My Sister Was a Badass

See all the pictures HERE

I picked Mindy up from her house on a Tuesday morning.

The night before I had traveled down to do some work in the backyard for mom - building planter beds and hauling in garden soil.

I wanted to bring Mindy down to visit with the girls. I wanted her to get a change of scenery for a few days and to spend as much time with her as I could.

That Monday Mindy and Eric had gone down to Portland to talk with her doctor and to ask what was next.

"I asked him if he was trying to tell us that we were running out of options," Mindy told me after we had started down the gorge toward my house. "He said we'd run out of options awhile ago."

In other words, when the latest medication she was on stopped working, the only course of action left would be hospice.

Hospice is a different kind of medical care from chemotherapy. In many ways hospice is a reaction to our modern medical system's focus on attacking a disease regardless of the pain and suffering the body in which it resides.

Traditional chemotherapy is a prime example of torture for your own good. The side effects are legion as we attempt to kill off the very last cancer cell, while leaving the patient alive. Advances have been made in recent years. New cancer drugs are targeted and much better tolerated. There are pills rather than infusions and medications much better suited to treating and preventing many of the side effects.

That said, most cancer treatments can leave you miserable, exhausted and depressed. It takes a strong person to get through a year of it.

Off and on, Mindy had been through four years. A roller coaster of good days and bad. When she was first diagnosed, she had been given just 6 months to live. Four years later her doctors were done pulling rabbits out of their hats.

Modern hospice care originated with British Registered Nurse Cicely Saunders, who created a philosophy of medicine which focused on the patient's needs rather than the disease. The goals are directed at the physical comfort and spiritual needs of the patient and the patient's family during the last days of life. It is the course of care when curing the disease is no longer an option or a choice.

Simply put hospice seeks to keep the patient comfortable and see to their needs rather than make them well. Comfort, quality of life and living fully until the end are the goals.

It is difficult in our culture to talk about death and dying, let alone enter into a system where dying is the end result -- even if the goal is to make that transition as easy and life affirming as possible. It is a hard conversation to have. Battling through chemotherapy and its side effects is all about fighting. After years of it, it is hard to change our thinking. It feels like giving up, like quitting.

It is not.

Mindy and I talked about these things on our drive through the Columbia Gorge. By the time we reached  Stevenson, she changed the subject.

"Did you know they have zip lines now at Skamania Lodge?" she asked.
"We have them down on the coast, near Astoria, too," I said.
"I want to do that," she said. "Do you?"

After that, the plan was set. I called just after we got to my house and set up a tour for Friday morning. Meanwhile, we took a motorcycle ride around the valley -- with her oxygen tank strapped to luggage rack of my bike. We visited Mary and said hi to the donkeys. We sat and watched the storms blow across the fields. The girls made her giggle and cuddled with her while we watched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Despicable Me. We ate at a Bosnian restaurant, enjoyed the strange food and laughed at the ranting waiter.

Mindy's 02 bottle was in the black bag on the back. 

We both grew nervous as the day approached. I was worried about her. I called High Life Adventures to make sure they could have a cart to take her from one place to another so she wouldn't have to walk, and that it would be okay for her to ride the zipline with her oxygen tank. We watched the wind blow and the rain fall and wondered if they wouldn't cancel our tour.

We got up early and dressed in rain gear and warm clothes. We were just two out of a group of 12 people on the tour that morning. The rain stopped just as we started.

The first run is easy - close to the ground and you can see the end. The next one is higher. After a few shorter runs, you climb a tower and open a gate high above a lake and step off -- riding a line that travels hundreds of feet over water and through trees. You cannot see the end, which somehow makes it scarier.

One of the women we were on the tour with was afraid of heights. Mindy -- always taking care of other people -- reassured and encouraged her.

The woman was there with her two teenage daughters. She told Mindy that she used to be more adventurous. Then a few years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She survived and was cancer free, now, but had been more timid ever since.

Mindy understood.

 "You had to face up to what you might loose," Mindy told the woman. "Now you worry about losing all those things if anything goes wrong. You know what's at stake."

"I worry all the time," the woman said. "I never used to be like that."

"I'm terminal," Mindy said with smile and a little laugh. "I have nothing to lose."

As the woman stepped through the gate and zipped off across the lake, one of her daughters said in a tone of admiration: "my mom is such a badass."

In the four years since her diagnosis, Mindy got to do a lot of things. She saw her eldest son get married, her youngest son graduate and do well in college and a new job. She saw her middle son enter the Army and thrive. She flew across the country to watch him graduate from basic training. She swam with dolphins. She always worried about her boys, but she lived to see them grow in the world.

And when she couldn't travel anymore, there came a parade of family and friends and wishes from all the lives she touched, for she was a light in every room. She was a gift in every life she encountered.

By the end of the Zipline tour she was tired and her second 02 bottle was almost empty, but her eyes were bright and she smiled and giggled as we stepped off the top of the highest tower and raced 1200 feet across the lake.

My big sister was such a badass.

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Getting a henna tattoo to replace lost hair. 

More photos from our adventure online here. 

Driving Lessons

My sister Mindy taught me to drive.

My brother Chuck used to send me out to warm up the old truck while he was getting ready for school and he would even let me shift gears -- left handed from the passenger seat -- in his Mercury Bobcat while his hands were full with a milk shake and burger.

Yet it was Mindy that actually taught me to drive.  She taught me the trick to driving is to keep your eyes far down the road.

Then she took me car shopping and helped me buy my first car.

It happened like this. Mindy had just bought a Ford EXP -- which was Ford's attempt in the 1980s to build a sporty two-seater out of the Ford Escort econobox.

 It is a car justifiably forgotten today. Beige on brown with a tan mouse-fur interior. At the time, however, it my sister's pride and joy.  A new off-the-lot car that was all hers.

It says a lot about Mindy that she would allow her 15 year old brother to drive it at all, let alone teach him how to drive on it. Mindy was like that, she was an instigator -- but in the best way. She was a "C'mon, it will be fun." She was "lets race the horses up from the hidden fields." She was a creator of experiences.

Her experience teaching me to drive was fraught, at first,  since her car was a stick shift, and we lived on back roads full of hill starts and two lane curves. She was as patient and calm with me as with the horses she trained -- even when I almost let her car roll into the guardrail while trying to work the clutch from a stop on a hill.

Maybe she was having second thoughts about using her new car for such duty, because one day she said "let's go car shopping."

Mindy. Always with the smile and the "C'mon, let's go."

AMC Matador: Mine was Maroon 

I had some money saved up working the hay and in my mom's restaurant. So we set off for town one afternoon, visiting the various used car lots, looking at old pickup trucks and thrashed Pintos. Finally we happened upon a 1971 AMC Matador. It was bone-stock with some melted plastic trim inside from sitting in the hot Eastern Oregon sun. It was big, slow and comfortable. She helped me negotiate the deal and arrange to get it home -- since I was still more than a year away from getting my license.

It was not cool. This was the 1980s and irony had yet to be discovered, but it was a good fit for me.

That car was a freedom machine for me during my teenage years. Before I got my license we practiced on the back roads, piloting the big boat around the curves and along the old highway to horse arena, or to my friend Danny's house.

After I got my license, the Matador was the favorite in school for hauling way too many kids down to the store during lunch our, or over to The Dalles on a Friday night. I got in trouble in that car -- it had a habit of backing into things -- parked cars, a restaurant on my first date -- but I had many more good memories.

It was in that car that I discovered a love of driving. Something I thought about often these past few weeks driving up and down the gorge to be at her bedside. Driving is where I did my thinking, my crying and my grieving. Driving through the beautiful hills and stark vistas, through white capped river and broiling clouds, through shafts of light and heart-stopping sunsets.

My sister Mindy taught me to drive, and so much more.

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Good Fences

My last wood screw went into the last board as the rain began to fall.

There had been a steady drizzle, but now the dark ceiling opened up to a torrential downpour. 

I scrambled to put my tools away, slipping in the mud.  It took me a few moments to realize that it was the very last screw in my pouch - the last 3.25 inch construction screw I had.   It took still longer for me to get inside  the warm house and out of my wet clothes, to stand at the window looking at the green gray fields and admire what I had accomplished.

The fence was finished.

It still needed a coat of white stain on the last section, but that would come on a sunny day. My daughters love painting the white stain.

 I love good fences.

I never thought much about fences until we moved out West in 1978. I was Grace's age then and the forest hills and hidden fields seemed vast open wonderlands to me compared to the crowded suburbs of New Jersey. To be sure, we rambled through the wooded swamplands that backed up to our home there, but it nothing like 82 acres of field and forest. 

There was a great hill overlooking the whole property that we would climb in the last hours of a summer day with the night hawks already diving for prey. It was a grand thing to me then, to stand in an open field on the crest of a high hill, counting the white capped mountains as the pink fire of sunset painted the sky. 

The fences were barbed wire, which tears your shirt if you slide under it, and is too unsteady to climb over. Best to have a friend hold the wire for you,  if you want to climb through. Still they seemed few and far between.  We could ride our horses for miles without touching a road by simply finding the gates between properties, and making sure that we closed each gate we opened behind us. 

I never liked barbed wire. It rips the flesh of spooked horses and his hard to see in the trees. 

The fences I loved were at Crosby Stables. White painted rails around the whole property including the arena where Jim Crosby trained his Tennessee Walkers. I remember the mint green barns and the ink-black Schipperke dogs that Jim and Eunice used to keep. Little Tasmania devil dogs that would run and hop up to land on the rump a moving horse that never lost its stride. Jim was an Iowa man who landed out West with the railroad. We would ride over the hill to his place for 4H sometimes and he gave our family invaluable advice on horses when we were just starting out. Crosby Stables was like a microcosm of a Kentucky estate, four rail white fences cutting serenely through rolling hills. 

It is the fences of his idyll that I have tried to recreate here on my little patch of land. 

When we moved in, 22 years ago. The house was in need of attention more than the property so it became our priority. 

 The borders of the land were blackberry bushes with barbed wire buried somewhere underneath. 

When we had time and energy from our busy low-paying just out of college jobs, I hacked at the blackberries with a machete. Year by year cutting away at the invasive plant's empire of thorns. It was cathartic, but my desk job left me too weak to counter it's ever encroaching vines. It took years -- and eventually Hank's excavator -- to clear the last of it. It opened our property up so we could see the open fields beyond. We put in posts -- some dug with auger on the back of the tractor, other's dug by hand -- until finally the bright white-stained rails emerged. 

Just in time for little girls to clamber over them for walks out in the field. 

You see a good fence does more than just keep livestock in. It keeps animals -- and children -- safe. Lindsay and Grace love climbing the fences, or sitting on them and waving to grandpa as he goes by on the tractor. The white brings bright beauty in the dark gray of winter. 

I ripped out the last of the barbed wire a few weeks ago. 

Dug the post holes by hand. A good post hole digger will beat a week at the gym for building upper body muscles. There was a layer of gravel to go through too and some concrete from the old dairy barn that used to be nearby. At times, I was hands and knees pulling up rocks from the holes. 

Of course I never count right when it comes to how many boards I need, and that means another trip into town. No matter. There was a time when we could only afford to do a few sections of the fence at a time.  

Now I can even afford to buy a store-bought gate and latch. Much better than the home made gates that now want for replacing. 

The girls are helping me paint now that the weather has turned. Lindsay is dreaming of horses that will one day lean their heads over the top rail trying to see if there is a treat in her pocket.

As Lindsay and I paint, I tell her to take a step back every now and then and look at her work.

"Why?" she asks.

"So you can look at how far you've come," I tell her.

 "So you can see how much better you've made it by your hard work."

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Life is Not Fair

Life is not fair.

If you haven't noticed that by now, either you haven't been paying attention or you don't have enough birthdays under your belt.

Life was never fair, and never meant to be.

While whole religions have erupted from the minds of men to address this one issue, the fact remains, there is no divine justice wrought here upon the Earth.

I learned this lesson while I was very young, but had it reinforced by a decade as a newspaper reporter.  I saw cold-blooded killers set free, saw liars triumph and the honest punished for their honesty. Mendacity rules at all levels of power. Inhumanity and incompetence are promoted. Debased actions and bullying are rewarded. Being a reporter is to strive for truth in the face of lies. Journalists comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

In journalism, fairness is a watchword and justice is what every young wide-eyed new reporter seeks. Yet, the pay is barely minimum wage and you are disposable to your employer and community. After seven years at one paper -- winning awards and working 60 hour weeks, I was told to move on because the corporation didn't want to start paying reporters more than $18,000 a year.

"You've had too many raises," the executive told me from the hollow of his tailored suit. "You've reached the pay ceiling."

Everyone hates you when you tell them the truth anyway.

I had few illusions when I went into nursing.

Sure, there are golden moments when all is right. When your patients are healed by your actions and grateful for your kindness. Those moments must carry your for six months to a year before you might encounter them again. In the interim, the kind nurses will be cursed at and shat upon, denigrated and abused. They will work long hours and then be mandatoried over to work more -- punished for showing up to work.

They will cast themselves upon the rocks of the suffering and pestilent, the addicted and debauched, to be broken, yet to stand again.

At least the pay is better.

Moreover, as emergency room nurses we see the inequality of life's whims on full display. Children suffer, criminals get out of jail by malingering. The drunk driver murders children, then staggers away without a scratch. The kind die in pain and suffering while the cruel survive again and again. Sickness is not tied to sin.  The good die and suffer for no good reason. The gift of survival falls heedless of whether the recipient deserves another breath.

It is a hard lesson for a nurse to learn. The zen of nursing is learning to heal without judging, without a care about justice. Your job is to make the sick better, not to make the world fair.

No, there is no fairness in this business nor in life.

Yet in our larger lives, we must still strive for justice -- for justice is a thing wholly created by humanity. It is our humane reaction to the unfairness of life. Justice is the perfection we seek but may never attain. Striving for justice, fairness and equality are the only tools we have to battle back against the empire of fates that seek to pound us into submission.

The world is not fair.

It never will be.

Unless by our hands we make it so.

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