Filed under: Letters to Leo | Tags: infant cold and flu, infant communication, Infant illness, WWII cribs
When we flew to Seattle (20 hours door-to-door, despite a direct flight from London), you didn’t sleep at all. Your father had returned home from his summer of work in the mountains with a virus that we were told in the USA, later, had ‘impacted’ in your ears during the flight, causing not only the virus itself but an ear infection. Your breathing was shallow. You were listless and sleepy all of the time. Your nose was alternately runny or clogged, requiring regular suctioning and steam showers. Your sleep was disturbed, to say the least. The doctors stateside gave you a round of antibiotics. Seven days later you weren’t better. I returned to the doctor and after much discussion because a new ‘vogue’ in the Western USA among ‘intellectual’ parents is not to give their children antibiotics (?! good job I’m not an intellectual) we decided to give you another round of a stronger antibiotic because of the flight home and potential discomfort for you. You were lying on the table in the doctors office playing with your toes when the two nurses came in with a shot of the new, more powerful, antibiotic to inject into each of your lovely, pudgy thighs simultaneously. You watched them put on their blue, plastic gloves with growing alarm in your eyes (oh, my trusting child!), then they shot you and your cried. I took you into my arms to console and feed you (it was the first time you bit me on the nipple, and this despite having six teeth for months!). They kept us in their offices an hour to make sure that you did not go into shock (?!). You did get better for the return flight, and were your jolly, calm, self again, but it was short-lived.
One night just after returning to France, you were softly crying and moaning in your sleep and could not be comforted. It was terrifying because your father and I didn’t know what was wrong. We changed you, I tried to feed you, but it was the first time you rejected my breast in your short seven months – truly alarming. Then you projectile vomited all over me and we took your temperature…it was 39.5 c (103.1 f). We dressed you warmly and put you (and a bottle of water and biscuits/cookies) into the car and headed immediately to the hospital. You were admitted. The cribs in the Paediatric ward were like something from WWII – iron, with high walls, reminding me of how a cartoon might depict a lion cage. They gave me a single fold-out cot to sleep in and you a dose of paracetomal, took your blood and your urine (three times, hey ho) but otherwise left us alone. Your father brought me a pizza to eat and the three of us played with ‘found objects’ such as a plastic cup from the vending machine, a straw, a spoon. You were a very good sport and didn’t cry. You even seemed better. You went to sleep, as did I (there wasn’t much else to do) but with the nurses coming in regularly to check your temperature, and the sound of children and babies crying, sometimes screaming, it was difficult going. So I took you into my little bed and while you’d intermittently look to make sure I was still there, you finally slept. Despite the circumstances, and you were released the next evening with a mild lung infection, it was a poignant night for me, the two of us on a single cot with a patch of bright light from the hallway, the sound of the nurses walking to and fro, the crying, and the two of us comforting each other through the night in a foreign hospital.
It’s horrible not being able to communicate with you now, or you to me, other than on a visceral and basic level (are you too warm or too cold? Are you hungry? Are you wet or soiled?) especially when you’re not well ‘cause it’s all guesswork – you can’t tell me where or what hurts….and it’s because of this that I write these notes to you.
Filed under: Letters to Leo | Tags: death, father, Jasper Johns, regret, son
Today is my father’s birthday, your grandpa…he died the day before his and my mother’s 48th wedding anniversary…August 22nd, 2001. I was there. Me, (my brother and sister) M and J had given him a sponge bath the night before – rather ceremonial…that same evening, my dad’s last evening alive, though he wasn’t conscious, my ex-husband, T, had cooked salmon lasagna and brought a bottle of absinthe from GA (not sold in the states – it’s said Toulouse Lautrec, the painter, went crazy on it) and he, my mother and me drank that, firing up spoons of sugar to put into it, talking quietly. Your aunt J sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen, in it’s entirety, to her little daughter, your cousin K, to get her to sleep on the couch nearby…her voice was like a flute. It was a lovely, somber evening. We had ‘shifts’ to administer morphine to my father – groups of two – and T and I went to bed with a shift to come up two hours later. But an hour after we went to bed, your uncle M came to the door of our bedroom and said that I was to come downstairs. I went and my father was dead. We stood in a circle around his hospital bed in the den, our arms around each other encircling him. I remember thinking he looked smaller….that maybe there was something to a soul ‘inflating’ a body.
I remember it started to rain heavily then…the hospice workers came in the dark and in the rain, in a type of white cargo van with no windows; it was a woman with really fried-out 80’s-type hair and a run in her pantyhose, and a man in a cheap suit. They put my father’s body on a gurney in a black plastic bag, zipped him into it and took him away into the rainy night. I went upstairs and cried and cried in bed. The next morning, I stood on the front porch, it was still raining, and called family and close friends to let them know what had happened. I’d borrowed a dear friend L’s old VW convertible bug (as I came from LA) and drove that day back to the airport in it, the rain coming through holes in the ceiling of the car – the whole world seemed to be crying.
T and I boarded a plane for LA. I was in shock. We couldn’t get seats together and no one would move to let us sit next together and it was started to dawn on me that my father had just died. Silent tears started rolling down my face. T was up and trying to convince the stewardesses to move us, to do something, that he needed to be near me to comfort me. I remember this man and woman who were flirting with each other across the aisle, the woman sitting next to me as I sat in the middle seat, saying ‘Oh dear! Now look at him, he’s walking around as we’re taxi-ing’ as a ‘dry’ sort of comic making-fun-of-others for the benefit of the man, and I quietly said ‘My father died today. He wants to sit next to me.’ This shamed them enough to stop talking but not to offer up their seat. Then quietly a woman at the window said ‘He can have mine.’ By the time I got to LA – only about a 2.5 hour flight – I was a mess and really regretted flying back ‘home.’ I called my family’s house in McMinnville from the LA airport and my mother put my father’s brother D – who had just arrived from Nebraska that day, but not in time to see his brother – on the phone. I remember being shocked, and soothed, and saddened because my Uncle D sounded exactly like my father – there was a certain accent, Midwestern USA, but soft, too…it’s hard for me to explain it but I’d recognize that voice anywhere…
In the weeks and months that followed my father’s death I had this irrational desire to talk to him for even just an hour…I would beg the gods I didn’t believe in for this hour. I wanted the opportunity to apologize for being such a willful, often unappreciative little brat growing up…I wanted him to know that I missed him, and that I’d not realized how much I would…that I was sorry for not appreciating him more while I still had the opportunity. Finally, I gave myself solace remembering three very poignant telephone conversations with my father that last year: one was from LA and I remember speaking to him about his living will, his wishes to ‘live and die with dignity’ and the humanity of this…the other was from Cologne and I’d had a breakdown feeling that I’d wasted my life, squandered the opportunities available to me, and he’d told me that I hadn’t, that he was proud of me…and the other was in McMinnville as he’d shown me where all his sketches and paintings were and complimented me on my understanding of his work. I still ‘sting’ at the memory of a couple of times that I was hateful in the wake of his being kind and thoughtful, vulnerable, particularly during his last trip to LA, but I couldn’t do more than I did at the time with what I knew…and I believe, I hope, that he knew that I loved him.
Filed under: Published film reviews | Tags: Doug Liman, Naomi Watts, Richard Armitage, Sean Penn, Valerie Plame
Fair Game is based on Valerie Plame’s memoir in which Plame’s status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Plame’s career was essentially ended when Washington Post journalist Robert Novak, with information obtained from Richard Armitage at the US State Department, revealed in his column her identity as a CIA operative. This story is terrifyingly relevant. It is also very frustrating – and this is a credit to the compelling story, the acting, and the direction – to watch as the Bush (2) administration road roughshod over anything, and anyone, in their way.
Starring Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive, 21 Grams, Eastern Promises) as Valerie Plame, and Sean Penn (Harvey Milk, The Game) as her husband. As mentioned, the story is relevant in its depiction that too much power corrupts, and the direction is well-paced by Doug Liman, who also directed The Bourne trilogy.
Victoria Jelinek 