignity if he was unable to work again, no matter how tough that road might be.

In the hospital, staring at his swollen head and his face mangled from the shrapnel, I decided that if he were going to be a vegetable, at least he would be my vegetable.  I would take this day-by-day. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that he would do the same for me.

Luckily, my man returned.  He came back in an amazing way with a lot of determination, time and the love of family and friends.  He has defied every expectation and his recovery is nothing short of a miracle.   That's a pretty strong word but I have to say it applies here.  I'm not going to minimize or gloss over this part.  It was hard work.  And there were plenty of moments of despair and doubt and terror and grief.  There was regret and sadness and depression on my part and feeling emptier on days when I had to buck everyone else up- emptier than the emptiest vessel.  And there are moments still where I can feel the damage that was done to all of us by that insurgent's bomb.  Every trauma leaves its scars.

But in the aftermath of Bob's injury, once he was back at work and well on his way to becoming himself again, I crashed.  What had been so "up" for all of those months, had to come down at some point.   For months, I battled with the enormity of what had happened to us, the devastation and the post-traumatic stress giving way to disbelief and soul-sucking sorrow.  And when I took that dive, Bob was there for me, just as I'd been for him.  That's the amazing thing about a strong marriage. The give and take.  You can't script that, and you can't perscribe it, all you can do is feel your way along with no road map.  You use your gut and your toes, your instinct and your generosity.  You may fumble sometimes, but if you've laid the groundwork and built the foundation, the center holds. 

I don't recommend tragedy to bring people closer.  It doesn't always work.  I've known couples that divorced under the strain of illness or children with disease or disability.  Hardship doesn't always bring out the best in people and I can't pretend to have a formula for how it worked for us.  Not every day felt good or hopeful. 

But as I write this in the bright sunlight of a July morning, four and a half years after his injury, my husband has already walked the dogs and gotten breakfast. There is bacon on the stove and the trash is already out by the curb.  Our kids will be stirring soon and they will gradually tumble down the stairs in various states of awakening.   At some point in the day, we will both look around us and be awash in the unarticulated goodness that makes up our lives.  It's a feeling I have when I look at each member of my family and realize we have survived.  And our love has grown and aged in different ways.  It is richer now, more mellow, like a good stinky cheese. We've mostly moved past that horrible time.  The big thing that happened to us no longer defines us.  

And so we all move forward.  We are closing in on a quarter century of marriage now.

I can't tell you that we're religious about "date nights," about having long, intricate conversations and regular sex.   Many times we don't exactly know what the other person is doing or has planned.  I'm not always up on what news stories my husband is working on or where is he traveling on a given week, and he doesn't always know what articles I may be writing.  Our lives are full and busy and I am grateful for that—even though the flip side of busy can be stress, fatigue and an occasional lost sense of connection. 

Marriage is far more work than they ever tell you. Or maybe we just can't fathom it at the time.  I think about that naïve couple we were—standing in front of the altar flanked by friends and family, believing that the whole world streamed out before us, that it was ours to fashion and make in a way of our choosing.  And, to a degree, it was.

One of the hard things about surviving decades of marriage and life itself is to make peace with the fact that at a certain age, though you still feel mentally young, many of the roads have already been taken.  The key choices have been made (unless you're a serial divorcee).  There are no big surprises left - - except possibly the ones you don't want to contemplate; the ones that involve loss.  Don't get me wrong, there are still lots of wonderful moments to anticipate.  But exciting, yet-to-be-revealed things like my choice of career, the man I'll marry, the children I'll raise – these blanks have all been filled in.  My parents are aging and failing.  There is poignancy in watching the seesaw tip as my sisters and I begin to parent them in the circle of life.

I often revisit a conversation I had with a family friend, the mother of two boys we grew up with during our summers in the Adirondack Mountains.  At 72 she was dying of ovarian cancer.  She was honest and open about this fact when I went to visit her for what would be the last time.  In that candid way you can afford to be with someone facing their own mortality, I asked her what advice she would give me about marriage; standing as I was, hopefully, in the middle of a long run.

"If I could do it over, " she said, "I'd leave more dishes in the sink.  I'd worry less about the to do lists and leaving my kitchen perfect for the next day.  I would have spent more time just sitting on my husband's lap."  

What a heartbreakingly simple thing to do.  Just sit there for a spell, entwined in one another.  There is something so basic and pleasurable about just being present.  You don't need words.  I try to remind myself of this advice as I rush through my day, fume over Bob's dirty pile of clothes on the floor or slap together a microwaved family dinner.  You'd think that after all I almost lost in my marriage, after everything we've been through as a family, that I'd spend every day reaching for gratitude.  But we have short memories, we humans.  Real life intrudes and I have to remind myself of my friend's rear view mirror wisdom whenever I feel my foot pressing down on the accelerator.

There are hopefully many chapters yet unwritten in my marriage. But if you're just  looking for the high wire act, the rollercoaster thrill, if you're a junkie for the eternal sizzle, the fresh piece of flesh and the multiple orgasms, then my words are probably going to fall a little flat.  Me?  I'm simply happy that my husband and I can reconnect to those parts of ourselves that matter most, the things that brought us both together in the first place.  I'm content most nights to aim for sitting on his lap.  

Even if I don't get there as often as I should,  I'm happy to focus on that next pang.

 

LET THE GIFFORDS HEAL IN PRIVATE

When the news broke about Gabrielle Giffords last weekend, it was Ground Hog day all over again.  My husband called me from the car.  I stopped and said a prayer.  And then I turned on the TV where the stunning first pictures of the scene were coming in.  I turned it off.

My first thoughts were not of Ms. Giffords, who at that point was in surgery or at least sedated.  My first thoughts were of her husband, Mark Kelly, and what a phone call out of the blue, so unexpected and so devastating, feels like.  It is a blow to the mental solar plexus.  It is sheer confusion, absorption and then living hell.  Wait, there must be some mistake, is your first thought.  Just minutes ago my world was normal.  How can it all go upside down so fast? 

Five years ago, I was that spouse, blissfully waking up in Disney World with my four children to the phone call from ABC that my husband had been hit by a bomb in Iraq.  He had taken shrapnel to the head.  From that moment on, the outside world shrunk down to a faint background buzz.  I would inhabit what I called "the zone" in my own mind. The zone had no room for anything else besides my husband's condition, our children and close family and friends.  Period.

My husband has experienced a miraculous outcome.  And we have witnessed and come to understand over and over again just how lucky our family is.  Since Bob's very public injury, we both have devoted much time talking to families, advocating for our wounded veterans and others with TBI (traumatic brain injury). We are honored to be that voice on the other end of the phone for anyone who knows someone who knows us and needs to talk about brain injury and recovery.

Until Bob returned to work ten months later, I would not turn on a TV or watch any news.  It was painful to see that my husband, who loved what he did, was no longer in the mix as a journalist.  He might never be in the mix again.  As I awoke daily into the fresh hell of grief and uncertainty during the five weeks he was comatose, part of me was stunned that the world outside the ICU window kept on spinning.  The sun still rose and set.  People still went to the grocery store.  I couldn't imagine it then, but the real work was about to begin.

As we wait and watch in these first few days after the shooting, we will probably not learn many more details about Rep. Giffords' long-term prognosis.  Nor should we.  Right now this is a battle she and her family need to wage out from under the media scrutiny.  And it will be a long and hard fight. 

There are few miracles and much hard work in the excruciatingly slow process of recovering from a brain injury.  People ask me when it was I knew Bob would be OK and I tell them it was a full year before I let my breath out.  I would have chosen absolutely any other kind of injury or disease but this.   Every other horror I could think of at least had odds or prognoses.  A brain injury is as individual as the people who receive them.  The brain is our most complicated and complex organ.  Some of the deficits and ways people are tinkered with in the aftermath can be painful to bear.  Yes, spouses are lucky their loved one is alive, but that creates a guilt over grieving the loss of both little and big things.  It's a complicated grief.

And so now we must collectively back away from the Giffords' bedside. This is a marathon, the doctors told me over and over again, not a sprint.  Send the positive thoughts. Keep their names on the prayer lists at synagogues, churches and mosques.  Mail the elementary school classroom get well cards, bring on the casseroles, plant the flowers in the yard.   But don't hover.  Let this family and the others who lost loved ones in this tragedy heal in private. And by the way--- as a nation we must be there for those who have come home injured from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as we are for those who serve in public office.  We must be supportive of all who walk this long and torturous road.

Almost exactly five years to the day that our family became members of a club we never expected to join, here is what I do know.  I share it with Mark Kelly and anyone else going through a difficult journey, a challenge or their own "in an instant" moment:

1) Human beings are born to survive.  The resilience of the human spirit is one of the most humbling and awe inspiring things to experience and to witness.

2) The love, prayers and contact with family and friends do help motivate recovery.  It was my daughter's kiss on Bob's comatose face that brought the very first involuntary response… a tear from his good eye.

3) Hope is a very powerful commodity and if you can't feel hope on some days yourself, find that friend or loved one who can hold it for you temporarily.

4) Denial is sometimes a useful tool.

5) Take life hour by hour- forget about a day—that's too long.  Some days just getting through an hour is a monumental task.

6) Everyone takes recovery at his or her own speed.  There is no right or wrong answer about how to grieve or get through a tragedy.  Be good to yourself.  Accept the kindness and good deeds of others.  Let go when you need to and buck up for the right reasons.  There are no first, second and third prizes for stoicism or grief. 

You make up the rules.

 

Interview with Drinking Diaries

Hi there.  I recently gave an interview to the site Drinking Diaries.  You can read an excerpt below, and the full interview here.  And, as always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments - thanks!

Each week, we post short interviews with interesting people about their thoughts and feelings on women and drinking. There is such a wide array of perspectives about this topic, and we are excited to gain insight into as many as possible and to share them with you.

Lee Woodruff is co-author of the best-selling book, In an Instant, whichchronicles her family's journey to recovery following her husband Bob's roadside bomb injury in Iraq. Woodruff is a contributing editor for ABC's Good Morning America, reporting on a variety of home and family related topics. She recently published her second book, Perfectly Imperfect – A Life in Progress. A freelance writer, Woodruff has penned numerous personal articles about her family and parenting that have run in such high-profile magazines as Health,Redbook, Country Living, Parade and Family Fun.

How old were you when you had your first drink?

I was probably in ninth grade.

How did/does your family treat drinking?

My mom doesn't drink at all and my dad was a gin on the rocks with an olive each night kind of guy. It wasn't taboo but there was definitely no excess—I don't remember ever seeing my parents drunk.

Keep Reading on The Drinking Diaries

DEATH IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

A friend died the other day.  Breast cancer that spread too far, too fast.  But she had her dukes up the whole way; fought a damned good fight.  She stood tall, battled elegantly, thrusting and parrying at the disease like the most elegant of fencers.  I know there must have been ugly days, days of railing at the fates and wondering "why me?"  But she chose not to show most of us those days.  She moved through the world with giant grace; with her chin up, a twinkle in her eye and a sense of good humor.

I stumbled across the email entry for her in my computer the other day and my fingers froze.  My heart constricted.  There she was, I thought.  Living proof.  Was she really gone?  No more replies to my emails or Face book messages?  For just a millisecond I moved to delete the entry and then stopped.  I wasn't ready to press that button and say "yes" when my computer asked me if I really wanted to do this.  I wasn't there yet.

How does one "delete" a friend in this age of technology? What about Face book?  Do you "un-friend" someone after they die?  It seemed so final.  So I chose to do nothing.  I declared a period of memoriam in cyberspace.  She would live on there, until I was ready to let her go.

In the old days, back when people like me walked barefoot to school and got wooden teeth, you had physical address books. You could hold them in your hand and flip the pages alphabetically, long before computers organized that information for you.  When someone moved or died or just no longer really featured themselves in your life, you would erase them, cross them out.  And in this simple act you could still see the traces of them there—the ghost of the person.  Like a reflection or a shadow.  This was the final step before obsolete.  Sort of an "un-dead."

But now everything is instant, electronic, immediate.  It's so simple to add or delete.  Things happen inadvertently.  The first time I faced this issue was when our friend David Bloom died in Iraq in 2003 while covering the invasion of Baghdad.  I remember stumbling across his contact information at NBC, his work number and cell.  It was a hard slap to see the computer scrolling past his name in the "B" s.  What to do?  David was gone.  The silence was deafening.

I didn't dwell.  I decided (by not taking action) that death in the technology age required a period of mourning.  I would keep David's entry there until I had processed the death, lived with it, grieved it and accepted it, as much as one can accept death.  Just having him alive in my laptop and cell phone somehow kept David present.  The David Bloom entry was my proof that he had existed at all.

I haven't had to deal with more than my fair share of death yet.  I don't know what one's fair share is.  But I know there are families and towns for whom death and loss has been more of a frequent companion.

For an old gal, I've been relatively unscathed.  My first was a fatal car accident involving my high school friend -- a boy--- who was a prince among men.  I didn't go to that funeral in Buffalo, New York and I will always kick myself.  I was in college at the time, couldn't figure out the transportation, didn't understand quite the weight of ceremony.  No one talked about "closure" the way they do now, but I suppose all these years later my lack of attendance haunts me for that reason.  I needed to be there to lay him to rest too.   

I missed both of my grandmothers' funerals as well.  During one I was out of the country, the other, across the country with a newborn.   The trip and leaving a baby seemed impossible back then; we'd just made a move to a new town.  I was overwhelmed and I'd said my goodbyes to her not long before.   I look back now and wish I'd made more effort.  Those passages are important.  They don't seem so when you are younger and lives stretch out like red carpets. 

Looking now through the rear view mirror, I understand that ceremonies offer a sense of completion and celebration of living.  They are a tender act; the way women lovingly wash the feet and bodies of the dead. There was a time in America where you kept the body at home for the wake, dressed your loved one, held them as they died.  In the parts of the world where people are not as removed from the cycles of birth and death, they speak of the comfort brought by this proximity to the departed.

We don't get up close to death like that anymore. That's mostly handled by others; professionals in hospitals and hospice.  It's a job, a career.  It's not dissimilar to the way we buy our meat in the supermarket, already slaughtered, butchered and wrapped in plastic.  We sub-contract out the messy parts.

Looking at a dead friend's contact information in my computer is a little bit like that.  It's an industrial, sanitized entry, no pen marks or wine stains on the page.  It's too easy to hit the button and move on.  A bunch of keystrokes cannot, certainly, constitute the essence of  the person who lived, laughed and loved.  And so, in defiance of all that is so efficient and easy and destructive in this age of technology, I will stage a sit-in for her in cyberspace.  I will keep her alive in my hard drive for as long as I choose.  There will come a day, when I'm cleaning out my address list, adding and deleting, that I will finally let her go.  But right now, I'm still content to catalogue her as a "friend."  

 

The New Yorker on 'Heroes'

Tad Friend of The New Yorker recently published a wonderful profile on the work we do for Remind.org.  You can read the full article here and I'd love your feedback!

We admire people who can do something we can't. If we wish we could do that thing, too—or are very glad we don't have to—then we call those people heroes. Hero worship beamed in all directions at Manhattan's Beacon Theatre the other night during "Stand Up for Heroes," a benefit for Bob Woodruff's foundation, which aids wounded veterans. (Woodruff, an ABC News correspondent, was himself badly wounded in Iraq in 2006.) The show's array of stars had other stars crowding in backstage to watch. "It's a little Rat Pack-y thing," Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen's longtime drummer, said. When Tony Bennett sang "The Best Is Yet to Come," Springsteen was humming along, just offstage. "Fabulous," he said about Bennett's swingy, catfooted phrasing. "Fabulous! I do not want to follow Tony Bennett."

But he did, ripping into "Open All Night," backed by Weinberg's fifteen-piece band. Bob Woodruff stood in the wings, bobbing on the downbeats. "You can't top this," he told his wife, Lee, who was shimmying in a purple dress. Nearby, Jon Stewart, the evening's host, was pounding the air drums alongside a wary Jerry Seinfeld, who stood with his arms crossed. When Springsteen hopped onto the Steinway to play a few licks, the crowd went crazy, and Stewart leaned toward Seinfeld and said, "If you could do that, you would. That's what you would do." After a moment, Seinfeld nodded.

Keep Reading on The New Yorker

The Humble Mascot

Over the past few years, I've traveled to university towns in the nation's heartland numerous times.  Although I'm an easterner by birth, I feel at ease in the plain states.  But it wasn't until I recently spoke at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers, that an observation about the mid-west suddenly jumped to the forefront of my brain.   The dots connected.

Who had chosen the mascots at some of these big mid-western schools?  The gopher and some of its regional rivals, seemed to be in a category better recognized as annoyances, pests or animals simply destined for road kill.

Let me just admit up front that I am NOT a sports person.  My son and husband think it's humorous to throw a team name at me and ask……no, not where they are from.  I'm more hopeless than that.  They quiz me on what CATEGORY of sport it is.  I'm about 75%.

But the mascot thing was way more interesting to me than the sports themselves. Gophers in Minnesota, Badgers in Wisconsin, the Wolverines in Michigan, (is that even a real animal or is it the Chihuahua of wolves?)  Illinois State has the Red Birds, (decorative) Jay Hawks symbolized the University of Kansas and University of Ohio trumpeted the Buckeyes.  How do you fight a nut, for pete's sake?  How do you even make that into a costume the spirit team can wear?

Nebraska's Corn Huskers were perplexing but understandable.  But who the heck wanted to go up against a team known for repetitive food preparation?  I discovered the Foresters of Lake Forest College.  They sounded like an industrious lot, clearing acreage and all, but that didn't seem particularly competitive.

Where I come from back East, mascots are ballsy animals, spoiling for a fight.  Tigers in Princeton, Yale had the Bull Dogs, Brown the Brown Bears, and my personal alma mater, the Colgate Red Raiders.

Even small schools chose fighters like Bucknell's Bison or the Bates Bob Cat, animals known for mixing it up.  The list went on with spit and vinegar.  But what had happened in the mid-west?  Was this simply a case of the region's good natured and understated humility? 

Personally, I liked the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  Finally, a mascot I could relate to. OK, so maybe it gave Irish descendants like me a bad name, as if we already didn't have  the drunken brawling stereotype to contend with.  But in my opinion, a drunken fighter doing rope-a-dope still wins out over a badger, gopher, nut or an ear of corn.

When I investigated further, I found many other more appropriate competitive symbols;  Braves and Indians, Warriors, Rebels, Marauders, Cavaliers, Cowboys, Crusaders , Knights and Privateers, Raiders and Rebels, Savages and Saxons, Spartans, Trojans and Vikings.  There were also smaller but determined mascots, like Hornets and Yellow Jackets.  Things you hit with a rolled up newspaper.

Scary bad guys like Devils and Demons proliferated.  There were do-gooders too, teams with the Lord on their side; Saints and Bishops, Quakers, Cardinals, and hearty Pioneers.  I was confused by the Battling Bishops of Ohio Weslyan.  It seemed a little contradictory to be a man of the cloth and put up your dukes. 

I personally liked the animals, especially the feline family. There were Tigers, Cats, Bob Cats, Lions, Panthers, Wildcats and then other fierce fighters like Bison, Eagles, Bears, Rams, and Broncos. Pittsburgh State had the Gorilla, an animal not usually associated with Pennsylvania or steel.

One of the most perplexing mascots, however, was the "Blue Hose" of Presbyterian College.  I prefer to think that this is about colonial stockings and not a garden implement, or worse, a glib sexual reference.  This would probably be one of the few sweatshirts my daughter would NOT beg me to buy during a college campus visit.

Weather patterns like Cyclones, Hurricanes, and Tornados were common.  And added to that list of "difficult and uncomfortable mascot costumes" was simply the Green Terror at McDaniel College.  The name conjured up images of plagues, nerve gas and Centers for Disease Control. 

With a total right-brained lack of imagination, engineering schools, like RPI, and MIT came up with……..yes,  "The Engineers,"  battling rivals with pocket protectors, power strips and duct taped glasses.

Faced with the complete list of college and university mascots, I began to see the reasoning in the mid west's Big 10 decision to choose kindler, gentler animals.  Maybe if you weren't so full of yourselves, you'd actually psych out the opponent.   Perhaps so many smaller schools picked giant-sized, bone-crunching Tomahawk wielding mascots out of a Napolean complex.    How humbling to be badly trounced if you are The Golden Eagles, Wildcats or Razorbacks.  Better to low-ball the competitive expectation with, say the humble nature of a Badger, Cardinal, or for heaven's sake, a Buckeye. And then  --  WHAM -- cut'em off at the knees. 

It was the recent experience of running into my new friend Chip, one of the regulars at my local dog park, that drove home the importance of selecting an appropriate mascot. Usually hatless, he was wearing a baseball cap that said  "COCKS" in giant stitching.  I knew Chip was newly divorced, and as I warily moved closer for inspection, I wondered if Chip might fare better in the dating department if he just got a T-shirt and drew arrows pointing at his groin.

"That's quite a hat," I said, figuring I needed to tackle this head on.

"Yeah," said Chip.  "That's my team."

"Oh," I said relieved, as I read the tiny print "University of South Carolina" above the cap's brim and bent to pick up the steaming poop my dog had just deposited.

"What a, um, great hat, " I said to Chip, instantly re-evaluating the wisdom of mid-western mascots.

"Sure is," he beamed.  

Notes From The Road - Veterans Day

If you do one thing this Veterans Day to honor our service members, watch this video.

If you want to say "thanks" by donating ANY amount you can give click here.

And if you already did something to assist a wounded warrior and their family, we salute you.

"Support Our Troops" is not just a slogan.  It's an action.

www.ReMIND.org

 

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