Random reflections and observations

Politics. We're heading into a new presidential race that unsurprisingly enough feels like a repeat of four years ago. Biden versus Trump, unless each party comes up with a better candidate to represent them. I wish both men would retire quietly, without a lot of fanfare and chest beating, and leave the arena to new and younger blood. Although promising at one time, De Santis just doesn't make the grade; he seems like a mini-Trump sans the bravado and in-your-face aggressiveness. But he pales in Trump's shadow. If Trump wasn't in the picture, maybe he'd have half a chance. But I don't think he has what it takes to be president. Neither does Trump, for that matter. I cannot understand why anyone still supports Trump, but I've given up trying to figure people out. He's a national embarrassment and I can say that; I live abroad and I see the reactions of the European media to him. No one can figure out the Trump supporters. Many theories have been advanced as to why they support him, but there doesn't seem to be one defining thing that makes them like him. It's actually a bit scary. 

Society. I saw a meme on Facebook today "Forget world peace, just try visualizing using your turn signal when driving". That's about where it is for me. I suppose we need to aim high--world peace--but at this point, I'd settle for a return to common courtesy and common sense in society. It seems that the world is mired in greed, lack of ethics, lack of empathy, lack of respect, and lack of common sense. I see it every day here in Oslo. The rudeness in society is appalling; bicyclists who don't stop for pedestrians in the crosswalks, but who suddenly stop for no good reason in the bike lanes, causing those behind them to brake suddenly. One day there is going to be a major accident involving many cyclists. Bicyclists here are as thoughtless as many car drivers, but we're always hearing about how rude car drivers are, never how rude bicyclists are. That's because the Green Party here has to push its message, which is to bike in any and all circumstances. "Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail" should prevent the good Oslo citizen from biking. It borders on ridiculous. It's like the Green Party has forgotten that winter in this country is a good five to six months long. I don't understand their point of view and I never will. Some construction projects take years to plan, finalize and complete. Not so with bike paths; they are constructed and finished before you have the chance to take a breath. When they want something, nothing stands in their way--that's the motto of the Green Party. I have no problems with biking; I've been biking my entire life, since I was a child. But I won't bike in the wintertime, and I don't need fascist propaganda telling me to do just that. And as an 83-year old friend of mine recently commented--not everyone can or is able to bike, regardless of age. She's right. 

Religion. I attend mass on Saturday evenings/Sunday mornings hoping to find some peace and quiet that are conducive to contemplation and prayer. Not to be had. No matter what (purportedly sans music) mass I attend, the priest insists on singing some part of the mass. Unfortunately, about half of the priests who say mass cannot sing to save their lives, so it's both painful and irritating to listen to them. I stand in the pew and pray that my irritation dissipates, but it's a bit sad to find myself in that position at mass. I don't want to be thinking about my irritation at something that could be solved easily--just have one mass for those people who don't want priests and/or the congregation singing at them, who don't want to sing the entire mass or even parts of it. Just have a quiet mass, for heaven's sake. Is that too much to ask?

Friendship. In the final analysis, friendship is defined for me by who is there for you in good times and in bad. I have a small circle of lifelong friends without whom I couldn't imagine my life. They are in my heart forever. The rest are just acquaintances or work friends, and with a few exceptions, I cannot rely on them to be there for me. It's always been that way, but now that I'm retired, I see it more clearly. They do not prioritize getting together; they prioritize work and more work, anything that furthers the work cause. Now that I no longer work, we have less in common. If one relies on these types of people for friendship, one will be quite lonely. I don't, but I acknowledge the strangeness and clarity of it all. But suddenly, when they want to get together, they expect you to dance to their tune; they decide the time and place, you show up. Not all of them behave that way, of course. But accommodating their schedules doesn't work for me anymore. I used to do that, but no longer. My schedule is just as important as theirs, perhaps more so, because I have plenty to do now that I'm retired. They don't think so, however. So these types of relationships will eventually fade away. As will many other things, since life is about letting go.

Getting older. That leads me to the final observation--getting older means getting tougher in all ways. I'm simply not interested in wasting my time on people, situations, books, films, series etc. that give me nothing, that don't inspire me, that don't make my life better. I don't want to waste time doing things that I don't want to do, and that includes spending time with people who are sometimes nice and sometimes not. I want to spend time with people whose moods are for the most part stable, who are kind at heart, who have Christian values, and who are not rude or aggressive or passive-aggressive, or who try to gaslight you (as in, they never said or meant this or that, but they did say it and they did mean it). I want to spend time with people who are as interested in my life and what I'm doing as I am in theirs. I want to spend time with people with whom I can have a real and meaningful conversation. There is so little of the latter; it truly surprises me that more people don't miss having good conversations. I miss my parents and my brother, who were people I loved and with whom I could converse. Our times together were real, likewise our conversations. 

Quasi friendships

I rarely cancel social plans that I've made with friends. Throughout my life, friends have been and are important to me. In other words, they are a priority in my life. For me to cancel plans with them, I have to be either sick or unable to keep my obligations due to a crisis of some sort, neither of which happens very often. I have never used school or work projects as an excuse to cancel plans; if anything, I didn't make social plans if I knew I had an exam on the near horizon or a crucial work project to finish, because I didn't want to cancel. I think carefully about what I promise, but once I promise something, I fulfill that promise. I don't promise what I can't deliver. 

I try to be available for get-togethers with friends and I look forward to them. But we live in a society now that worships work, and being busy at work is often used as an excuse for not getting together. I used to think it was purely an American trend--this obsession with work. But it's not. I recently tried to get together with some friends that I haven't seen since before Christmas--the end of November to be exact. We are a small group of women who meet and enjoy chatting for a couple of hours over dinner. My attempt to gather us together was rebuffed by one of them, who considers herself the busiest of us all. Granted, she has a demanding job, but I don't understand her priorities or her behavior. It wasn't that I was trying to plan a get-together for a week or two in the future; I was wondering if we could perhaps finalize a date at the end of June. Nail it down, so to speak. She wasn't having any of it; her excuse was that there might be upcoming work projects that would preclude her settling on a specific date for a get-together. Another woman in our group tried to get her to change her mind, but she ignored that attempt. What will happen is the following; at the end of June, the woman who won't meet us now will let us know that she is now available on such and such a day and would we like to get together. And usually we all fall in line to accommodate her schedule. Except that this time around I don't want to accommodate her. We've all done it for so long; she always calls the shots and it's always been that way. I'm not interested in continuing the pattern. 

I also don't understand another type of peculiar behavior where friends are concerned. Plans are made and everyone seems to look forward to getting together. But as the date approaches, one person backs out, then another, so that by the time we actually do meet, the number of joiners has been halved. I don't get it. It goes back to the idea of obligation; if you've said that you'll meet someone, you are obligated to do so unless there is a really good reason for not being able to do so. I can remember inviting four friends/colleagues to dinner (over fifteen years ago); all said they would come, but suddenly on the night in question, two canceled without a good explanation. I dealt with it then and can deal with such situations now, but it's downright rude to treat people this way. Imagine you had planned a big dinner party, had invited fifty people and half of them canceled at the last minute. People have also been known to do this at weddings; they are invited to the reception dinner and cancel at the last minute or don't commit to attending until the last minute. Are they waiting for a better offer? It's rude and selfish behavior. Besides the costs involved for the host, it's a downer for the host as well. It tells the host(s) that they are not a priority. I imagine that the invitees who behave this way think it's perfectly ok to do so. 

Then you have the people who never seem to be able to find a time to get together no matter what. But they stay in touch by texting and often say that they hope they'll see you again soon, or that we should get together soon. If you take them at their word, you quickly find out that they are not truly interested in meeting in person. 

I'm not sure I can really call these type of people friends. Quasi friends is more like it. Perhaps many work friendships developed over the years, with socializing once or twice a year, fit this definition. Once you no longer work with people on a regular basis, the reason for being friends lessens. After all, many work friendships are based on complaining about work, and when one is no longer working, there is little to complain about.  

One thing is for certain; as time goes on, these types of people will fade from my life, and I will be the better for it. Life is about letting go--of the past, of certain mindsets, and of people. One can let people fade from one's life, or one can make the choice to let go of them. I tend toward the latter. I give many chances and make any number of attempts to get together, but at some point I make the decision to let go. And once I do, there is no going backward. That's ok really, since some friendships are relative in the sense that they fit a particular place and time and are not meant to last forever. I'm thankful for my true-blue lifelong friends, the ones who are always there for me, and I for them. They know who they are, and I'm lucky to have them in my life. 

Grateful for the friends who didn't make life a competition

My favorite line--the friends who didn't make life a competition, but rather a grand adventure that became better together. I'm so grateful for my closest friends, because we have shared some wonderful adventures together, and have not wasted our lives competing with each other. We care about each other and love each other, and always have each other's backs. I consider myself blessed to have such friends in my life. 

Friendships and a similar core of moral decency

I get it. Everyone is tired, mentally and physically, after a year of nothing but Covid-19 pandemic news and one of the most divisive and destructive presidential elections in American history. Tempers are frayed, patience is thin, and energy levels are low. I am experiencing all of these things, and I know others are too. The toughest thing to deal with has not been the pandemic, strangely enough, but the sadness of coming to terms with the realization that there are friends and acquaintances that I really no longer want to know or have in my life. I just don’t know how to tell them so I haven’t for the time being. The friends were never close friends, but they belong to an earlier time in my life, and at that time, they were kind people—kind to me and kind to others. We reconnected on Facebook after many years of no contact. The people they are now could not be described as kind. I would rather describe them as hard-hearted, cynical, critical, and mean. Unfortunately, they were and still are Trump supporters who bought into the ‘Stop the steal’ conspiracy and all of the other nonsensical conspiracy theories that abound. They won’t condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene for her wild and divisive rhetoric and nonsensical viewpoints. They won’t condemn the hoisting of the Confederate flag in the Capitol building during the Capitol invasion. Heck, they haven’t condemned the invasion itself, and that by itself is cause for concern. They are still posting aggressive and bullying posts on social media that push the 'election was stolen' conspiracy, that Biden is a terrible person--the entire package. 

As I recently wrote to a friend of mine, I want friends whose core of moral decency is similar to mine. I don’t have much time for anything else the older I get. Good friends challenge us to see the other sides of issues, but in a positive way, not in a mean-spirited or negatively critical way. Not in a bullying way. If they love us and like us, they will not be ‘in-your-face’ aggressive toward us. If they love us, they will not be deliberately unkind or mean to us. You are rude, mean or aggressive to people you don’t really like; you don’t have to be, but if you are, it’s because you don’t like them. If you say you love or like someone, then you will strive to treat them well, to be nice, to be respectful, to be positive when criticizing them—all those things that make up common moral decency. Yes, we can be tired or exhausted, but the old adage, ‘count to ten’ rather than say something you might regret, is very applicable for situations that can annoy us with loved ones. How much do you value the relationship you have with others? Continual rudeness, aggressiveness, unkindness or deliberately provoking or needling others are simply ways of telling them that they don’t matter to us, that they are of little value to us.  

There are people who truly understand the meaning of the Christmas season

Whenever I am tempted to think that nothing nice ever happens in the world (a thought reinforced by the media that choose to cover only the lousy, depressing, horrific, grotesque and otherwise miserable stories in the world), something comes along to challenge that inclination. This story is true, I grew up in the same Tarrytown neighborhood (Tappan Landing Road) as Bill, the main person involved, and he deserves all the good things that come his way. Bill is going to the Super Bowl! Here is the link to the story:

http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/2017/12/10/nfl-commissioner-roger-goodell-surprises-tarrytown-firefighter-super-bowl-tickets/938673001/

Remembering and becoming

When I started out in the work world over thirty-five years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet some very special people who became life-long friends. One of them was Edith, who was already in her mid-50s when I met her. She was the head secretary for the department I worked in at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York, and we became friends immediately. She was a friendly and outgoing woman who made everyone she met feel welcome and at home. I would say she was one of the most hospitable people I have ever known. She was a born and bred New Yorker who lived in Manhattan most of her life. She married and raised two children in a spacious apartment in the Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, a large, post-World War II development of residential apartments on the east side of Manhattan. That apartment is where I visited her many times on my annual trips to New York, and it is where she suffered the stroke that eventually took her life at the age of 91. She had many opportunities to leave Manhattan, to move to the suburbs to be with her daughter and her daughter’s husband, but she chose not to. She remained independent until the day she died. I remember my last visit with her a few months before she passed away; she was waiting for me at the door of her apartment as I got off the elevator, and although she was very unsteady on her feet, she insisted on serving coffee and some pastries. And when I left her apartment a few hours later, she held onto my arm as we walked toward the door. Sometimes, before it got too difficult for her to walk, we would leave her apartment and walk to the nearby diner to have lunch--one of her favorite places because it made veggie burgers that were out of this world. And then we would walk slowly home again. It was always a bittersweet moment to say goodbye, much like when I said goodbye to my mother after one of my annual visits, not knowing if I would see them again, but hoping against hope that I would. Edith was a truly generous soul, who helped a lot of newcomers at work, who helped her children and grandchildren, and who took care of her husband who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s until she could no longer manage his care by herself. My memories of her are very pleasant; she and Virginia, another secretary at the institute and one of Edith’s close friends, both taught me how to make an apple-cranberry pie for the first Thanksgiving I ever prepared food for. It was the first such pie I had ever made; we made it at work during our lunch hour one dreary day in November, and I carried it home with me on the subway that evening. Unfortunately, I dropped the pie onto the subway platform and the glass pie plate shattered, and I ended up having to make the pie again when I got home. But at least I had learned how to do it. In return, I taught her how to use the newest word-processing program on her work computer. She was open to most new developments, was interested in the world around her, and very well-read. She loved to go to Shakespeare in the Park and to the opera and ballet. She and Virginia came to the church when I married for the first time (very young); when I later got divorced, she told me that it was no surprise to her, as she had not had a good feeling about my marriage from day one. She was honest that way, and it was good to hear it. If you asked for advice, you got it. I asked for advice when I needed it, because I knew it would be reasonable and smart.

I thought about Edith recently because I realized in one of those moments when certain insights make themselves known, that I have overtaken her role for some of the younger people I know, some of whom are at least twenty-five years younger than I am. The age difference between me and Edith was much larger, over thirty-five years, but it never bothered me. I hardly thought about it. That was the way I was raised. I had older parents and my relationship with the both of them was very good. They were my parents first, and then my friends. I assume that the younger people I know feel the same about me as I did about Edith; the age difference does not matter. Why should it? We are able to discuss books, music, movies and so many other things that interest us. I like a lot of the current music and literature; they like a lot of the music I grew up with, as well they should since it is really amazing music and an amazing era in which to grow up. We need role models to show us how to grow older. I had them, and I hope that I can be one for the younger people with whom I have become friends.

Making memories--two weeks in the States

This year I was lucky enough to have two whole weeks of summer vacation in my country. I planned it that way so that I could visit my two cousins, one of whom (Cathy) lives in Virginia; the other (Karen) who lives in the suburbs of Washington DC. I landed at Newark airport in early August and made my way to Washington DC by Amtrak train, where my cousin’s husband picked me up and drove me to their home in Virginia. I spent two very nice days with them; the first day we toured Monticello (in Charlottesville), the home of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a complex man, a scholar who strongly believed in public education, and a would-be scientist, as well as a military man and politician. As a landowner, he was very interested in different farming techniques and in improving crop production. He also tried his hand at making wine and beer. These are all activities that were carried out at Monticello. He is best-known as the author of the Declaration of Independence, but he also founded the University of Virginia. He was a slave-owner until his final days, although he talked about the evils of slavery and about abolishing it during his lifetime. After his wife died, he formed a relationship with the slave Sally Heming and fathered several of her children as confirmed by recent DNA testing. He is buried at Monticello in the family cemetery; on his gravestone is written the following, according to his wishes "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

I traveled from Charlottesville to Washington DC by Amtrak train, and visited my other cousin, and then traveled to New York City by Amtrak train. My experience with Amtrak on all three trips was very good; good service and functioning air-conditioning, the latter which was necessary given that most of the time I was in the USA, the temperatures were well over 95 degrees Fahrenheit, at least where I visited. The trains were packed, so talk of the demise of railroad travel in the USA seems rather premature, in my opinion. I find it very pleasant to travel by train.

I was together with friends from different periods in my past life on this trip: I spent an evening with two friends that I worked together with over thirty years ago at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; another evening with some women friends from high school; a day and evening with a close friend from the neighborhood where I grew up, and then some days with my close friend who lives further upstate. She and I made a list of all the things we wanted to do together on this visit, and we did them all. We have already decided to make a list next year as well. One of the things we did this year was to drive to Hyde Park New York (home to Marist College and the Culinary Institute of America) to visit Springwood, the home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is well-worth visiting Springwood both for its beauty and its history. The library on the premises has a very moving exhibit called Day of Infamy (https://fdrlibrary.org/pearl-harbor-exhibit), about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt’s response to the attack; the exhibit is open to the public until the end of December. Roosevelt loved to be at Springwood, just as Jefferson loved to be at Monticello. It is not hard to understand why in either case.

Both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were impressive individuals, singly and together. They are role models for how to behave in the public eye. Visiting Springwood made that even more apparent. When I think about this summer from a purely historical perspective, I realize that I have experienced a lot of American history this year: from Normandy and the D-Day landing beaches to Monticello to Springwood. As I get older, I find myself becoming more and more interested in American history. Perhaps not so strange, now that I no longer reside in my country. No matter how many problems and turmoil the USA undergoes (and how crazy the political processes are when election time comes around), I find myself more enamored of my country and its rich history for each year that passes. But mostly, I love being together with good friends and the little family I have left, especially knowing that time marches on and we are all getting older. There are no guarantees in life, so the most important thing is spending time with people who are close to your heart. Much of the rest is just filler--jobs, material things, money--that make the spending time with loved ones that much nicer.

Quotes about friendship

These are for my friends whom I hold close to my heart......I am blessed to know you. You light up my life and I could not imagine my life without you in it.

• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.   --Marcel Proust
• A friend is what the heart needs all the time.   --Henry Van Dyke
• A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.   --Walter Winchell
• The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.   --Hubert H. Humphrey
• I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let's face it, friends make life a lot more fun.   --Charles R. Swindoll
• There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.   --Thomas Aquinas
• A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world.   --Leo Buscaglia
• True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.   --Charles Caleb Colton
• True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.   --Baltasar Gracian
• There are no strangers here; only friends you haven't yet met.   --William Butler Yeats
• A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.   --Jim Morrison
• Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.  –Helen Keller

Quotes about friendship

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

--Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

--Marcel Proust

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.

--Henri Nouwen

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

--Albert Schweitzer

I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let's face it, friends make life a lot more fun.

--Charles R. Swindoll

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

--Helen Keller

A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else.

--Len Wein

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

--Anais Nin

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

--Thomas Aquinas

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

--Octavia Butler

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

--Henry David Thoreau

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

--Walter Winchell

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

--Laurence J. Peter

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.

--Plautus

Celebrating a network of women

There is a lot of emphasis at present placed on the importance of building networks in the work world, and how employees won’t get very far professionally without them. Women especially are admonished for not working harder to build and maintain their professional networks. You never know when you may need them, and you never know when your network may need you. I’ve reflected upon how this relates to my own life. Most of my professional network contacts are women. Many of my contacts/friends entered my life via my different jobs, others through schools and universities, still others from the neighborhood I grew up in. Those I’ve met via my different jobs have become my friends, and we’ve stayed friends even after we’ve left the jobs where we met.

My professional and personal networks overlap to a large degree; I consider my professional contacts to be my friends. And my friends from outside of work, from my childhood neighborhood and schools, are a support network for me in all ways, sometimes even professionally. One of my friends and I collaborated on a consulting web project together a few years ago, at her initiative. I wrote a report for another friend who was thinking about investing in the building of a private lab for the production of a malaria drug, also her initiative. Another friend--a research scientist—asked for my help in publishing two articles on which we’d collaborated during the past few years, and another friend asked me to provide photos for a scientific writing project she was working on. I have helped a teacher friend who had her grammar school class write letters to me to ask about what’s involved in becoming a scientist. I organized a tour of my hospital laboratory for the high school class of another teacher friend, so that the students could get an idea of what it’s like to work in a lab on a daily basis, and to see the techniques and instrumentation we use in our research. A photographer friend asked me to model for her a couple of times, and has taken some nice portrait photos of me that I have used professionally. Another photographer friend designs and formats the text and covers of my published books.When I think back over the years, we have helped each other in different ways. We’ve stepped up to the plate for each other and gotten involved in interesting projects as a result, all of which have enriched our lives, personally and professionally.

I want to acknowledge these women (of all ages) who are a part of my life and who have enriched it beyond measure. I consider each of them friends, including those who are family. They come from all walks of life, and all of them are wonderfully different and talented women. Many of them have combined work and family life with all of the attendant difficulties and joys. Without naming them personally, I can list their various lines of work here:

1. at least ten scientific researchers, one of whom is an author and consultant , another who is an author and owner of a scientific publishing company
2. two photographers and small business owners
3. two social workers, one who heads a non-profit educational organization
4. two teachers (one retired)
5. supermarket head cashier
6. president of a city university
7. global marketing manager for a scientific company
8. fundraising director
9. a minister
10. conflict resolution counselor, author and coach
11. part-time educational and programming consultant
12. university administrator
13. owner of a scientific consulting company
14. three doctors
15. hospital and health professional
16. soil conservationist
17. paralegal
18. computer services manager
19. writer and editor
20. national scientific liaison manager
21. three librarians
22. obstetrics nurse
23. horseback riding instructor
24. three senior research technicians (now retired; all women in their 70s, one of whom works as a consultant)
25. nurse (retired)
26. apartment superintendant (now retired; a family friend who is in her early 80s)
27. tour guide (now retired, 85 years old)
28. secretary (was my oldest friend from my first job, who passed away last year at the age of 86)

Society should be celebrating the lives of real women in all of the different media formats, instead of focusing ad nausea on worn-out celebrities and celebrity wannabes. There are, dare I say it, things to write about other than the size of this or that celebrity’s engagement ring or who had a wardrobe malfunction. Who cares? Is this what makes women interesting? The answer is no. That’s my take on it, and that’s my challenge to society at large. Celebrate the interesting women--the women on my list. They are the women who are advancing the world, one small step at a time, and they’re doing it without a lot of fanfare.

Saying goodbye to Fru Østbakken

On June 5th of last year, I wrote a post about Fru Østbakken (http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/2010/06/fru-stbakken.html), who in her 94th year had moved into a nursing home temporarily to recover from a small stroke. She was eventually moved to Grunerløkka nursing home in the early autumn and it was there she lived, in a small room with some of her furniture, paintings, and belongings about her, until she died last week (June 14^th) at the age of 95. My husband and I attended her funeral service, which was held this past Wednesday in the basement chapel of the nursing home. The service was well-attended by her extended family and a few of her neighbors; she had no children of her own and her husband pre-deceased her in 1993. Most of the elderly ladies who lived in the same co-op development whom she socialized with have passed on or are themselves living in nursing homes now. So there has been a real changing of the guard not only at work but also in the co-op development where we live. One of the neighbors who attended the service together with us, an older man of 70, commented on this—how strange it felt to see this happening. He meant that when he looked around, he knew no one anymore. Everyone he knew has either moved away or passed on, and he will also be moving away, to Germany, at the end of the month. It is a strange feeling to watch the years pass and to see this happen. I agree with him. But there is no stopping the progression of time; it is also very strange to think that someday, God willing, we will also reach 70 and maybe even 80 or 90 years of age. It must be strange to know that most of life lies behind you, in the past, and that there is nothing you can do to stop the flow of years, that brings you to your own passing. The realization that one is a mortal being is a gradual process. Though we know when we are younger that we will not live forever, it is not ‘real’ in the same way as it is when you hit middle or old age. I remember that with my mother, who sometimes commented on it but who mostly avoided the topic. Fru Østbakken talked a little about what it meant to foresee her own death when I visited her before Christmas. She was ready to die, even though she was afraid to die. She meant that she had lived a long good life. The priest who led the service also commented on this. I think she was more afraid of not knowing when her death would happen, what it would involve, or how much pain or suffering it might involve, and so on. When we visited her a few weeks ago, her doctor had essentially informed her that it could happen at any time. She had advanced colorectal cancer and it had apparently spread, so that it was only a matter of time.

I write about her now because I look up to her and admire her courage. This life we live is a mystery, but death is also a mystery. No one has managed to explain why we age and pass on. Scientists study aging, and they have their theories with some underlying data as to how we age (e.g. telomere shortening that leads to cell aging), but why this should be the case, that we build a life on this earth that we must let go of at some point, remains an unknown. It is not for nothing that you realize at some point that life becomes about how to let go of things gracefully. Not an easy task. It is not easy to say goodbye, not easy to let go, not easy to deny our will and our desires. I have realized that truly living life is a paradox—one lives best when one knows that one will not live forever. In that way, you will not take life and loved ones for granted, when you know that seconds, hours, days, and weeks become years and decades and that time passes and that the present is what we have—to make good memories together with those we love. So I say rest in peace to Fru Østbakken; I know she would tell us to live life and to enjoy ourselves. She embraced her life each day; her will to keep going was impressive and if given a choice, she would have remained in her apartment, at home, until the end, but she was not able to afford what it would have cost to have made that possible—live-in care. So she was pragmatic. She understood this and accepted her lot. That was very characteristic of her—she was pragmatic and accepting. I hope she has found the peace that she deserves. 

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.  

Saying goodbye to a colleague and friend

A colleague and friend passed away early this morning after a seven-year battle with breast cancer. Her death was peaceful. We visited her yesterday afternoon, having had some idea of what might happen this week. We got a chance to say goodbye since she recognized us even though she could not talk. Her life the past five years has been a roller coaster ride that is almost impossible to describe. We who witnessed her fight know how much she went through, how many rounds of chemo she endured, the different drugs that wore her down, made her lose her hair, affected the nerve endings in her hands and feet, changed the taste of food, and so many other things. Cancer is a horrible illness and she was the first to admit that. She bemoaned how it altered her physically. Mentally was another story. It seemed to motivate her in a way that I found surprising. She was a fighter to the end. She focused on living and not on dying; she kept on working as much as she was able to, almost right up until the end. It kept her going and she was honest about that; she did not have much immediate family around so the social environment at work was also uplifting. She and I often commented on the irony of her situation—she had metastatic cancer that showed tendencies toward becoming resistant to the different drugs she was taking, and she was working on projects at work that had to do with how cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy. She was very interested in all the new studies and data showing that this or that drug might help improve prognosis. She was an active participant in her treatment programs and was not afraid to discuss her illness or to challenge her doctors with new knowledge that she had found on the internet. She was stubborn and it was that trait that kept her going and instructed those around her about how she wanted to be treated. Except for one or two occasions when she told me that her cancer had again spread and we shared a good cry together, she did not want pity nor did she want anyone to feel sorry for her.  

I knew her for many years, since I moved to Norway. She was an American who married a Norwegian and moved to Norway in the 1970s. Both of her children were fluent in Norwegian and English from a very early age. She saw to that. She did not travel each year back to the USA as I have done since I moved to Norway. It did not seem as important to her as it is to me to do that. But she had weekly contact with her father (a widower) via email, and as he got older, daily contact. When he developed lung cancer, she went to stay with him as his nurse and companion for a few months until his death. She told me that her mother had also had cancer and had died shortly after she moved to Norway. She was proud of the fact that her mother had briefly been a movie star in Hollywood; she had starred in a movie together with Ronald Reagan, but her career was a brief one and when she married she left acting.

She loved to read and her interests were in historical biographies and modern fiction. She and I enjoyed reading the Harry Potter series together and going to the Harry Potter movies with work colleagues. She wasn’t as avid a moviegoer as I am but she would occasionally join me for trips to the movies. Her family and my family managed a trip to the local concert stadium to see Riverdance in 1999. She loved Riverdance. We also shared a Thanksgiving together at another American friend’s house and that was an enjoyable time. When my stepdaughter was young, she and I and my friend and her daughter went strawberry picking together. That was a lot of fun; both girls ate more strawberries than they picked. It is one of my most vibrant memories of being together with her. Her husband’s job took them to Africa when her children were small, and that was an experience she never forgot. She loved being in Africa and we always used to wonder why she didn’t join her husband there in later years when he began to work there more often and was away for months at a time. But she didn’t. She would visit him there during vacation and talk about moving there if she decided to quit working. But she never did.

My memories of her are of a person who was kind, hard-working, patient, selfless, nurturing and supportive. She rarely complained. She made you see the other side of impossible situations even though you didn’t want to. She did not have many goals or ambitions for herself, and I for one wish she had. She expressed a desire once to pursue a Master’s degree but it never became more than that even though there were several opportunities that came her way. She was smart and interested in science and could have managed it without problems. She worked on my research projects for the past nine years, and was a great support to me. Her work was consistent, reproducible and high-quality. She also supported her children in all ways, listened to them, gave advice, helped them financially, and was always available for them. I was glad to see that they were there for her when she needed them, especially the past few months. Her daughter is pregnant and will give birth next June; it is very sad that she did not live to see the birth of her first grandchild. She would have enjoyed being a grandmother. We watched how she was with the son of another friend and work colleague. She really enjoyed him and being around him.

I realized yesterday after having visited her for the last time in the hospital, that it was good that we had said all we needed to say to each other before yesterday. As colleagues, I had already thanked her for her help and support at work so many times, and she had thanked me for giving her the chance to do some of her own research on projects that she was interested in. As friends, we spent countless hours over lunch talking about life and relationships and women’s rights and injustice in the world. I was probably pretty confrontational at times when it came to women’s rights. She was less so when I first met her but became more so during the past few years. I think she understood that it was important that her daughter have the same opportunities as a man would have in the work world. I am nine years younger than she was and I think she thought sometimes that I still had a lot to learn. She was probably right. There were things we did not talk about, and during the past few years there were more things that remained unspoken. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was her illness that crystallized the meaning of life to her, or perhaps we both realized that we could complain about the state of the world but we still had to live in it. In any case, we knew how to agree to disagree when we did not share the same views about the world or specific situations. I am glad that her passage out of this life was peaceful. She deserved that after her long battle. I will miss her. We will miss her.

Fru Østbakken

Our neighbor, Fru (Mrs.) Østbakken, who is 94 years old, moved out of her apartment this past week and into an elderly residence/nursing home. She was told that it will be a short stay while she recovers from what seems to have been a small stroke, but her niece meant that it is unlikely that she will return to her apartment. We were getting ready for work the day she had her stroke (episode as she calls it). She felt her legs go numb and she could not get up and walk, and it lasted for about twenty minutes. In the meantime she had managed to summon help (us and well as her neighbors upstairs) by yelling as well as by pressing the little alarm button that older people often wear around their necks as a kind of necklace. It alerts a central station that this person needs help and an ambulance can be sent if the person needs one. In Fru Østbakken’s case, she did. But after all the blood and medical tests they performed on her, they could only tell her that her heart, lungs, kidneys and other organs were in good shape for her age, and they sent her home again. However, her condition seems to have deteriorated a lot since then (about three weeks ago) and she stopped going to the elderly center on Tuesdays and Thursdays and preferred to remain in bed the whole day. I would say that she became more fearful and depressed. We had been checking in on her for the past year or so, making sure she was ok, buying bananas (her favorite food of late) and other small groceries for her, and bringing her small portions of our supper meals to her when we knew it was something she would like. At those times she would often talk about how much she enjoyed her mother’s home cooking. The last time I stood in her kitchen I really listened to her as she told me about where she was born and grew up, and who her relatives were and where she fit into the family tree. I have noticed this sudden need to talk about their early lives and family in other older people who were close to me. It is a sense of urgency, I believe, because I think they get a premonition of the reality of their own mortality. I cannot explain it any other way, and it has had a marked effect on how I view my own life and mortality. It seems to be more important now than before to chronicle one’s life and family history so that our children and family know who we were and what we thought.

When I moved to Oslo, she was already 74 years old. She had retired at 70 after 50 years of working and had received some kind of tribute from the King of Norway for her long years of service. When she told me about this honor she was very proud. She was always very generous and kind to my stepdaughter through the years, giving her candy and small gifts. If she made bread or waffles she would share them with us. Up until she was around 85 years old, she would go to her small cottage in the mountains during the summer months, and live there alone with occasional visits from friends and family. She would take care of the grounds, haul up her own water from the outdoor well, and take care of herself very well. She sold the cottage when she was in her late 80s. Her husband died in 1993; they never had children and she carried on without him. She has been an independent soul for as long as I’ve known her. We have watched her go through a bout with colon cancer which she seems to have beaten, as well as arthritis in her knees which left her legs twisted and bent. It must have been very painful for her to walk but she kept on going, walking up and down the three flights of stairs when she needed or wanted to go out. We live on the third floor of our co-op building and there is no elevator. She enjoyed sitting outdoors in all kinds of weather with the other elderly ladies who lived in our neighborhood (they are gone now), some of whom are in nursing homes themselves, some of whom have passed on.

In the past year, when I have stopped in to see her, I have sometimes felt very mentally exhausted due to work problems. Sometimes I would just tell her that I felt like giving up, and she said to me that she had often felt that way when she was younger, but that it was just to go on and not give up. She has lived that way her whole life. It helped to hear that, as it often helped to talk to my mother and father when they were alive. Older people have wisdom to share with younger people that is unfortunately not valued as much these days as it was earlier, or perhaps that is my impression and not necessarily the truth. However, it seems to me that society is mostly concerned with youth and tends to ignore aging and death. I remember my mother, when she was in her late 70s, commenting upon how invisible she often felt to the world around her. Luckily, she had her family who cared for her, but it struck me how alone and lonely many older people, who do not have any family, must feel. We will eventually visit Fru Østbakken in her new home, but we will wait a few weeks to see what actually does happen. It would not seem right to return her to her apartment without full-time help, and that she cannot afford. She has nieces and nephews but they do not have the possibility to take her in and that is not done so very often here. Older people move into state-funded old-age homes, nursing homes and/or assisted living facilities and that is that. I hope Fru Østbakken will be happy there—somehow I think she will, after she adjusts to this major new change in her life. We did not know ahead of time that she was leaving her apartment on the day she left (her niece told us later that she would have called to let us know about it), but we happened to be home and we went in and I said to her that I had thought of asking her if she needed me to buy bananas for her that day. Her answer was that she was sure that she would be getting bananas that evening at the home. She could see herself there already and I suppose that is a good thing—to be able to visualize yourself in the new situation. It is another lesson in how to gracefully let go and adjust to the inevitable changes that life gives us.