I have always hated leap years! With a passion ...
They roll in like an unruly teenager, full of pluck and insolence, trashing your house, your car, and emptying out your bank account before they take off into the sunset never to be found with your whole life in shambles behind! There is no reasoning with them and nothing to do but step aside, let the damage unfold and hope it passes. Because you know, we are told that everything has an ending. Even the tragedies ...
2024 was much like all the other leap years that have passed over me. Maybe it’s because it’s the most recent, but this one really left a mark! I feel exhausted and totally uninterested in what is next, if you can believe it ... Me, the nosiest, most curious person you know - couldn't care less about what comes next! Because this year has taught me: “don’t ever ask: what else?!” - because to you that’s a rhetorical question, but to life, that’s a challenge!
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At one point, a whole Vatican of cardinals flew over our heads during one of our walks, and then we knew we were going to be in for an interesting one ...
In January, mom collapsed alone, in our home in Romania, and was in a coma for some number of days ... We had family and friends gather around her to care for her around the clock after that. The ER doctor wrote to us that she can never be left alone for the remainder of her days.
In February, mom collapsed to her second coma, this time with a very severe case of sepsis. Her doctor urged us to come back to Romania, because she was not sure she would come out of it. But mom is like a cat with about 10,000 lives so she did come out of it. Damaged, and weak, never to be herself again, but she survived it.
March gutted me! It asked me to make the hardest decision I have made in my entire 49 years of life. It was time to find a place for mom. Even if the family lived with her, we were urged that her mental state and her health is too precarious to be at home.
You know those idyllic commercials for “A place for mom”? They are all a bogus bunch of nonsense! No place, no matter how polished and advertised in slow motion with plenty of light and smiles is ever as good, as loving, as safe as you would want it to be for those you love. It was like someone was pulling my heart out of my chest with no anesthesia and promising me this is for the best reasons and it’ll be good! I didn’t see it. I never saw it. And for me to make this decision the week of Mother’s Day, it was just cruel! I kept asking why? What have I done? Who have I wronged to be asked to make this decision for the woman who gave her all to have me ...?
As my personal life was in this much turmoil, the world was stewing with bad news, as well. March was the month that reinstated Putin (after a rigged election) as the president of Russia - all while the world shuddered, and all but a feeble reminder of what we’re headed towards!
In April, I tried really hard to start some semblance of a healing process ... I came back home after the hardest, most cruel month in Romania and I looked for ways to lick my wounds and heal ... We went up North to be with my sister for my birthday. Watching the total solar eclipse together put some things into perspective: when something makes you feel that small, you realize your woes are only infinitesimal on the firmament of life and the universe ... Aa. and I then headed South, to Florida, to learn more about how to advocate for Homozygous FH - the genetic disease that both my parents so generously gave to me and my sister ... I learned of new ways to help the world live with this sometimes invisible and cruel disease. You know what a smart man once said: when everything falls apart around you, look for the helpers ... I try to do that: be a helper to whomever might need me ...
May continued with this year’s streak of pain: mom was rushed into the ER for the third or maybe fourth time this year (in five months!). This time with pleurisy. This on top of her lung cancer and COPD, of course ... May was a touch-and-go month for her - several visits to the hospital for lung fluid punctures, a tooth infection and more complications ... The little bit of diversion we had here (a trip to the mountains on Memorial Day weekend) was always accompanied by long all-night calls with Romania to coordinate mom’s care and with my sister who was there for Easter, trying to be there for her in spirit while she handled mom on the ground through the ups and downs...
The world continued to boil over, as the prime minister of Slovakia was assassinated in May. Trump is formally convicted of a crime the same month - the first former president to do so. In May, we also lost the Greensboro News and Record’s building, the place where Aa. and I met in 2007 - as it was torn down by bulldozers in Greensboro, NC. There is nothing that reminds you how transitory we all are more than watching something once standing proud as a beacon of truth turn to rubble.
June was another touch and go month for mom. She went to the hospital for a week to undergo a procedure for her lungs that would hopefully prevent her from ever building up fluid again. We spoke every day, as we normally do ... and she begged us daily to take her out of the hospital - but it was not possible ... A few weeks after being released she had to be rushed into ER again because her operation stitches had become infected. How’s that for adding insult to injury?! With every painful breath she takes, I feel a pang of pain in my side. But I must keep going. For me, for my family, for her.
July seemed that we were well enough to try to sneak in a bit of a bright spot, as we took some time for ourselves: we flew to Chicago (my first time) and then we visited with Aa.’s mom for July 4th in Michigan . But then, shortly after we came home, while we were at a baseball game in Greensboro, NC, then former president Trump is shot in the head, in an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. About 5 days after that the world is back to normal, with the story barely in the headlines anymore. Whatever your stance on the matter or the person shot here, what kind of a world do we live in where an assassination attempt is just normal?! The whole event made me feel dirty for being human, really!
President Biden announces he is stepping down from the race to the White House in the fall and is making room for Kamala Harris to replace him. This is also in July, 4 months before the elections. I don’t think this country has ever been more divided and thrown into confusion before as it is now - but of course I was not here for The Civil War and for the 60’s ... It’s like: just when you thought you got your balance this year, here’s another punch in the gut!
And even worse news came from people much closer to my heart: my best friend’s mom dies at 70 from complications of lung disease. The streak of sadness would not let up this year, I figured, by this point ... But I stopped counting a long time before then ...
August came roaring with another piece of bad news from home: my only aunt also moved into an assisted living home after making the decision that she can no longer care for herself either ... On the backdrop of my family just falling apart this year, I didn’t want to be anywhere for my sister’s birthday in August but with her. So, we surprised her with the only surprise I have been known to successfully accomplish in my life when we showed up at a restaurant in Boston for her birthday dinner ... Everyone that knows me knows that 1. I hate surprises and 2. I am just about the most predictable person you’ll ever meet. For me to pull this one off successfully was an accomplishment of a lifetime. But we needed each other, my sister and I ... She gave me some much needed strength for my April birthday when I got to go up there and spend it with her, that I just wanted to give her that gift in return. I hope she felt the same as I did in April ...
September was another bleak month. One of my sister’s best friends from work passes incredibly young with two small children after a short and cruel battle with cancer. My former philosophy teacher dies in his 70’s from many complications from a stroke he had over a year before. My aunt is sent to the ER from the assisted living facility with respiratory block caused by her heart condition.
On this backdrop, I fly to Romania to spend mom’s 71st birthday with her. Her birthday was a bright spot during that trip, as she got to come out of the place she is in and have lunch at her favorite restaurant. As I was trying to leave my home town, at night, the Tarom (Romanian airline) could not find my ticket for the flight out of there. I was livid. Their own app showed the confirmed ticket, the app where I bought the ticket showed it, too, but the check-in agent said a passenger by my name does not exist on his flight and the flight was full so they could not just give me a seat. Huge scare, but averted because they had ONE person NOT show up so after check-in was closed, they snuck me in at the insistence of my uncle who is a retired Tarom official. Glad that the universal “knowing people in the right places” still works sometimes. Also in September, Trump manages to survive another assassination plot - this time averted with no shots fired. September also brings unprecedented weather to North Carolina, too, and absolutely trashes the West (yes, not the ocean-front East) part of the state, the mountains, after the passing of Hurricane Helene.
And just because pain gets lonely and needs injury for companionship, I test positive for Covid in October. Yes, folks, this is still something real and this is still going around! North Korea ships 10,000 troops to fight in the Russia war in Ukraine, while the US lifts all restrictions on how the Ukrainians can use the arms and ammunition that they bought from America. I am not even brave enough to imagine what kind of world we would wake up to the following morning - every morning ... This feels like the ultimate straw. Except it is not ...
On a personal level, I meet with a new vascular surgeon for an update on my abdominal aorta and he pretty much waves me off that I am OK, when the CT scan he ordered and never reads shows the status of my aortic stenoses is worsening. I am used to medical doors slamming in my face, but it’s especially hurtful when you know the situation is worse ... The fight continues, I can tell you that much!
We all know what November brought at a national and even international level ... It brought a new (old) president to the US for the next four years. Everyone I know is mad or sad about this - regardless of what side of the fence they both stubbornly hug! Some people are mad at the result, some people are mad at the loss of identity of one party, some people are mad because they lost friends and even broken up families in the process. The vitriol and hatred continues to boil as the world seems to continue to not figure this out at all, but instead, to dig us all into a deeper grave.
My mom’s last living aunt was hospitalized (she is 86) with a ruptured large intestine in November, as well, and has been very slowly healing with several complications for over a month now. She is now bed-ridden and without a clear future yet.
To get away from it all, Aa. and I decide to take a bucket-list trip to follow the sites of the Twin Peaks series in the Pacific Northwest. It was a trip much like a Lynch movie: part mystery, part dream, and all real ... I need a whole book to document this as one paragraph would not do it justice.
The pay-back for having a breather came when we got back, when we had a small cancer scare that ended up being benign right here, in our home ... But sigh of relief on this one for now! Then, also in November, the same out-of-control political nightmare that threw America into chaos earlier in the month repeated the feat in the Romanian elections. Foreign interference, social media manipulation, and all other means of political corruption thwarted an otherwise free election to cause it to be canceled by the Constitutional Court - an unprecedented event in Romanian history. But this is how leap years roll, I tell ya! Remember 2020?!
December rolled in with a bang. Quite literally, when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was assassinated in New York. It feels some days like this country sees only two solutions for every problem anymore: a lawyer, or a gun. Nothing besides or in-between.
Aa.’s closest friend’s wife spent most of this month in the hospital between this world and the next one (including during her birthday), and another one of my best friends broke her leg in New York at the end of November. This left both these women out of commission at this time of the year - either in bed or in a wheelchair ... Pain and sickness is emotionally contagious, so we cry and mourn and suffer with those we love, here and far ... And always, always feel helpless.
All of late fall, early winter has been peppered with more international instability and bad news: from the war in Israel that’s spilling into several other Middle Eastern countries, to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, to the second collapse of the French government and the turmoil of Canada, and of course, through the long, bloody, and painful war in Ukraine which is next door to my other “home” - miles from my home town in fact ... it feels like this Titanic is flooded and going down fast ...
And now, as I write this, I am getting ready for my third trip this year to Romania to be with mom, my aunt, and briefly with my sister and nephews for a few days ... I am even scared to put that foot down outside my front door and start this journey, but life has always taught me that hiding is how evil wins! So onward is the only way ...
This was the least productive year for me, literary-wise ... I felt no desire to write, no reason to do it, it all seemed useless and futile. I also probably read the least, because I cannot focus enough to go through a book. Not really ...
There have been some (not many, but a couple or five) bright spots this year that made the going easier, at times - and for that I am so grateful, of course ...
Despite the sadness and the back-paddling, besides the aging and the sense of loss, this is also the year when we saw Bob Dylan and Alanis Morrisette. The year that I followed in the footsteps of David Lynch, one of my brilliant guiding minds. As technology and science are still advancing, this was a year of partaking more of their new offerings for a better, more efficient life; the year when I finally found a more stable (albeit painfully expensive) cure for my HoFH (the only thing that ever truly worked for me - a new once a month infusion called Evkeeza thanks to medical discoveries). I am grateful that the world still innovates despite all the calls to the contrary. Or maybe it does because of it ...
It was the year I saw a full, total solar eclipse, the Aurora Borealis and a comet - all in the span for 3-4 months. The year I saw the most architecturally beautiful city that I have ever seen (Chicago) and the year I met up with a long-lost friend from way back in high school that happens to live in the Pacific Northwest. Through some kind of a blessing, he and his wife were available to meet us on our Twin Peaks tour. I don’t like surprises, but this was one of my favorites, to be sure.
Unrelated to the leap year, as I get older, I am finding out with every year that I have fewer and fewer friends ... Especially in times like these, where you feel like you’re barely hovering over the abyss, I have felt most of my “friends” drift away. I am sure everyone is busy handling their own tragedies, perhaps, so I am not too bitter about that. But it does get quieter and quieter in the friends zone for us ... I have no judgement to add. It’s an observation, and nothing besides.
The people we did get to see and spend time with this year, whether in good times or bad, were God-sends. They made the journey more manageable by sharing the load. For that I am forever grateful. Even those we cared for in sickness and even those who had sadness of their own were a welcome balm, to be able to share their sorrow as much as they shared ours ... To them all, I owe the lessons I have learned and the energy that I have to keep going ...
Everything does have an ending and so will this wretched year. Good or bad, much more sad and painful than light and joyful for sure, it is part of my life. Like any link in the chain - the whole life would not make sense without it in it. I am changed. I am morphed into whoever this new person is now. I feel in my body like I am still 10, but in my heart and my mind, I feel 120. Don’t even dare look in the mirror ... Most days I am scared of what stares back at me - this scared mouse, afraid for her and her loved ones’ life, with only a glimmer of what used to be hope in her eyes. I am not too convinced the actual hope is indeed still there most days ...
But ... at the end ... we don’t want evil and sadness and death to win. At the end, as long as there is breath, we move on ... At the end - always remember: tragedies are not endless ...
Now for the next year, the only promise I am making is this: I will work the hardest and the most diligently that I have ever worked to see that there is a next year and a next 50, even.
Happy new one, all! I hope we all meet again after the threshold - braver, stronger, and readier ...
(Photo from the Londolozi reserve - South Africa)
