Throwing things out / Poem: Experiment on Death

While waiting for Scott to come over so we could walk the Pennypack, I started cleaning out the papers from this chest of drawers, given to me by my late Aunt Ethel.

It's filled with paperwork.

I threw out all my notes and handouts from grad school at Hahnemann when I became a MGPGP, master, group process and group psychotherapy.

I loved the classes!

Barely visible, darn.

My teachers included Fabian Ulitsky, now in his 80s, the deceased Mike Vaccaro, and Joyce Keene.

Six weeks after I defended my thesis, I got a job at the now-defunct Bristol-Bensalem Human Services. As a souvenir, I kept my schedule - see top - with the names and phone no's of my clients. Linda Cleighton typed it up for me.

Mediphors, below, was a magazine that published one of my short stories, Eugene Radice, MD, editor.

I always kept little notes to remind of things. On the top is some advice by child psychiatrist D W Winnicott. Hopefully, if I double-click I can read it. I threw it away.

The middle thing is some advice I gave someone about being a group leader. Everyone, of course, has their own style.

The pink paper was some advice I gave myself about getting manic.

"If you are filled with an overwhelming desire to do something now, you may be getting manic," I wrote. "And then again...."

See, there's a thin line between mania and reality.

This is an envelope I kept from the PEW Foundation where I was a finalist in 2005 in Creative Nonfiction.

I decided to call myself the pretentious Ruth Zali Deming.

Now I call myself the pretentious Ruth Z Deming, but those words feel like me.

After Bristol-Bensalem closed, my boss wrote a letter of recommendation for me. I had forgotten his name but remembered his personality. Wrote a great poem about him, which is somewhere in the piles.

Yesterday I dropped off a whole-wheat challah loaf to neighbor Patrick and Sue and their two kids. We had a great time.

I walked up the steep hill to their house. Feels good on my legs.

Patrick told the story of his blue van being hit by a deer.

He was going to work at 4:30 in the morning down County Line Road. It was dark. Suddenly he hears a thump and see these things like brown arms flailing across his windshield. And then blood.

He pulled over and called the cops, who dragged the deer to the side of the road.

What a traumatic experience! The convergence of two unrelated beings who impacted each other in a major way.

My friend Judy Lipchutz stopped over for some challah. We reminisced about our days at Hahnemann. She was a movement therapist who also had Mike Vaccaro.

Got the idea for the below poem last night.


EXPERIMENT ON DEATH

A scene on the show The Closer goes like this:
Young man dying, must get information before he exhales his last breath.
Our sly star, Kyra Sedgwick, extracts the desired spelling of the killer’s name
after which our young man breathes his last and the monitor flatlines.

Someday I will exhale my last breath.
If it should happen this afternoon I would be sad.
I want to know what it feels like to be seventy.

Amazingly, I have reached the august age of sixty-six, having nearly died of self-annhiliation and later of kidney annhilation.
Imagination, a relic of my childhood, when I authored “The Mullagaring is a very strange thing” still resides within.

When it goes, I go too.

But now I lie dying. My earthly journey is over. The firepit of ashes awaits me and I shall be gone. Let us now praise famous women but only for the generation after me.

I have chosen my death-bed companion.
It is You.
I lie on my red living room couch.
I no longer look out the windows for my thoughts have turned inward.
In my hand, I squeeze a tiny pine cone, detached from the conifer next door.

I have always done experiments – Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts? – Hershey chocolate or Stutz?
One final experiment and I’m done.
After my body decides it’s finished, might I artfully keep myself alive the way Kyra did her boy?
I resist the snatch of death.
The window! Look, there’s Patrick’s house on the corner, there’s the old tulip tree....
My eyes close.
I am received by gentle arms,
a baby coming out of the womb.
Out into the brilliant darkness I'm tossed
reborn
dead.