"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." - e e cummings
I woke up this morning to a few soft taps from a paw on my back - taps that weren't really there, but were memories of my beloved cat Smudge waking me up two years ago on this date. He was very, very sick and I had decided after listening to his labored breathing all the previous day that for his own good, he needed to be put down. So, the night before, I sadly put his limp form in the bed next to me so that we could sleep together one last time and he didn't move all night. That is until it came time to eat in the morning and then he was up and poking me with a look on his face like "What's the matter with you? You're not feeding me?" One last assertion of who he was and a reminder that who he was was formidable even when terminally ill.
I am reminded of this not only because of the anniversary, but because my foster mother Lydia Bullock Touloumtzis passed away early this Sunday at the age of 88. It is no trivialization of either to say that she and Smudge had certain personality traits in common.
Lydia was the mom of my best friend in junior high and high school - Mike Touloumtzis. As has been recounted here before, this period was a perilous time for me. My own mom became sick with cancer and died during my high school years, my father went into a deep depression as a result, and I was pretty much left on my own. The Touloumtzis family was kind and generous enough to emotionally, if not physically, take me in as I tried to work through what had happened to me.
At the center of this was Lydia - who earned my infinite respect by not trying to be my mother. She was always there when I needed to talk or when I was upset about something - usually smoking a cigarette in the small kitchen in the big house and looking into a distance for things that only she seemed to be able to see. But it was clear to both of us that she wasn't my mother and that the one that I had lost could not be replaced. And, of course, she was right. Most of us only get one and when you lose her, she's unreplacable. This is the sad fact that the Touloumtzis family now must deal with.
She knew this was the case because she knew herself and her uniqueness very, very well and thereby knew the uniqueness of others. Like Smudge she had a firm grasp on who she was even if, at times, she couldn't find the room to express it. She certrainly expressed it at the end though - she refused to go to the hospital from the nursing home where she was trying to recover from multiple physicial insults even during a life-threatening crisis. She had had enough - a new great granddaughter had just arrived - that generation was now settled and thriving, the house where she had lived for 50 some odd years had been sold and handed off to another family who would raise their children there, and even I, the perpetual late bloomer, was finally getting married.
She was done. Staying alive was no longer worth the pain that she had to go through to maintain the state and there was little to look forward to. So, when the time came, she wrapped it up. Very cut and dried. Very Lydia.
So maybe it wasn't Smudge poking me this morning. Maybe it was Lydia reminding me that it was time to get up and fight the battle to be myself one more day - one more once - until it's time not to do it any more. It's the Yankee thing to do, and the Smudgy thing to do, and the Lydia thing to do. Thank you both for the reminder.