June 24, 2011, Note: I’m posting this letter I wrote half a year ago for those who may not have read it and for my continuity to the Solstice letter I’ll post in a couple of days. I’ve also appended my June First Goodbye NM letter to Friends, which most of you have recently read, as part of my saga.
December 2010 May whatever feast you are celebrating be merry and bright with warm fires blazing in your heart as we welcome the return of the light and do what we can for peace, justice, healing, and embracing our fragile vibrant globe. Now post-Solstice, dear friends, darkness is fading. Doris turning up our antique lamps creates little islands glowing with hope and cheer. How does this waning first decade of a new millennium find you?
2010 opened for me on a high note. We only turn 70 once. My almost twin Nancy and I celebrated with a once in a lifetime feast. Doris and Nancy's Brenda arranged our big party with catering by dear friends Anne and Kay. Lisa flew in from Orlando to help and take pictures and help. About fifty women filled our main room and spilled out to the patio to gaze at the glowing Sandias, including Nancy's senior women's basketball team and my bookish political buddies buzzing away in comfy chairs. Joy and love embraced us all. Poor May Sarton seemed so grim about aging in her journal At Seventy, but she didn't have my Doris.
Speeding ahead, I continued writing memoirs and revising my Nebraska matrilineage story based on my trip with Lisa in August 2008, teaching memoir writing at the senior center, teaching African American Women Writers for UNM at the new Westside campus in Rio Rancho, and plunging into spring performances of my "living history" Chautauqua solo show on Mabel Dodge Luhan for NM Humanities. I love arriving somewhere as Mabel instead of just a tourist in places I'd like to discover anyway—Ruidoso Library, Las Cruces Agricultural Museum, Spanish Colonial Arts Museum in Santa Fe, and closer to home for UNM Feminist Research Institute and Meadowlark Senior Center where I teach writing. Mabel even made her way on stage at Solo Fest in early July at a local theater's festival of one-person shows.
Even better, an old friend I knew from women's studies in the 80s in Florida recruited me in April to review Albuquerque theater for a website: talkinbroadway.com/regional/alb/ Take that link to the current review and previous ones. I love brilliant, prolific Albuquerque theater; and writing these reviews has drawn me into the local theater community, research, and voicing my political and aesthetic opinions to the world.
The bad news came in late April. The cough I'd had since early 2008 was getting worse. I could hardly catch my breath pushing myself onward in daily walks. Diagnoses from X-ray and CT scan: pulmonary fibrosis (never heard of it!) Since then I've been on oxygen (a real drag) and exploring a new landscape I'm dubbing "medical-world" full of doctors, tests, therapies, waiting rooms, rehab programs. I'm interviewing and befriending the inmates of this mysterious culture, learning their language and customs in hopes they won't kill me. End of August I had an open lung biopsy at U Colorado Hosp that confirmed diagnosis. Docs won't give prognosis because they know little about causes, treatments, and progress of this rare disease.
How & where did I get it? Docs call it idiopathic. My answer: toxic pollution spewing out of INTEL plant making silicon chips half a mile above our house. Corrales has ten times PF cases as national average. I've joined Corrales Residents for Clean Air and Water who've been fighting INTEL for 20 years. But I don't want tending my "fatal, incurable, progressive" malady or fighting the corporate monster with infinite legal resources and PR to suck up all my time and energy, even though needing O2 slows me down and limits travel options. Let's flow forward with creativity.
Life is uncertain, and we'll all die. Some say live every day as if it were your last. Focus on what's most important Here Now. I must clean out my archives, speed up memoir writing, disperse most of my library. We'll move to a lower altitude. Come see us while we're still here in Corrales in 2011!
Doris and I have heeded my carpe diem philosophy. In June we drove to Arkansas to join my daughter and granddaughter to celebrate the 70th birthday of my ex-husband Charles, Lisa's dad. Crazy, you say, for one who sometimes calls herself a separatist? Charles and I have never been enemies or spoken ill of the other. Cheyenne could see her grandparents happily divorced for 40 years reminiscing as friends. Charles enjoyed lecturing Doris on his rare antiques, and she enjoyed learning about them. The adventure prompted me to begin writing about my Arkansas years, and breathing was much easier at 1200 feet than 5000.
In July and August Doris and I took week-long trips to Denver--first for tests at National Jewish Health Clinic (best in US for respiratory ailments) and then for the biopsy at U of Colorado Hospital. We pretended we were on holiday--browsing bookshops and galleries, sampling microbreweries. In October we explored the ancient petro glyphs at Canyon de Chelly and the Crownpoint rug auction.
I spent all of November in Florida. Miraculously I could breathe at sea level without oxygen. Doris and I drove down and played tourist at Harry Potter World with Lisa. After Doris flew back to ABQ , I helped Lisa get ready for her photo exhibit at the Lake Eola Festival. I had an ocean front condo on Cape Canaveral for 15 days of pure bliss--writing memoirs, reading, healing, visiting old friends from my 14 years at Rollins College, and spending separate quality time with Lisa and Cheyenne. My 13-year-old granddaughter and I bonded. She's into math and science projects and writing stories. What a sparkler! What a magic liminal age! My Cape Winds Journal chronicles that 15 days. Doris flew back to Florida on Thanksgiving. We spent a delicious Margaritaville weekend in Key West before driving back along the Gulf.
It's good to be back in Corrales with friends, good to share my memoirs and those of my senior center writers; to continue reviewing plays; to accept invitations to perform Mabel in 2011 and teach more memoir writing; to join Democratic Women of Sandoval County promote progressive politics in NM ; and to embrace "medical-world" with hope and cheer, despite fog about our future.
Other sad news: We lost Tiger in October. When her health failed, she went fast. She decided that Doris's birthday dinner would be her farewell party. She played hostess, more extroverted than she'd ever been. She sat up at the table next to me as if she expected a plate of her own. Four days later she collapsed. When no treatment worked, we brought her home. Brenda took a family portrait. The house now seems so empty without her shenanigans for the past 17 years. Doris always said Tiger took after my party girl Irish side. We still feel her playful spirit.
Winter Solstice cheer and love from Rosemary and Doris, who doesn't write holiday letters.
Goodbye New Mexico (written 6/1/11 in Orlando)
I hope you are rolling into summer 2011 with good health and good spirits. I wanted to update you on my transitions. It was becoming so difficult to breathe at 5000 feet that I had to flee my beautiful home in Corrales earlier than I’d hoped. My need for more oxygen was increasing so rapidly that I could hardly move without continuous flow 24/7. My allergist said I had to leave and phoned my pulmonologist, Dr. Fernandez, at National Jewish Health in Denver to get me to see him ASAP. Denver doc phoned me to see him immediately because wants to get me on a lung transplant list, even though people over 60 are rarely considered safe risks. Since I’m healthy in every other way, Duke Medical is reviewing my case. They must judge that I can’t survive with these lungs and can withstand the transplant. If my insurance and medical records pass, they’ll schedule a week-long evaluation. I’m optimistic.
These past few months I’ve been writing my memoirs, dispersing my library, and finding a home for my feminist theater and LN archives. Even in my flurry, I published two more reviews for Talkin’Broadway: http://www.talkinbroadway.com. If you’d like to read my reviews, click on the site and put my name in the search box. Memoirs will be in progress for a while. I thought sorting my library and archives would take 6 months, but I did it in about 10 days: 3000+ books to UNM English and women’s studies, 1500 to Corrales Library (most of my modern drama collection), 500-1000 to friends and other places. I’ve kept 2500+ for myself to enjoy for the next decade. My feminist theater archives have been shipped to Smith College. I’m delivering 3 cartons (my Australian lit collection) to Rollins College this week. Later I’ll organize LN papers, but I need them for the memoir I’m writing this summer. Doris has packed dozens of cartons of books. She’ll be working on our house this summer.
Alas I had no time to say goodbye to most of my dear NM friends (thus this letter). Doris and I are grateful that my daughter Lisa flew to ABQ May 22 to drive with me to Orlando so that Doris didn’t have to stop work. Tornadoes sweeping across the path we were to travel delayed our departure until May 25. We spent a day in Clarksville, AR, with Lisa’s dad and 95 year old granny. We arrived here May 28.
Lisa took photos of the tornado devastation in our path that we didn’t have to detour to see all across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Alabama. I’ll tell you when she posts them on her site at lisadevore.com. While I’m fleeing for my life, I’m mourning of all whose lives were swept away in an instant. We were tempted to take an extra day to detour from Clarksville to Joplin where we lived 1976-1979. Is our old house near downtown still standing? Lisa as photojournalist hoped to document that disaster, but then we thought better of intruding. We are treasuring everything precious in our lives.
Failing lungs aren’t going to stop my plans to take my 14 year old granddaughter Cheyenne to NYC (her first trip!). We’ll fly to LGA on June 9 and take Amtrak back to Winter Park, FL, June13-14. We hope to do the tourist hot spots and lots of theater with Cheyenne pushing me and oxygen tank in a wheelchair when my lungs aren’t strong enough for tourist walking. No barriers for this adventurous duo!
Back in FL, I’ll have a condo on Indian Harbour Beach overlooking the ocean June 15-July 15 where I can breathe, heal, write, read, meditate, wait for whatever happens next. I’m resisting grieving all I left behind. Doris and I don’t know where we’ll settle if/after a transplant. Right now we are living day to day in the whirlwind on opposite sides of the country. (cell phone: 505 463 3843).
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