The Monthly Musing and Rememberings for the Month pages and the Bulletin Board below usually change somewhere between the 15th and the end of each month - unless, sigh, it's not time yet.

Many of the words/images you read here are available, by snail-mailorder, as posters, notecards, postcards and other special treasures. Most orders will be shipped the day they are received. The Catalog of Treasures is a downloadable on-line version of our catalog. The Order Form (which you'll need to download to write an order) also functions as a page of links to each of the treasures on the site. If you'd prefer our hard-copy catalog, please send $1.00 and a business-size SASE with $1.34 in postage on it to Robyn at Box 725w, Ojai CA 93024

To explore the possibility of one time, occasional or ongoing individual consultations (by phone or in person) for coaching/counseling/mentoring/therapy support on the journey, click on The Healing Journey and/or call me at 805 646-4518. (I'm licensed in California as a Clinical Psychologist.)

Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you.

ROBYN'S BULLETIN BOARD:

August 2010

Coming home after a 10-day-long wild ride in New York City, my garden is solace for my exhausted and depleted body and soul. Though my cat and garden sitter (Auntie Evelyn) keeps everything and everyone inside and out fed and watered, when I come home after so long away there’s an accumulation of the daily bits of puttering and primping that haven’t been done during those days. Overwhelmed as I feel at the prospect, I know that if I go slowly and take breaks in between, my working with these green growing friends will help me put my self back together and working in the dirt will literally and figuratively ground me again in my own world.

At first, I’m in tears at how much there is to do both inside and outside to make it all mine once more. Everything looks dirty and in disarray, uncared for. Then, between long sleeps and many naps, I do baby steps, going only as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe/ready to go. I pick apples, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, bok choi, kale and chard. I pull up gone-to-flower mustard and arugula and expired primroses. Days later I come back from the nursery with new starts of mustard, bok choi and zinnias. By the end of a week at home all is back to normal in my garden though I still feel only a slight lessening of my exhaustion.

The kitties have been staying close by during the days despite their habit of disappearing for hours on end, especially after being housebound (grounded because they don’t come in when called by Auntie Evelyn) for so many days while I was gone. They keep checking on me, coming in for loves as if they weren’t quite sure I was coming home this time or maybe because they’re needing to be sure that I’m actually still here and okay. Am I? Some days I’m not even sure my self.

The wild ride? Exactly one year and one month to the day and the hour (6:00 PM) from when I received my stepsister’s urgent call (that I wrote about here last month) to come help my dad with his meltdown upon being put in a skilled nursing facility, one of my sister’s closest friends called to tell me my sister was dead!

Lydia had been in severe respiratory crisis for almost two weeks, her COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) in an acute stage. She’d seen her pulmonologist the week before and then again on the Monday before the Wednesday she died. Her blood oxygen levels had been dipping significantly (according to an oximeter she’d been wearing at home for several days) and he strongly recommended she be hospitalized on oxygen therapy or at least have oxygen brought into her apartment. She adamantly declined both possibilities. When I spoke with him from the Santa Barbara airport that Thursday morning (en route to New York City to deal with arranging her funeral) he was convinced that she’d refused both options because she wanted to keep on smoking cigarettes! This, even as she couldn’t walk from one end of her studio apartment to the other without struggling for breath and could barely speak a sentence without having a coughing fit.

Throughout this crisis (and the several crises around her twice shattering her upper arm in two different falls in November and January) one of her closest friends was checking in with her daily. When Barbara couldn’t reach her all day on Wednesday, she and Peggy (a friend who lived closer) decided to call the neighbor in Lydia’s building who had her key. Gene (until four months ago the only person she’d allow into her chaotic and overstuffed hoarder’s apartment) let himself in and found her lying on her side on top of her comforter, fully clothed and looking as though she were napping peacefully. When his attempts to rouse her failed, he called 911. Fire Rescue EMT’s arrived to declare her dead, followed by police officers and detectives (to ascertain whether there was evidence of foul play) as well as people from the Medical Examiner’s Office to remove her body.

Peggy called me (at 9:00 eastern time) once Gene reported that Lydia was dead. Incredulous, I spoke with Gene who told me his story. He asked one of the officers at the scene to call me and let me know what I’d need to do once I arrived in the City. As the officer and I talked, he asked me how long ago I’d seen my sister in NYC and then warned me to be prepared for the likelihood that the state of her apartment would be quite upsetting. (This turned out to be a gross understatement!)

And, so, a year and a month after the last emergency call for a trip east, I again spent the evening and night arranging for an indeterminate absence. Packing vitamins, lotions and potions in carry-on amounts, gathering some clothes, getting airline tickets, arranging for my cat sitter and updating her instructions, cancelling various self-care appointments I had for the rest of that week, arranging with my friends in the City to roost with them for a while, filling seed and hummingbird feeders, watering the houseplants and garden and otherwise setting my life and house in order for their being left without me for a time – all of it getting done while I vibrated with shock, adrenaline and a sense of unreality.

This was a call I’d been anticipating for years. My beautiful, very bright, incredibly caring, hilariously funny and much-beloved-by-many sister had been dancing at the edge of death for more than half of her 62 years. Never quite able to figure out how to take loving good care of herself in any way but financially, unable to heal from the woundings of our childhood years with a very damaged – probably certifiable – mother nor, later, to recover from the death of the love of her life when they were both just 31 – she’d turned to pills and alcohol for comfort since her early 20s. In her twenties it was Quaaludes and pot. In her thirties it was Seconal and Nembutal. In her forties it was vodka. After she got alcohol-sober in rehab, she picked up with pot again and in her fifties got into Soma, a muscle relaxant that, at the high doses she used it, acted as a serious downer. Last year at this time as our father was moving toward his death, it seemed she was at the edge of overdosing (her recently engaged therapist called the police to do a welfare-check on her when no one could rouse her behind her chain-locked door). The Soma was extremely toxic to her system and for a long while, irresistible to her psyche. Over the past year it seemed that she was losing it mentally and unraveling emotionally either from the effects of the drug use or perhaps something growing in her brain. Because she shattered her arm just days before it, she never kept an appointment last November for a head scan that I’d kept asking her to get done. As she tapered off the Soma which had probably contributed to her many falls, she was overusing her prescribed psychotropic drugs: Lamictal, Lexapro and Clonopin. Until recently she often had no sense of how impaired she was or sounded when she’d call me (or our stepmom or her friends). Over the years she’d frequently drive me wild by calling me, 3000 miles away and of no use to her, when she was totally out of it, slurring unintelligibly on whatever downers she was currently using. Many times I’d extract a promise from her not to ever do that, to instead call local friends who might be of some real help if she was overdosing. And, then, she’d call again.

Despite her varied substance abuse over the years, she’d always manage to keep it together to work effectively as a schoolteacher (in her twenties) and, after returning to school to be trained, as a Physician Assistant (since her 30’s). She started out in a clinical office practice and then became first an associate professor in and later the Director of the Physician Assistant Program at Long Island University for many years. Until she retired in November (just as she shattered her arm) she’d spent the last six years as an associate professor and Director of Clinical Training at Truro College’s Physician Assistant Program. Everywhere she worked, she adored and was adored by her patients and students. Humor, wit and irreverence marked her every interaction. She was one of a kind.

She had several circles of close, adoring friends  – from her high school and college and professional years – who wove together because of their connections with her. She had legions of former students whose lives had been marked and changed by her caring and commitment to them. She was well known, well respected and well liked by professional colleagues. She was everyone’s first call in hard times and times of medical challenges. Until the past couple of years she was also everyone’s favorite dinner or weekend guest as, with her amazing improvisational gift she could turn absolutely any situation into a comedy routine that would crack everyone up and provide, as she herself described it, “the entertainment.”

Some 60 or 65 of these loving friends, cousins, colleagues and students turned up at the gravesite service we had the Sunday after her death. Several others would have come if they’d not been away on vacations out of state. I eulogized her with words that had written themselves as I traveled across country on Thursday. Then, six of her close friends spoke letters to her and one read a poem by a seventh who was out of town. The rabbi I’d arranged for as I sat in airports along the way did the prayers that I knew she’d want said because she’d wanted that for my dad’s funeral last year. It was a beautiful service full of laughter and tears, love and truth and a beautiful photo of her beaming at us from where it sat at the edge of her grave. With the ritual shovels full of earth we also cast into the grave four dozen of her favorite mauve roses, a faux-autographed photo of her much beloved tennis hero, Rafael Nadal and photos of her precious kitties, Steve and Edie. We were sure she’d have approved of the flow of it all. At the luncheon after we left the cemetery, several among the 40 or so of us who went on to the restaurant ordered her favorite meal: grilled cheese and French fries with some even adding a malted. (At 62 she still mostly ate the way a teenager might.)

And, then, the real nightmare began for me.

After the Sunday funeral, my friend Carol and I went to Surrogate’s Court early Monday morning with the official death certificate, paid funeral bill and a copy of the police property voucher for the items of value removed when her body was taken from the apartment. We understood, from directions given us by the lovely woman at the mortuary, that these would suffice to get the apartment unsealed so that we could go find the financial papers needed for probate to be filed. Alas, this was not how things actually work. Apparently probate needs to be filed and granted first. I dissolved in frustrated tears. How could probate be filed without the papers that were locked in the apartment! We called Lydia’s lawyer (a dear, gentle most un-lawyerly soul, the brother of one of her best friends) who suggested we throw ourselves at the mercy of the precinct commander and try to prevail upon him to bend protocol a bit.

My four DC area cousins, Carol and I all met up at the local precinct. Carol and I had waited there for almost two and a half hours the preceding Friday while they tried to find the voucher bag with the key to her apartment and then free two officers and a vehicle to accompany us to the apartment for the quick courtesy seal-breaking drop-in for burial clothes and address book. This time I talked at length to the precinct commander explaining that we had to get back into the apartment in order to get the papers needed to begin filing for the probate without which we couldn’t get into the apartment legally: catch-22 in spades. In the end, he somewhat grudgingly capitulated to my pleading since I had five others and myself all from out of town at the ready to do the searching without which probate could never be filed. Then it took almost 20 minutes for them to track down where the seals were kept so he could give us a replacement seal to take back to put up when we were finished with our search. He apparently decided he could trust us to break the existing seal and get on with our search without a police escort.

Off we went to the apartment and our quest not only for the papers but, as well, for my mother’s diamond ring that Lydia had hidden somewhere she never got to tell me about in 2004. According to Nancy (the professional organizer she’d been working with for the past three months), Lydia herself no longer had a clue where she had stashed it. The hunt required that we go through every single bit of stuff in her hoarder’s apartment.

Until there had begun to be serious cracks in her outward persona, proliferating physical/medical issues and increasing obsessions with these symptoms during the past two years, there had been little to alert friends and colleagues about what was unraveling inside of her. While I had recognized that she was deteriorating and had talked with her many times about my concern about what seemed to be her decompensating, about what I saw as an urgent need for her to get back into therapy, even I really didn’t understand just how deeply troubled she really was. Until I saw her apartment.

Although she continued to be impeccable about her person, always well groomed and well-dressed, sometime before 2001 her once lovely, well-tended studio – a place into which she’d invite and entertain her many friends, a place she seemed to enjoy keeping up – began descending into an increasingly cluttered, dirty and dilapidated mess. She stopped allowing anyone into the apartment nine years ago. (Except for Gene, her neighbor who’d feed her two cats when she was away.) She did let me in three years ago for an hour or two during which I helped her take down to the building’s basement a six foot tall carpeted kitty condo that lay on it’s side – along with two large corrugated boxes that she’d kept on the floor for the cats to play and scratch in – filling the tiny bit of available floor space in the overstuffed main room. We bought a small shredder at Staples and began shredding some of the stashes of paper that were on every surface and stuffed in numerous shopping bags around the apartment. I knew from that visit about the level of chaos and clutter. But, until the police broke the seal on the door so that Carol and I could get her address book and the clothes in which to bury her, I hadn’t realized the extent of the filth and squalor in which she’d been living.

Even after three months of working four hours a week an amazing and dear professional organizer excavating floor space, a sectional couch, coffee table, computer desk and one closet – the apartment was still filled with myriad shopping bags crammed in four more closets and other odd places, each stuffed with miscellaneous opened and unopened pieces of mail, receipts, un-cashed student fee and colleague pay checks from 6 and 7 years ago, professional journals, photographs, family and friend obituaries, upward of 60 unopened packages of black panty hose, random bits of clothing, purses and shoes, some with tags still on them and the occasional moldering bits of bagels in plastic bags. Most horrifying of all, everything was covered with eight years worth of un-vacuumed cat hair, fur balls, dust, litter crumbs, shredded cat box newspaper and general debris. She hadn’t had a working vacuum for eight years and only a couple of weeks before her death did Nancy, the organizer, cajole her into buying and help her pay for an expensive Miele canister vacuum.

The kitchen sink was filled with moldering pots and hadn’t been usable for six years due to a leak that she wouldn’t allow the building superintendent in to fix because of the state of the rest of the apartment. She washed dishes in the tiny bathroom sink in which only the cold water faucet worked. Years’ worth of dense black mold covered the random miscellany and full shopping bags stuffed under the kitchen sink. The refrigerator had stopped keeping things cold several weeks earlier and, since she hadn’t emptied it, it was filled with stinking, rotting food. We slammed it shut the second we’d opened it. The kitchen floor was awash with empty and filled shopping bags covered in dust and cat hair. The melted plastic dish drain that she’d set on fire some weeks ago (when she’d accidentally turned on a stove burner on which it’s rested for years) sat exactly where it had burned with its ashes still littering the stove top. She’d put the fire out with plastic cupfuls of water she’d run back and forth to fetch from the bathroom. All the while subjecting her compromised lungs and the rest of the apartment to the toxic fumes and soot of the burning plastic. Once I saw the state of the apartment I realized the “accidental” turning on of the wrong burner had most likely happened while she was loaded on some medication or other.

The bathroom floor space was so covered with bags and mounds of clothing, shoes and magazines – all covered with inches of dust and cat fur – that we had to sit sideways to use the toilet. The medicine cabinet overflowed with some 30 Estee Lauder giveaway blush compacts and a similar number of giveaway lipsticks all encrusted with dust and random cat hair. A month or so before she hired Nancy to come and begin the archeological dig at the apartment, while she still had her arm in a sling, she’d let two of her friends, a couple she’d known since college days, come in and help excavate her bath tub. Until they did that she, once she could get her arm wet again, would have had to move a large number of shopping bags out of the tub, then move all the hangers with her current wardrobe off the shower rod and onto the already piled bathroom floor in order to take a shower. It was a routine she’d had to follow for years before her broken arm incapacitated her.

Lurking under the recently excavated computer desk upon which sat a computer that hadn’t worked to get her online for at least five years (until she retired in November, she’d done her email and research while at work), there were two shopping bags filled with used cat litter that she hadn’t yet, for who knows what reason, dumped down the incinerator. Though, oddly enough, these didn’t smell, the entire apartment reeked nauseatingly with the acrid smells of nicotine and cigarette smoke.

The entire wall-to-wall carpeting was spotted with dirt, blackened diet Pepsi spill stains and, around her chair, numerous cigarette burns from cigarettes that had been dropped and smoldered along their length up to their filters. One filter still sat at the end of such a long scorch. Though there brand new sheets on her bed, the previous set – covered with cigarette burn holes and scorches – was piled between the sides of her platform bed and the walls, covered with cat hair.

She’d actually allowed her superintendent in the week before her death to check out why her air-conditioner wasn’t cooling at all during the hottest, most humid July in NYC history. When I ran into him in the recycling room in the building’s basement, he told me that the filter had been covered in a solid mat of cat hair plastered together by nicotine. Though he’d changed the filter for her, the cold air was still being blown through louvers lacquered, as were the walls, windows and appliances, by nicotine. He also told me that when he’d gone up to re-install the
air conditioner he’d found her both choking and smoking. “Lydia,” he’d said, “how can you keep smoking when you can hardly breathe!?” Laughing, she (according to him) replied, “I guess I must be crazy!”

After the first hour or so that we were all in the apartment, my one cousin’s husband began to have breathing problems. Three of them left for Virginia and home. He was ill with irritated lungs for four days after that brief exposure. Carol had had to leave to begin her workweek. So, cousin Pearl and I began what was to be four almost 10 hour days, wearing bandana-masks and gloves and slowly, methodically moving from one end of the apartment to the other in search of relevant papers, the ring and the rest of Lydia’s randomly stashed jewelry.

Pearl was one of the many gifts from the Grandmothers to ease this heartbreaking journey. I usually choose to do big and little tasks alone because I like moving at my own pace and being able to lose myself in the doing. Since I have very particular ways of doing most things and I don’t like having to handle other people’s differing agendas/approaches to whatever the task is before me, it invariably feels like it would take more time/energy to explain what kind of help would work for me than it would to simply do whatever it is myself. Sometimes, when what I have to deal with feels too much/too overwhelming for the energy I have available, I wind up sitting in the middle of the floor and sobbing while wishing I could simply have another Robyn, a clone of me who would help in just the ways I needed without me having to explain!

Amazingly, Pearl and I were able to work together for all those hours in an easy, calm and utterly seamless way. Our rhythms, our stamina, our needs for closure and our abilities to set emotional reactions aside in order to stay single-pointedly attending to the task at hand were remarkably similar and our focuses turned out to be magically complementary. I could NEVER have done any of it without her partnering me all the way through it. I’d have felt utterly overwhelmed and not been able to set aside the intense emotions that seeing how Lydia had been living stirred in me. I had my deepest wish granted: the equivalent of another me working with me! And, though we worked in companionable silence much of the time, we frequently cracked each other up with random inane observations, actually having a good deal of silly fun with each other in the middle of all the chaos and filth.

Over meal breaks we shared wonderful tales about the grandparents that we both adored and we caught up with each other’s current lives (we’d grown up together in Brooklyn as, for a good many years, we’d either lived across the street from each other or visited on weekends). We both delighted in each other’s gentle, calm presence.

As we came almost to the end of the searching with me buried in the last of the five closets and Pearl sorting through tangles of jewelry, we’d just acknowledged to each other that we were letting go of the hope of finding the still missing ring. We agreed that, even if it didn’t turn up in this last closet, neither of us had any inclination to open the freezer to see if it were stashed in there. After days of breathing totally foul air neither of us was about to expose our selves to the stench of the freezer’s interior.

I was emptying a hanging shoe bag that had torn away from its hanger and was lying atop the piles of random stuff on the floor of the last closet. We’d been bagging some of the better things for Salvation Army to consider down the road so I was stowing the shoes into shopping bags (we found fourteen singleton shoes along the way!). I’d just realized that while I’d been consistent about looking into the regular shoes I’d already bagged, I hadn’t ever put my hand into any of the shoe-boots. I thought for a brief moment and promptly decided that there was no way I could go back through all those shopping bags to search the boots. Some Salvation Army customer was welcomed to the ring if they found it. I was too fried to care anymore.

As I finished emptying the ripped shoe bag, I got a call from a close friend of Lydia’s who’d just come back to town from a vacation and heard the terrible news. I stopped to put my head set on and then began rolling up the torn bag and stuffing it into a plastic shopping bag so it could go down the incinerator chute. It was a bit of a wrestle during which it never occurred to me to check the emptied pockets. Once I’d tied the shopping bag closed, I turned toward my left to take the bag to the door and there on the floor lay a jewelers small Kraft envelope. I whooped so loudly I thought I’d broken poor Elyse’s eardrum! There it surely was, the almost two-carat, brilliant blue-white marquis-cut diamond set in platinum flanked by two lovely baguettes; found completely “by accident.” Once again the Grandmothers had made their presence known, helping in yet another miraculous way during this devastating time.

Both Pearl and I needed to complete what we were doing even though the quest itself was over. She continued sorting out photographs of family history to take home to share with her sisters and her sentimental niece. I finished looking through the rest of the stuff in that last closet and then vacuumed it and the rest of the hallway. I went out to get us some coffee and yogurt and we sat (on the well-vacuumed by Pearl) couch congratulating ourselves for all of what we’d managed to do in those four long days. They were days during which Pearl kept postponing her departure (for Maryland, her partner and the awaiting preparations for a vacation they were to leave on in just a couple of days) until we had completed the task before us. What a gift she was!

And what a gift Carol and her soon-to-husband had given us the day before when they came in for two and a half hours and together unpacked and sorted through one enormously overstuffed closet filled with lots of Lydia’s collection of family jewelry along with disorganized miscellany. Though their pace was so different from ours, like sprinters in contrast to our marathon-runners’ pacing, we would probably have needed another two days to do what they did in those five person-hours.

I stayed up till 5:00 AM that night at Carol’s both going through the several bags of financial papers to winnow and organize them for the trip to the attorney’s office on Friday morning and then researching flight alternatives for returning home to California. I hadn’t put back the police seal when we left on Thursday night at ten. I worried that I’d have a hard time getting to sleep for obsessing over what I might have left undone in the apartment.

So, after what had become my typical two or three hours of sleep those by then eight days, I headed to the lawyer’s to drop off the papers for him and her accountant and to sign some required releases. Then, I went back to her neighborhood to make and test several sets of keys for our return trips. My cousins and I will go back after probate completes to oversee both Salvation Army and then the haulers who’ll clear everything that’s removable and take it to the dump. After that we’ll bring in some folks who deal with smoke and mold damage to sterilize/fumigate the shell. Then I’ll be done with my part and her executor (thankfully) will have to deal with arranging and overseeing all that needs doing to get her condo studio ready to be put on the market.

After testing the keys, I went back into her apartment to sit in her chair and to open my self to feel whatever I might feel in there now that the need to stay task focused was over. All I felt was emptied out and exhausted in a space that felt empty and dead.

On Friday night Carol and Anan were out working on their wedding invitations with a young couple that was helping them. In their lovely apartment where they had been lovingly providing me with a healing cocoon each day, I sat sorting through the jewelry Pearl and I had put together for Lydia’s friends to choose from when we return after probate and have a gathering of her close women friends (including those who were away when we had the service). Pearl had taken with her all of what we thought her sisters, nieces and grandnieces might be interested in and all of the family jewelry collection, including the diamond ring that my sister had earmarked (in a note with her will) for Pearl’s sister. Even though I was completely exhausted I couldn’t seem to stop organizing things.

As I sat on the floor surrounded with all the beautiful silver and gold things Lydia had collected over her abbreviated life, I began feeling overwhelming despair over how she had been living: The squalor, the dilapidation, the air itself so dangerous-to-lungs already compromised. How completely unable she’d been to provide a healthy and safe environment for herself. Clearly this had been “suicide by apartment and cigarettes.” A savvy and medically trained person there’s no question that she knew she was assuring her decline into death.

Then, as now and in the weeks between when she died on July 14th (two weeks less than a year after our dad’s death) and this one month anniversary of her death, I’m feeling profoundly grateful and relieved that she died gently, slipping away in her sleep probably because low blood oxygen dis-regulated her heart and caused it to stop. With her deteriorating lung disease, her worsening scoliosis that was progressively compressing her chest cavity, diminishing the space her lungs had in which to function and, of course, her continued smoking, she would, down the road, have died in a much more challenging struggle for breath. And, from all the evidence of fires and near fires in her apartment – she had been wakened some years ago by the heat of her smoldering mattress that she then doused with water and slept on, mold and all for several years before she had the courage to replace it and expose the secret of that near catastrophic lapse – she could also have died incinerating herself and other innocent people and animals in her building.

I’m so grateful, as well, that she’s finally been released from the unimaginable emotional suffering that’s been her secret life for all these painful and depressing years. And, I’m grateful for my self being released from all these years of bearing helpless witness to her inability to develop an inner parent to authorize her to care compassionately and lovingly for her broken heart. From watching her futile searching for some way to get or some one to give her the caring we neither of us ever got from our biological mother.

With her and my dad’s deaths, I’ve been released from the anguish of helplessly watching them both live what have felt (to me) to be such painful, sad and despairing lives. As with the dropping into my imaginings of my dad’s inner experience that I described last month, so with the dropping my self into imagining my sister’s inner reality, I can only go there in snatches because the agony I feel is too overwhelming. I have to keep reminding my self that it couldn’t have felt to her the way it feels to me when I imagine it or she couldn’t have lived that way.

So, as with my dad, I grieve deeply for what her life was and not for her death. Her dying feels, in every way, a blessing for her and for those of us among her friends and family who have been so distraught over her lately ever more apparent misery and who have felt increasingly frustrated in our attempts to inspire her to help herself.

It’s hard to take in that she’s really left the planet. Even as I saw and hugged her cold little body at the mortuary and even as I spent those days dismantling her life, it all feels quite surreal. I notice my self thinking, “Oh, Lydia hasn’t called in awhile,” and beginning to wonder what’s up with her now before I remember that she’s never going to call again and feel a wash of relief rather than sadness or missing. This is perhaps one of the most stunning realities in the aftermath of her death. I don’t miss her. I don’t miss the hopeless burden that her life and her troubles had become for me. Except for a brief time in the very late 80s while she was in therapy and after I had resigned from being her (or anyone else’s but my own “good mommy”) our relationship has never been a balanced one. I was always her primary confidante, despite her many close and caring friends. I was, until very recently when she began dissembling about her drug use, the one to whom she told all her “terrible, embarrassing truths,” the one she trusted with her darkest secrets.

No matter how I tried to evade the role, she inevitably held me in the like-a-mommy place. She would simultaneously idealize me excessively and consistently make my self-nurturing and alternative healing ways the butt of her ridiculing humor. If she hadn’t been my sister, I would long ago have ended the connection. And, in the past two years after first some appallingly outrageous projections she laid on me about some money interactions we’d had years ago and then after her crazy, out of control involvement with the Soma when she was supposed to be helping with my dad’s dying, I had indeed been cutting the deeper emotional ties I’ve had with her. Her death leaves me feeling finally freed from her and all the crazy-making energy her life brought into mine.

I know she couldn’t help how she was, just as my mother before her couldn’t. Yet, at this moment, I’m still feeling angry with her for not doing better for herself; for leaving me to clean up the mess of her life just as forty years ago (when she’d abdicated into her QuaaIude la-la land) I was left having to clean up the mess of my mother’s life. It was all such devastating déjà vu.

My life has been all about learning to be a loving care-giver/mother to my self and to mentoring others on that journey (in my work with clients over the last 46 years and with the stories on my web site over the past 20). Yet, ironically, it was this journey my sister could never make.

There’s further irony in the fact that that her dying leaves me even better able to care for my aging self than I would already have been with just my own resources. Almost all the money and assets she chose to squirrel away rather than use to make her own life gentler and more nourishing will ultimately come to me. It’s a legacy I would have rather not received.

So, I have no idea if and how my feelings may evolve from here, but this is where I am at the one month mark: profoundly relieved and also enormously grateful to my friend Carol who, once again, has lovingly walked with and been a comfort and balance for me through an incredibly challenging time.

The animal lovers among you will be happy to know that while the cats were removed by the Animal Shelter people the night Lydia died, a good friend spent a day (and a $500 contribution to a cat clinic) making sure these two totally traumatized elder kitties were found and removed from a kill- to a no-kill shelter where they were also give medical treatment.

I include here both my eulogy for this complex, wonderful and disturbed woman who was my sister and the words of one of her oldest friends:

July 18, 2010

My sister was a one of a kind woman: funny, outrageous, irreverent, sometimes smutty mouthed in her amazing propensity to turn anything that might be going on into a stand up comedy routine. 
 
For most of her life she was everyone’s favorite house or dinner guest, providing the evening’s or weekend’s entertainment as with her non-stop comedic riffs she could crack everyone up in an eye blink. She seemed always to know just how far to take each routine, stopping short of where it might get irritating. Her humor and easy chattiness could cajole even the most staid bureaucrats into laughingly acceding to almost any request. She rarely met a stranger she couldn’t turn into a fan/friend.
 
She was an extraordinary friend to so many of us for so many years weaving into the fabric of our lives with her warmth, caring and support though whatever crises, challenges and joys we might be facing or enjoying.
 
If any of us were dealing with medical issues, she was always right there providing any information we might need along with whatever physical, hands-on care-giving was needed.
 
As a teacher she was remarkable. Her students were her life. She was profoundly committed to giving every one of them a fair shake, helping them through the hard places, advocating for them, inspiring them, staying in touch with so many of them all through their professional careers, cheering them on and always making them laugh with her antics.
 
She’s been so loved by so many of us for so long (62, 52 and 40 plus years), even as in these last 9 or 10 rough years in her life, she could and did try our patience and sometimes drive us crazy as we each tried mightily and in countless ways to figure out how to get her to take better care of herself. How we fretted and worried about her failing health, the dangerous condition of her apartment, how so much seemed to be falling apart for her on so many levels, how preoccupied she often was with the state of her bowel movements!
 
The terribly sad irony of her dying just now is that in the past three months and even on the day before her death she seemed at last to be getting her life on some definitely more positive track.  She and Nancy (the organizing woman she’s been working with since May) bonded deeply over the archeological dig that’s been the process of moving toward reclaiming what most of us remember as a once beautiful and lovely haven for so many parties and gatherings of her clan.
 
She’d been so excited and delighted with the journey she was taking and now, in a shocking instant, it’s over and we can hardly imagine our lives without her caring, her humor, her sometimes frustrating and quirky ways of evading our concern, of not doing what we thought might be best for her.
 
What an enormous hole her passing leaves in all of our lives! We leave her body here today, but she lives forevermore in the wonderful, hilarious and nutty memories we each carry of her in our hearts and in the deep marks she’s left upon all of our souls.
 
She slipped out of this life peacefully, her friend Gene (sent by Barbara and Peggy to check on why she hadn't been answering her phone on Wednesday) found her lying on her side, fully dressed atop the covers on her bed looking as though she were fast asleep in a serene nap.
 
Her doctor surmised that her blood oxygen levels (that had been low on Monday when he recommended hospitalization for oxygen therapy which she adamantly refused) had likely taken a severe plunge and dis-regulated her heart which then stopped.
 
Given her obstinately self-damaging choices, the progressive nature of both her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and the scoliosis that was increasingly compressing the space her lungs had in which to function, she left before the worsening struggle for breath to come. Hard as it is to lose her, in the end, it seems she’s well out of here.
 
Oh Lydia!!! How can you be gone from us?!

And, from her friend Bob:

My best friend for a few short years in the seventies was a loving, funny, crazy guy named Alan. Sadly, he left this planet at a young age and yet gave me as his legacy a female version of himself: Lydia Posin.
Through Lydia, Alan got to live another 31 years in my heart.
They were both like Ebinger’s blackout cake: Just enough and I was in heaven and too much and I was sick.
I learned how to experience Lydia in the right dose. Not too much, not too little.
You see I could see so many of the things I loved about myself and so many of the things I didn’t love about myself in Lydia. As I rejected and embraced the two parts of me, I found it reflected in my relationship with her, even though she always stayed loyal.
I actually didn’t speak to Lydia for almost three years.
And yet when my father died, I called Lydia first,
And when Alan died, I called Lydia first,
And when my brother Bruce died, I called Lydia first,
And when my partner John died, I called Lydia first.
My best heart to heart talks were with Lydia. I felt safest being vulnerable with her.
Whether we were together or apart, I always kept a dose of Lydia in my heart. As I embark on the longest separation yet, she remains safe in my heart.
Some of us excel as professionals.
Some of us excel as spouses.
Some of us excel as parents.
Some of us excel as friends.
Lydia, more than anyone I have ever known, excelled as a friend. Because of that so many of you are my friends and have joined Lydia in my heart.
Lydia, you are awesome. I thank you and I love you.

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