In the 1950’s most kids ate oatmeal, cornflakes, cheerios, or shredded wheat for breakfast. Not at my house on Wells Street in Westfield, NJ. When I came down for breakfast, my brother was sitting in his high chair mushing cottage cheese and applesauce, mostly into his mouth and spreading the remainder around on his tray. My petite 29 year old mother, donned in a powder blue negligee’, was standing over a smoking iron skillet frying calves liver. Yes, calves liver for breakfast. My mother was totally into health food and organic eating 50 years ahead of the rest of us.

Each breakfast time she’d ask my dad and me if we wanted any liver for breakfast. My dad dressed in suit and tie and ready to head into Manhattan on the train, always said the same thing, “Are you kidding, Mary? I don’t ever want liver for breakfast no matter how good it would be for me. I want cereal like everyone else in the United States!.” My father would quickly kiss my mom and us goodbye and rush off to get his train. I realize now he rushed to get away from the smell. He didn’t want to smell like our kitchen, a combination of animal blood and freshly slaughtered and seared calf. It was not a pretty smell and even at five, I wondered why anyone would want to smell that first thing in the morning. I still do.

My mother was usually humming as she sautéed, happily beginning a new day nourished with loads of iron and protein. My mother had read and studied all things health related. Currently she was totally into Adelle Davis’s then best selling book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954). It was her newest health strategy for keeping all of us and especially her fit and strong.

 

My mother’s mother, my Nana, had been chronically ill with Rheumatic fever and then rheumatoid arthritis from the age of 24. Nana’s pain was often so terrible that she could not hold my Aunt Cathy when she was an infant or attend her daughters’ school activities. My Nana had spent most of her adult life house bound or when things were really bad, bed-bound.

My mother had grown up with an ill and ill-tempered mother who was always looking for the next miracle cure for her degenerative disease. This environment had embedded a deep and lasting fear of illness in my mother. If we complained of a sore throat, we were immediately taken to our pediatrician, Dr. Fiddler (yes, really. That was his name). However my mother’s fear also played out in another strangely counter-intuitive way. My mother never went to the doctor herself, except for an annual visit to the gynecologist. That was it. Happily, my mother was quite hardy which she claimed was totally due to Adelle Davis, the Roman Catholic mass, and Bonnie Prudden.

Bonnie Prudden was my mother’s personal trainer. Each morning after her calves’ liver, she would dress and make her way to our little den or later to our light filled dining room, where she would go through her paces under the direction of Bonnie Prudden’s recording, Keep Fit Be Happy Vol. I (1960). Prudden was one of the first fitness trainers and a prolific fitness researcher, writer, and teacher.

Bonnie Prudden was born in 1914 in NYC and lived to be 97. Growing up Prudden was an avid dancer, gymnast, and later mountain and technical rock climber. After a climbing fall in her 20’s she rehabilitated herself with chair exercises and aqua and swimming exercises. She went on to be one of the most important people in both adult and children’s fitness, writing over 30 books, and making over 15 recordings, films, and television programs. She earned over 30 awards and appointments during her lifetime, including the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sport and Nutrition – Lifetime Achievement Award and the creation of annually celebrated Bonnie Prudden Days in the states of New York and Arizona for her contributions in the areas of fitness and myotherapy. Prudden was also way ahead of her time. Just like my mom.

In the 1950’s, most moms did as little exercising as possible. Moms in my mom’s circle played bridge or arranged flowers. They studied in study groups through the American Association of University Women; sat on boards at the local school district; volunteered at the hospital, lead Girl Scout or Cub Scouts. My mom did these things as well. But she was different, that I could see by Kindergarten.

She had a voracious appetite for knowledge about anything that interested her. Lunchtimes were her ‘do not disturb’ time. Then my young mother would curl up on the sofa with a plate of celery, carrots, scallions, and cottage cheese (apparently cottage cheese figured as a must-eat health food staple). After eating she would begin reading and taking notes about whatever was her interest of the month or year.

For two years, she studied the Plantagenet’s, reading everything she could find at the local libraries. She did all of this eating and studying on the den sofa, never at a table or desk. In fact, she never ate at a table except when we ate as a family. I wonder if that was a habit developed from childhood, where mealtimes were often fractured and eaten alone.

Perhaps because of growing up in a sad house, my mother made sure our house was always full of fun, music and laughter. She played pretend games with my dolls and me; served us tea with cherry topped banana slices, and always sung us our own personal lullaby when she tucked us in. She wanted to make sure we didn’t grow up the way she did.

As I reflect on my mother’s life, there is another thing she did that I hated at the time, but now see why it was so important to my mother’s well being. If my mom were picking my girlfriend and me up from piano lessons for instance, she could suddenly say with a lilting and theatrical voice, “Let’s stop at St. Simon’s girls and make a little visit. It’s just what we need.” I’d groan and say I didn’t want to. If I mentioned we didn’t have hats, (at that time women had to wear hats in church) my mother would laugh and say, “Yes, we do” as she fished about in her handbag for Kleenex and bobby pins. Yes Kleenex and bobby pins. While I tolerated wearing a bobby pinned Kleenex on my head at five, by the time I was eight with my girlfriend in tow, I despised the weirdness of it, especially in front of my girlfriends.

Ironically, none of my girlfriends minded this stop and even saw fun in it. They liked going into the nearly dark, medieval church with massive ten foot long carved wooden angels flying from the buttresses. And if there weren’t enough Kleenexes and bobby pins to go round, never fear, my mother would gleefully rip each in half or quarters, and we were in business. Sometimes my mom couldn’t find enough bobby pins in her purse so we all had to hold our Kleenexes on our heads with our hands. Then my mother would turn to us with her hand atop her Kleenex draped head and exclaim, “Isn’t this fun? See who can keep their Kleenex on without holding it.” I was horrified and wanted to crawl under a pew. My mother? She found the fun in just about everything.

The many eccentricities of my mother bothered me sometimes. No one wants to be different when you’re growing up. As a child and a teenager, I couldn’t imagine why she did the things she did. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t mind being different.

My mother had a full social life and many friends though she didn’t talk with them about spontaneous visits to dark churches or liver for breakfast. She knew that would be way too out there. And so she kept certain beliefs and behaviors private and so did we. After all, we didn’t want our friends to think our mother or our family was weird or strange or the worst ‘different’. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, everyone was trying their hardest to be the same. It was a homogenous time.

Looking back, I see my mother knew she needed certain things to keep her balanced (a word she would not have known to use in 1959). She healed herself through food, exercise, and meditation (though she wouldn’t have know to call her church visits that word either). She just knew all of her daily habits (some may say quirks) made her feel well and happy. They gave her energy and confidence.

I know my mom never sat down and analyzed what she did and why. Even though I believe she knew that the exercise and the meditative church visits gave her a deep sense of peace and calm. She needed them: the food, the movement, the knowledge, and the quiet.

My mother was way ahead of her time, just like Adelle Davis and Bonnie Prudden. My mom lived what we call today a ‘healthy life style’. She nourished her body and mind with wholesome unprocessed food and yoga type exercise. She meditated and enjoyed the healing effects of music and nature. She is what we would call today, mindful, aware, and curious. She wasn’t afraid to eat calves liver for breakfast.

You know how well intentioned people will say, “there’s always a silver lining’ or “in our darkest hour one door may close but

another will open”? And you just want to say, “Screw you”. Or at least that is what I’m sometimes thinking and feeling, but I say, “Yes, there are many silver linings”. And weirdly, this is also true. There are many silver linings in trauma. And it also totally sucks.

 

My husband’s cancer diagnosis came out of the blue. A routine colonoscopy changed our lives from one minute to the next.

It’s been quite a ride this past year. Chemo and radiation followed by surgery with many complications followed with more, stronger chemo and looking forward to more surgery in the spring. Anyone who’s done it knows this drill well. It’s exhausting, terrifying, traumatic, and numbing. And then there’s my intermittent and unexpected cortisol highs that bring on raging bouts of anxiety and dark frightening projections about the future., usually at 3:00 AM.

Yet all this angst also brings a whole lot of hope and positivity. That old saying that ‘you are more alive when you are close to death’, is really true, at least for me. Some days I am so filled with light-filled energy, that I must get outside and walk and walk and walk, up and down one rural road after another. I crave the sight of the hills, fields, and woods; the sweeping vistas from the top of Mc Cleary road are balm and nourishment both. I search for coyotes and hawks. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to see a bald eagle or Great Blue heron. I long for the sound of water over rocks and the roar of the wind in the 200 acre woods. Wind especially reminds me of power and grace and of my tiny place in this universe. A tiny place in a good way. I am not alone. I’m part and parcel of every moving atomic particle. It’s a comfort and exhilaration both.

Don’t get me wrong, I also feel sad, frustrated, and trapped in the get me out of here for a week at the beach kind of way. Then I must push hard to get out of bed and get outside. I make myself meditate because it definitely helps me, and I drink a couple of glasses of wine at the end of the day. That helps too. A little numbness is good in an unrelenting situation.

As for silver lings, there have been many these past seven years. I’ve learned I’m way, way stronger than I thought I was. I’m more confident, more tolerant, more patient. I appreciate more. I relish experiences with friends more. My relationships with family are closer and stronger. There’s a tenderness in my heart and perspective that wasn’t as apparent to me before. I pause more often and take stock. Perhaps this list is something that all caregivers and family members experience during a serious illness. I know I’ve read many of these on online caregiver testimonial sites. Even though they sound cliché, they are indeed true, at least for me.

What I learned from cancer is that life is short. It goes by so fast. At 30, when I was working as the only woman in a commercial real estate firm, Carter Dye, the 70 year old broker, took me aside and said, “I know you probably won’t believe me when I tell you that one day you will look back on this time in your life and wonder how it could have possibly gone by so fast, like a handful of sand sifted through your fingers in 30 seconds. That’s how it feels from 70. You just can’t believe you did all of that stuff in such a short time. It didn’t feel fast while you were doing it. But now it feels like it went by at warp speed. “ Of course I didn’t believe him at the time. I thought he was old and giving me ‘fatherly’ advice. But now, now I do.

The warp speed of life has made an impression on me particularly over this past year. I’m turning 65 in February, and incredibly, unimaginably, I can see the end. Something unfathomable for me even a year ago. That sense of leaving leaves me with a ‘seize the day’ mentality. I know time is short. I probably won’t be able to fit everything I want to do into the ten or twenty years I have left.

So I’ve reevaluated my bucket list, a list whose contents have always been haphazardly organized and prioritized. Now I ponder and mull over what I want to do, where I want

to live, and with whom I want to be. Time is of the essence and no longer a thing to traipse about in as if I had a boundless supply of it. It matters very much how I spend my days and nights. And that, that is exhilarating, and freeing. Instead of tightening around this ‘end’ idea, I’ve decided to try to loosen my hold and just go. Much the way I did so easily in my twenties. Now it’s not so easy, but I’m determined to go for it anyway. Time, time, time. It’s a big motivator.

Just as in my twenties, I want to live in the mountains. I want to work in a community of like-minded people who know that we create our lives and our environment. I want to live among people who love and honor nature. I want to live among rocks and water, snow and sun, wind and soaring mountaintops.

Amazingly, I found the New York Adirondack Mountains through my husband twenty years ago. Since then, we’ve spent all of our vacations and school breaks somewhere in the six million acre Adirondack Park. It’s the oldest and largest forest preserve in the United States, larger than the combined size of Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks.

Ten years ago we bought a small, tidy 100 year old farmhouse in the hamlet of Wadhams, close to Lake Champlain. It has been our refuge from the hubbub of big city life and work in Baltimore, MD. We go there to restore and create, to hike and paddle with friends who seem like people we’ve known forever. The Adirondacks is our home-spot. The place where we feel most ourselves.

So how do we get there? Can cancer be both our epiphany and tipping point? Can we ditch our secure jobs and lives here in Stewartstown, PA and go for it in a place we know and love, but have never lived a work-a-day life in? Do we pave our way by making a financial plan with our Morgan Stanley guy, Dave? Do we look for work there from here? Do we let that nagging fear that we’re ‘too old’ get in our way?

I’ve thought a lot about these things and have come to a few conclusions. We ain’t getting any younger. We ain’t going without a plan. We are going to be afraid, just like when you make your first dive into deep water. But should fear stop us? We’re challenging cancer at the moment. Moving can’t be any scarier than that, can it?

So when my husband says, “I don’t want to die in Stewartstown, I want to die in the Adirondack Mountains”, I enthusiastically agree. In the past, we laughed as we said this, believing it would happen later, rather than sooner. Now when we say it, there is a tolling immediacy that wasn’t there a year and a day ago. Cancer changes everything.