Category Archives: Images of My Suburban Dreamworld

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld, photos

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld: 6

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My life right now might best be described as a Manchester by the Sea kind of awful. A few weeks ago, my mother, who broke her hip back in March, developed an intestinal blockage after undergoing hip surgery, and then brain damage as a side effect of the procedure to clear the intestinal blockage. Apparently this is common for elderly people under anesthesia.  In any event, she’s now almost completely disabled and will require my brother and me to liquidate her property to pay for a nursing home or a twenty four hour home health care aid. In one “stroke” (pun intended) my family has gone from petty bourgeois to fully proletarian.

This morning I looked out of the window to see tulips in the backyard. How is this possible? I didn’t plant them. I don’t know anybody who did. Is there such a thing as a wild tulip? They have renovated the house next door. They have done landscape work to the park down the block. So it’s possible tulip seeds blew over onto what will soon not be my property, and bloomed this morning after the big rain storm. What do these wild tulips symbolize? Are they nature telling me that Spring always follows the Winter? Or are they nature reminding me that I’m living on a piece of property that will soon have to be sold? Are they flowers of hope? Or are they flowers of evil? I’d like to think that the yellow tulip is reminding me not to be a coward.

(Thanks to the people who got back to me and reminded me that tulips are grown from bulbs and not seeds. So someone planted them. I just don’t remember their being there.)

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld, Personal Diary, photos

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld: 2

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Last month my elderly mother — she’s in her 80s –and I went to a family reunion where we both caught a nasty case of the flu. I was in bed for two days with a 102 degree fever. I had to give up running for a week, but I managed to recover. My mother wasn’t so lucky. The flu led to pneumonia, and in her weakened state she fell and broke her hip for the second time in three years. The surgery was successful and she was transferred to a physical therapy and rehabilitation center, but at that age you don’t recover easily from a traumatic injury. Her limbs became swollen. She was unable to make progress in physical therapy, and she developed an intestinal blockage, which required a second major operation.

So this is a big part of my life now, walking up the big hill in downtown Summit, New Jersey and taking the elevator to the ninth floor of Overlook Medical Center to visit my ailing mother. Overlook Medical Center is not only an excellent hospital. It has stunning views of Manhattan. My mother is getting just about the best healthcare money can buy. Nevertheless, as she nears the end of her life, my mother is not a happy woman. The American healthcare system is excellent for people who can afford it, but it’s still coldly rational. It treats the body but ignores the soul. The doctors and nurses at Overlook see the world through the very narrow perspective of treating the body. One has an injury. You treat the injury. There are then a series of steps you most go through to recover from that injury.  In the case of a broken hip it looks something like this: After you undergo surgery, you are moved from the operating room to intensive care to the cardiac and surgical division back to a regular hospital bed before being discharged. Then you spend the next few weeks in a rehabilitation and nursing home learning how to walk again.

It all makes perfect sense. Who doesn’t want to get better? Back in 2013 when I had a cycling accident and spent three days in intensive care with a severe concussion I couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital. Had they not let me out the day after I was moved to a regular bed, I probably would have escaped and walked to the nearest New Jersey Transit station. But while doctors and cranky middle aged cyclists see recovery as a rational series of steps that lead back to normality, frail elderly women do not. The constant moves, the lack of a regular routine, the inability to get up and walk around, the knowledge that she’s approaching the end of her life have disoriented my mother.

My family is not religious. We don’t prepare for death. It’s not supposed to happen. The result is denial, and my mother, not wanting to face the grim reality in front of her, is beginning to deny reality. Her old habit of repeating questions until she gets the answer she wants is getting worse. She asks me to explain things that I, not being a doctor, cannot explain. When I call a nurse into her room to give a more authoritative response, my mother drifts off into her own world until she can once again ask the same question to me, hoping she can bully me into saying something like “no, you will not have to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of your life” or “yes you are being treated badly by these excellent health care professionals.”

Perhaps it was better when Hospitals were managed by the church. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the soul. A purely rational approach to healing based on pushing the injured person through a series of steps on the way to recovery might make sense for a 30-year-old, but for an 80-year-old it almost seems like a death march of denial. So I stay as long as I can and say whatever I can. Then leave my mother’s room and walk down the hall to console myself with the view of the Freedom Tower off in the distance.

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld, photos

Images of My Suburban Dreamworld: 1

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I run 7.1 miles, usually late at night, five times a week. There was a snowstorm today, and running after a snowstorm is always a hassle. Nevertheless, snow makes for good light to take photos, so I grab my camera and go.

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It’s hard to imagine a more insignificant little town than Kenilworth, New Jersey, or a more architecturally nondescript town hall. But they keep the lights on all night and it looks pretty in the snow.

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I stop to count the icicles.

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Earlier today this intersection was full of police cars. A man died here last night, a teacher at a local high school. They found his body floating in the river this morning. Usually this intersection just annoys me. It’s always full of drunks stumbling out of the local bars, or walking home from the NJ Transit station. I ran past it tonight. I expected to find it a bit creepy, but I didn’t. It looks the same as it always does.

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They found the body in this river. The newspapers haven’t released much information. The comments sections are full of speculation that it was a suicide, but I’m skeptical. The river is very shallow, only about three or four feet deep, so it’s unlikely anybody who lives in the area would imagine you could kill yourself by leaping over that metal railing. That building in the background is a popular local bar. My guess is that he had a few drinks there alone, then decided to walk home. Perhaps he felt nostalgic for a river he had known in his youth, leaned over, slipped and fell into the water. Over the past week, the river has been swollen by rain. It’s also full of that thick mud that you can sink down into up to your knees, the kind of mud can make even a very shallow river dangerous. I suppose they’ll release more information when his family talks to the press. I can imagine that it would be pretty stressful being one of his students.