Our back porch is familiar and reassuring, there is always a cat or chicken there, never a human being. Ed Gulley’s sculpture looks as if he grew up there (“Mr. Blockhead”), sometimes the porch looks a hundred years old. I guess it is at least that, surely twice that.
I’ve had a therapy dog on and off for six or seven years, we did hospice work and now, we visit veterans from our two continuing wars, elderly people in assisted care, dementia patients in special homes and facilities. I am forever impressed by the warmth and dedication of the nurses and staff, forever disheartened at the way our culture has failed the elderly and those on the edge of life.
Usually, in my therapy work with Red, we come to visit the elderly. Tomorrow, they are coming to us.
You don’t need to spend a lot of time with the elderly or people with terminal illnesses to see two things right away: our idea of medicine and health care profoundly fails the people it is supposed to help. And we have isolated them from our world.
Says Atwal Gawande of the Harvard School Of Public Health in his powerful book Being Mortal, “the waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit.”
I love doing therapy work with Red, but I hope to see it clearly, for the people I visit, for me. It rewarding but also difficult work.
Every time I visit the elderly, I see them suffering from pills that disorient them, endless procedures that cripple and drain them. Their days are spent in institutions – nursing homes and rehab and hospice and intensive care units – where they are utterly isolated from everything they know and love, living anonymous, hidden and regimented lives, cared for by dedicated but overwhelmed and over-worked people.
The elderly are lonely. They are grateful for any crumb from the outside world that deigns to come inside. They often seem resigned to me, uncomplaining and without much hope. The mere presence of a dog reduces even the strongest person to a kind of desperate gratitude, so eager are they to touch something alive and warm, and remember a morsel of their former lives.
I still see and feel much love, for the friends they make, the families they miss, the partners they have lost, the lives they lived, the pets they owned.
I come to know and love many of them, they are so accepting and grateful for five minutes of my life, for any question I ask and answer, for any news of a real life. It is almost surreal, it is so easy to please them. You do good just by appearing. They remind me that I am getting older, but I am not yet old, being elderly is something apart from what I feel and have experienced.
Tomorrow, a dozen or more people from am assisted care facility Red and I now visit regularly are coming to the farm to see the donkeys and pony, to watch Red work, and then to sit out on our lawn and have lunch with us. They are bringing their own chairs and box lunch, an outing at Bedlam Farm, hopefully the first of many.
This afternoon, I went out and mowed the back yard so they can sit and watch the dogs herd the sheep and have lunch with us. I scanned the yard for dog waste, smoothed out the bumps and filled the holes. Most of our visitors can walk, but not far. I am happy they are coming, I hope they can get into the pasture and touch the donkeys, Lulu and Fanny are such powerful healers. Most of them already know Red, I will be vigilant to make sure Fate doesn’t jump on anybody, I imagine they will love to see her run.
I do this for myself, of course, as much as for them. I am fortunate to live a life they care to see, many of them are farmers who could no longer stay on their farms. This facility is not for the rich, it is a comfortable and clean but simple place, a Medicare and Medicaid place.
I have talked to almost all of them on my visits to their facility, I see that they are often cut off by the very nature of our systems from almost all of the things that matter to us in life – friends, family, familiarity, animals.
The things that comfort most of us are beyond their need. Our world has conspired to hide them away and out of sight, so we don’t have to worry about them. They die in hospitals and nursing homes, not their homes. We never see them die, nor are they ever mentioned by our journalists or politicians.
We refuse to honestly examine and consider the true experience of aging and dying and so, we have, says Dr. Gawande, increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the most basic and elemental rights and comforts of a human being. We have left them to their fates, their lives utterly controlled by bureaucrats, the vast and chaotic medical system, lawyers, politicians, technology and strangers.
Perhaps we can break that chain for a few hours.
So tomorrow, we are excited to break bread with this group of people, they are coming to us. I hope they enjoy their time here, I hope it brings back positive memories of their own, I hope they come often. I hope we bring them comfort.
I went into the barn with my IR camera and saw a wall full of hay, and it is a comforting and impressive sight, I wanted to capture the feeling I get when an old barn is filled with hay and winter is creeping along. When winter comes, I intend to have enough hay in the barn to get us through April. We have two donkeys, a hungry pony, and ten sheep.
In the winter, they eat twice a day. They mostly eat first-cut bales of hay, less rich in nutrients and flavor than the second cut in August. Second cut hay is like Thanksgiving dinner, say the farmers, you don’t have Thanksgiving dinner every day. But in the dead of winter – and this one is supposed to be harsh – the animals need some extra nourishment and energy, and so we mix the second cut in with the first cut when it’s bitter cold.
I’ve got nearly 100 bales, I’m getting 30 more. I took a pinhole photo – very narrow aperture – of the hay to try and capture the warm and timeless feel of it. The IR camera captured the low light in the barn.
If you wish to understand the very powerful undercurrents for women that run through Donald Trump’s sad and hateful campaign for the presidency, you might wish to start by reading a piece my wife, Maria Wulf, wrote this morning on her blog, it is heartfelt and instructive. It is being shared all over the place.
I am very sorry that so many people are blind to his cruelty and insensitivity, but democracy is not always pretty. I think women feel the reality and danger of Donald Trump more closely than anyone, except perhaps, Hispanics, African-Americans, and refugees and their descendants.
To know Maria’s face and see it often is to understand her art in a special way. Maria is utterly without guile or pretense. But she has the keen sense of injustice that comes from people who have experienced it.
Her art, like her, is a kaleidoscope of feelings and emotions, all on top of one another. Increasingly, her work a sometimes subtle, sometimes strong feminist message of empowerment and strength.
Although her early life was difficult, I think she was saved by successfully hiding and protecting her heart and soul, it is almost a fairy tale story. She hid it and thus kept it safe until it was okay to come out. The people who hurt and dismissed her never knew it was there , so they never bothered to destroy it.
Her soul and spirit was never broken, they are out in the open now.
One of the many reasons the animals love Maria so much is that her emotions are right on the surface, they show up in her face as they do in her work. And animals read emotions much more intuitively than humans. They can smell our feelings. I feel the same way. My emotions are very much submerged and protected, but she sees them and knows that they are there, and they find her.
My sister is also a creative and loving person, she is also, like Maria, sensitive.
But she was broken down, criticized, interrupted, hurt, and undermined. They got to her soul and broke it into pieces. She has had to spend so much of her life bravely finding her voice and her place and healing herself. Perhaps this is why I am determined to never treat women or anyone else in this way.
Like so many women, Maria had to submit to survive and she believes that in many ways, she led a life of subservience. Watching Hillary Clinton, she felt the thrill of defiance.
Maria has become a writer, in the last year or so we woke up this morning talking about the Clinton-Trump debate, and especially Donald Trump’s whining that Clinton had not been “nice” to him, I could almost hear the middle-school bully whining that it “wasn’t fair” when one of his victims finally got sick of him and beat him up.
Maria well remembers people who hurt her and were cruel to her protesting that she wasn’t “nice” when she protested. So she tried to be nice.
Maria sat up in bed, and said “I have to write about this.” She is a writer now, as well as an artist. A couple of years ago, she was afraid to write about herself or most other things at all.
Like my sister, Maria felt she had to surrender to people, mostly men, who persuaded her that she wasn’t good or attractive or worthwhile. To this day, Maria, who weights less than half of me and is no bigger or wider than many sticks or tree limbs, believes she is fat, and has had to work so hard to not surrender to men, to be “nice” to them.
Blessedly, this has never been an issue with us.
From the first, she has told me exactly what she thinks, and when I have not been “nice,” I have heard about it directly.
And I have never protested when she challenges me, although sometimes I fight. This fear has never been in our relationship. She does not surrender to this any longer, and certainly not to me, and if I am in any way a part of that, I am very proud of it. She wrote a beautiful piece about this on her blog this morning.
One of the things she talked about was an article which spoke of women constantly being interrupted by men and seeing their ideas stolen. I asked her if I have ever manturrupted her, and she said no, not ever.
Watching Donald Trump try to bully and interrupt Hillary Clinton and make taunting faces and noises was both painful and emotional for her, it brought her back to the men in her life who had done that to her, and her long subservience to them.
For us, this debate wasn’t just about who gets to be president, it was about something very personal. Women have not been treated well or fairly in this world, and it is a glorious thing to see them rising up and finding their voice.
I guess you had to really be there to feel the wonder of this, it was a feeling very much in evidence in our farmhouse this morning. Maria felt so powerful to me that I jumped out of bed gingerly and said I’d take a shower first.
Tucked away on old dirt roads and behind big old maple trees in my country are some abandoned old family farms and farmhouses. They are touching, haunting, symbols of a different time, different values. The family farm is struggling everywhere in America, deemed by economists to be inefficient.
I try to pay them visits, stand quietly with them, photograph them, soak up the very powerful feelings of these places. This farmhouse is 15 miles from mine, like mine it was well and lovingly built, silos and crumbling barns behind it, the echoes still of the cows and maybe sheep that once lived here, the children that played and ran freely here, the families that worked so hard for so long and did so much.
I want to keep visiting them, I have this dread they will be completely forgotten one day.
