logloglog

It’s my birthday today but I’m totally not in the mood for a party. Alison is in Toronto, and I’m invited by friends to celebrate my birthday with them. Even though i didn’t feel like it I reluctantly went. It costs a lot of energy to appear human.

The supper was great, the cake was lovely, the company pleasant, but nevertheless I wasn’t able to really enjoy it.

This depressive episode lasts a couple of weeks now and I’m want it to be over. I can only see the negative side of things, the house that needs lot of maintenance, the tenants that refuse the rent increase, my lack of friends, clients that didn’t pay my invoices etc. I even shout to the dogs.

Pepe often covers his bowl of food so he can eat it later when he doesn’t feel nauseated. He does this by using his nose to move sand over his food. Since we are in short supply of sand in our kitchen, the dishtowel that we put his bowl on has to do. And it does.

Now he only needs to find a solution to that pesky creature called Poupoune, who keeps eating his food the moment Pepe leaves the kitchen. Even when he covered it.

What a difference a day or two makes. Yesterday I brought Pepe to the vet, who was very concerned and wanted me to take him to the animal hospital (the same place where I spent 1500 dollar for Poupoune a couple of years ago) to stay on an IV for the weekend to get some fluids and nutrients into him. She feared he had an ulcer and wanted to do lots of tests to come to a diagnose. I decided to only treat his symptoms, so she gave him an antacid and some subcutaneous saline. After paying 100 bucks I went home, with him wrapped in a blanket under my coat in the softly falling snow.

He slept all day, but then ate a little bit, and didn’t vomit. By the time Alison came home from the airport after midnight he was already feeling much better. He greeted her with his signature dance and she was very happy to see him alive. Today he’s even feeling better and eats and drinks, although not in very big quantities. But he is still frail. He lost almost a pound in body weight mostly of a lack of fluids. That is not healthy and we really have to fatten him up over the next weeks. He is very low on reserves.

I suspect him from pulling these stunts just to make us bond stronger to him. That and to be on the front-page of loglog every day.

I still need to record his dance for posterity; fortunately it seems he gave me a chance to do it. Now I only have to make him dance on camera. So far when I point the camera at him he immediately stops dancing and just stares at me and barks. His bark is just loud and annoying and not nearly as cute as him dancing in circles.

I might have been way too optimistic about Pepe’s longevity. He has hardly eaten during the last few days, and when he eats he starts to vomit soon thereafter. He sleeps all day, and when not he’s very frail and trembles a lot. He still wags his tail though, so there is some liveness in him, but he’s definitely not feeling well.

I just found a big puddle of watery vomit with blood in it.

Not good. Tomorrow to the vet, I hope she can keep him alive until the weekend when Alison comes back from a business-trip out West.

Pepe is ill. His kidneys don’t work very well, he’s drinking and peeing a lot, and he slowly loses weight. Getting the diagnose of kidney failure took a while because the vet wanted to check his blood and urine a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t a temporary illness that could be cured with some anti-biotic. She prescribed him antibiotics for a month ówhich made him feel nauseated causing even more weight lossó but it didn’t help.

So he is going to die. Not in a couple of months, but probably in a year of two. There is no cure but we can stretch his life a little, and improve his quality of life by giving him magical kidney powder. In order to make sure the medication is not having bad side-effects he also needs blood-tests every 3 months.

All this is not going to break the bank (it’ll cost slightly more than dollar a day) but during the last few months we thought long and hard what our limits are. Not only financial, but also moral. Should one really spend thousands of dollars to prolong the life of a dog (who had a good 12 years on earth) while for the same amount of money you could keep some people alive? It starts with a few dollars but since you have started, when and where do you stop? We’ve decided to treat him until the treatment stops working or until he has pain and isn’t happy anymore. But no big interventions.

Just thinking about our boundaries makes us feel guilty. Who are we to decide about life and death? But in reality we do. Our pets won’t survive without us. They need us for food and shelter and in return they keep us company and give us affection. But all these questions and doubts come up with Pepe, a dog we don’t have such a tight bond with compared to Poupoune. If Poupoune was ill we probably would go much further in extending her life.

Sure, Pepe is always good humoured, dances adorably (although not on camera) when he is excited and is very snugly and likes to be under your sweater and peep out his head like a joey. He sleeps 20 hours a day, preferably under a blanket, can’t go out for walks in the winter, sometimes poops and pees in places he’s not supposed to and, above all, he is not very bright.

Even though he’s ill he still does all of that. He’s not suffering as far as we can tell, and we give him special canned dog food specially formulated for dogs with kidney failure. Unfortunately Poupoune is very jealous he’s getting special treatment and she’s even grumpier than before.

Via illicit channels I stumbled upon a yet unreleased movie about the thesis subject of a fellow web-logger. I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to her. And since I had it on my hard drive I decided to watch it.

“Noise” is about a man (Tim Robbins) who can’t stand the noise in New York, especially the blaring car alarms, and he decides to do something about it. I won’t give away the whole plot here, but it involves breaking car windows and cutting battery cables.

Now is this a subject that lies close to my heart. During my last years in the Netherlands I was kind of obsessed with cars. I didn’t mind their noise that much, but I couldn’t stand them driving through red lights, not giving priority to pedestrians and bicycles on crosswalks and generally breaking traffic rules. So I actually had more of a gripe with their drivers than with the cars themselves. But since they were hiding in the sacred cows it was easier to hate cars, period. This all originated to a few incidents I had where I told (or gestured) some cars that they shouldn’t drive over my toes and was subsequently assaulted and beaten up by the driver. And this, instead of making me more timid and restrained, made me even more vocal and focussed on car’s errors. I once threw my bike in front of a car to stop it from entering the one-way street I lived in from the wrong direction (this happened a lot because it was a huge shortcut between two main streets). And I could get totally worked up when I saw cars jumping red lights, even when they were far away from me. I was a totally self-righteous asshole, stopping for every red pedrestian stop light, even in the middle of the night when there was no traffic at all. If I followed the rules I could critique everybody else who didn’t.

This happened only when I was riding my bike or was a pedestrian. When I drove a car myself I could stand traffic violations much better. So for a while I drove to my studio, even though that actually took more time and was a hassle with parking.

During the worst period I couldn’t even watch out of my window, in fear of getting totally worked up over cars running in the wrong direction. There were days I couldn’t leave the house. I suffered from a special case of agoraphobia. During the nights I was plotting evil plans involving setting cars ablaze that were parked illegally and acquiring a rocket launcher to, as in Doom, blow cars into pieces. Just the thought that I couldn’t afford being apprehended because it would affect my immigration process, withheld me from actually doing these things in reality.

When I was visiting Montréal I had none of these symptoms, probably because I didn’t have to “defend” my territory, because I was a visitor. But even now, when I’m not a visitor anymore, I only rarely have the urge to fight cars. I even jaywalk sometimes!

Anyway, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece but watching it brought back a lot of not so nice memories. Not so much that I started to hyperventilate, but enough to cause a slightly elevated heartbeat. But I was also relieved that this period was over, that I was “normal” again.

When we paused the movie we heard the neighbours dogs barking very loudly and we started to laugh about the coincidence.

It became even more hilarious when two of our tenants came down and rang our doorbell complaining about our dogs. I pointed them to the neighbours house and had to close the door fast because I couldn’t hold in my laughter.

[This necrology I wrote while sitting next to my dying mother. It is rather factual probably because I'm not ready yet to become personal. It's still too close, too recent. But I want to tell my mother's story now as a way to distract myself and at the same time getting closer to her. There are certainly a lot of factual errors in it. I will talk to Amadou, her Mauritanian friend who considers her his second mother, to fill in some details and make additions and changes. It's telling that he knows more about her life than her own children.]

Margrit was born in a upper middle class family in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. Her father was head of the bleu collar civil servants, and amongst others responsible for hiring labourers for snow removal. He had a lot of friends when visiting a bar. She was the youngest of 4 children, two girls and one boy. Her mother became very ill when she was a toddler and spent her last years in bed. Because little Margrit was still at home she got a lot of attention from her mother, who told and read her a lot of stories. Her love of books and reading must have been originated at that age. The blow for her when her best companion died when she was 6 must have been quite fierce. Her father immediately started an affair with the live-in house keeper which surely didn’t help.

During her teens she got a major traffic accident that scarred her face and caused major damage in other areas.

Margrit went to university to study physical education. However after a year and a half she herself fell ill with tuberculosis. She spent two years in a sanatorium in the Southern Alps where she read a lot and had extensive conversations about religion with patients and staff. During this time she decided to change her religion from Protestant to Roman Catholic, much to the dismay of her family.

When she was cured she wanted to change subject and start to study medicine to pursue a career as a doctor but her father told her that her study funds had been depleted by the sanatorium dispenses and that instead she should get a job. And thus she started to work as a doctor’s assistant. She didn’t have any diplomas but soon she did many medical procedures because she was better at them than the doctor she worked for and he was not afraid to acknowledge that. She really liked her job but one night she found out that her boss also carried out (illegal) abortions which totally conflicted with her moral and religious beliefs. She quit her job and after some other small jobs managed to become a sports instructor and landed a position as a group leader and sports instructor at a boarding school for Dutch asthma patients and children of diplomats (the latter financed the other, poorer students) located on a steep cliff near Montreux overlooking Lake Geneva. There she met Karel, a Dutch Language teacher from the Netherlands who proposed to her shortly after they met. She hesitantly accepted. Soon thereafter the school was closing its doors because of a lack of funds and the pair got married in a ceremony in the school’s auditorium followed by a short honeymoon in a hotel at the other side of the lake to where they travelled in exotic modes of transportation like a funicular and a Mississippi paddle boat.

Immediately after the honeymoon, Margrit and Karel moved to the Netherlands where Karel, being a Dutch Language teacher, had more chance of landing a job. She never worked in the Netherlands, lacking the required certificates.

Even though it was a couple of years after the German occupation and the Second World War the Netherlands was still lacking resources and there were big housing shortages. So the pair moved in with Karel’s mother and youngest sister in Nijmegen, a university town in the East of the Netherlands. Margrit was shocked, being used to the rich Swiss circumstances where they gained from the war instead of suffered from it. Living in with her mother-in-law also caused a great deal of tension.

To their great joy Margrit became pregnant, even though the doctors had told her that conceiving a child would be impossible after her accident.

Their first child was a girl they named Aagje, and soon after her birth Margrit got pregnant again and a boy, Peter-Jan, was born. After a few months he suddenly died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome leaving the young couple devastated. Soon thereafter, when Aagje was 2 and a half, they adopted Ronald.

Margrit got pregnant two more times and with Maaike and Barbara the family now consisted of 6 people.

They moved to another house, located opposite from the care facility that she lived in during the last year of her life and where she also died.

There, seven years after Barbara, Mark was born. Karel and Margrit tried to conceive another child as a playmate for him but after a late miscarriage their doctor strongly advised against getting pregnant again.

Even though she had many children Margrit never was a very warm and dedicated mother. The marriage with Karel was also not always easy as he often retired in his office to work on his dissertation, that he finally finished after 13 years, leaving most of the care for the 5 children to her.

She did the best she could but also tried to get as much away-time as she could by reading large quantities of books in as many as four languages. She wasn’t very happy in the Netherlands, but also didn’t feel welcome in Switzerland anymore when she visited there, but at least the books gave her an escape to live far more interesting lives in far more interesting places.

She was often plagued with health problems, had chronic and recurring bronchitis, a misdiagnosed herniated disk that was much later diagnosed as an inoperable cyst in her spinal column, causing a lot of back pain and painful pressure on certain nerves in her leg. She also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, especially in the morning when she hadn’t moved for a while.

In 1970 they bought a house in the country near Nijmegen that belonged to their maid’s mother. The house was in terrible shape, basically a shack, but it was very nicely located near a pond and a forest, just on the other side of the dike along the Maas river. They saw the potential in this house and worked for many years to improve it and make it their Garden of Eden.

Then Karel’s aging mother moved in with the pair and their two youngest children who still lived with their parents. This caused a lot of tension in the family when Karel had to decide where his loyalties lied, with his wife or his mother. It culminated in Karel getting a major stroke that, although it didn’t cause physical damage, made him less capable to do his work and after a short while led to his early retirement.

A few years later, Karel developed a major manic episode during which Margrit didn’t feel save anymore so she left the house that she loved so much to live alone which eventually led to a divorce.

The divorce turned out to be very positive for Margrit. Instead of relying on his circle of friends she had to make her own now. She started to do volunteer work for the refugee aid organization “Vluchtelingenwerk” that made good use of her strong language skills, and became really good friends with a couple of refugees. She also went on long and adventurous organized hiking journeys to faraway countries where she often was the oldest participant, but nevertheless connected with some like-minded people. During these travels she also made strong connections.

After Karel finally acknowledged he was ill and received successful treatment for his mental problems they became good friends again, maybe better friends than before. But she didn’t want to give up her newly found independence by moving in with him again.

Karel’s death a few years later caused quite a stir in the relationship with a few of her children. Accusations were made back and forth and only after many years they came on speaking terms again.

Over the years Margrit’s health also began to deteriorate. She suffered from a series of Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIA) and then a major stroke on the day she bought a ticket to visit her emigrated son Mark in Canada. That stroke paralyzed the left side of her body which turned her suddenly from a very active hiker to a wheelchair bound. She had to leave her own house, had to get rid of a lot of her art and her beloved dog.

[I was writing this story while I was sitting beside Margrit's deathbed. After writing the previous line my mother coughed twice and then stopped breathing and died.]

She was moved into a care facility where she spent her days reading and watching television. Her paralyzed leg became very painful and she required a lot of pain medication which in turn made her very drowsy. She couldn’t concentrate on complicated tasks and only pretended to read the books her friends brought her. Her friends played along, not wanting to make her feel more miserable as she already felt.

During a heat wave she developed serious pulmonary problems which resulted in yet another hospital visit. But her body wasn’t ready yet so her heart fully recovered. She also survived a double pneumonia combined with heart problems a year later.

In December 2007 her lungs started to deteriorate and she was often out of breath. When the nursing home doctor wanted to admit her to the hospital she refused and said she was tired of hospitals. They administered pain medication and she died peacefully after a couple of days, in company of her son Mark, who was coincidentally just visiting the Netherlands.

[photo: Goedele Monnens]

This afternoon, 11 December 2007 at 17h14, my mother passed away. I was the only one sitting beside her, my sister just left and another sister that was going to replace me so I could grab a bite hadn’t showed up yet. I was writing her life story while listening to her breathing. Writing gave me something to do, and gave me a way to connect to her even though she was in a deep morphine sleep and fighting for every breath.
Suddenly she coughed twice. I looked at her, there was not much change, but she had stopped breathing. I checked it by holding a hand in front of her mouth and then called the nurse. She also checked her breathing, her pulse and then stopped the loud oxygen ventilator and removed the breathing tube from her nose. I phoned my sisters and then spend some time with my mother alone. I cried but wasn’t sad. Her ordeal is over.

The soon to be demolished railway station of Rotterdam is temporarily renamed from “CENTRAAL STATION”. The current shuffle of neon sign letters means “shedding a tear” in Dutch.

I’m sitting here in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, next to my mother. She’s trying to fight off another pneumonia. Yesterday she indicated that she didn’t want to be transported from the nursing home to a hospital. They are administering morphine in increasingly higher doses. She doesn’t talk anymore, just sleeps while breathing heavily. I hope she has nice dreams.

No, I didn’t go to the Netherlands for an emergency visit. This visit was planned a long time ago and I saw her two days ago, when she was still lively and alert. Things go fast sometimes. Coincidence? I don’t know.

A whole group of bloggers visited Jonas, who had major cancer surgery last week. He is making a fast recovery. I wish him well.