Category Archives: Sonoma County

Midwifing a Death

25 Monday Nov 2013

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January 15, 2004

MIDWIFING A DEATH

By Marylou Shira Hadditt

This is about death – a more forbidden word than ‘sex’. About death and an extraordinarily profound experience. I drove up the Coast to spend a day and a night with my friend, Page who had terminal liver cancer. The day was sunny and bright – the winter rains made the moss on the redwood bark shine like neon and the familiar route 128 took on new dimensions. Page had rented a house on the sea; she wanted to wake up in the morning to see the ocean once more before she died. The house was in Albion, (adjacent to Salmon Creek bridge where I’d had my car accident twelve years ago. Page was with me in the aftermath.)

The Albion house, was a gem of a California home. All floor to ceiling windows and redwood rafters and exposed beams. The house sat right on the edge of the headlands. One could see the ocean from every room in the house – Page’s large king size bed looked both to the West and South where a series of seaside monoliths caught the breaking waves. Even with the windows closed, we heard the sounds of the surf all night long. There was a quiet and peacefulness, both inside and outside the windows.

Page astonished me. An intense person – we are alike in many ways- one of which is often not being sure of ourselves. In bed in her bedclothes, she was a different woman. Clearly, without hesitation, she voiced her needs and desires. “I need your help”, or “I don’t want your help just now” — all voiced without “could you please” or “would you mind”. She told me and another visitor that it was time for us to go, She wanted the last half hour alone with the sea. Page could not have been that direct two months ago. There had been a transformation.

The transformation of her acceptance of death. She did a lot of reading about death, she asked friends to bring her poems and stories; I read to her from Whitman, “and to die is different from anyone supposes and luckier.” She asked me to repeat “luckier” several times. I read a fable about Eros and Death, getting their arrows mixed up with one another – love with death and death with love. Another fable of a Maori woman who shed her old woman’s skin. Page liked these simple fables. There were precise, no ambivalence. Page told me about a breathing meditation: on the inhale, the breath encircles the heart giving it protection from fear, but she admitted, sometimes the fear sneaks in. Page surrounded herself with dying and death, not sadly, not mournfully, but in gentle peaceful acceptance.

As I look back now on our two decades of friendship, I feel blessed to share dying as we share our living. I drove back to Sonoma County, not with sadness, or grief. I drove with an uplifting feeling, one might even call it grace. As I drove through that cave of redwoods along the Navarro river, turned on the Mendocino NPR station, – there was Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ. The nobility and holiness of that music, the grace of the redwoods, the shadows on the roadway: these embraced me. In love — and perhaps the grief, like Page’s fear, will sneak in from time to time.

Page-image-fixed

Page Prescott was the midwife for her own dying. She saw what needed to be done and went about doing it. Shortly after the days at the Coast, three days after her 70th birthday, Page chose not to eat and not to drink fluids. She was inviting death to come to her. She selected a cardboard casket and asked friends to decorate it. During the next week and half, she made certain to say all her good-byes. Eleven days later, she slipped quietly away in her sleep with family and friends nearby to ritually cleanse her body, prepare for cremation.

Two weeks later I had a wonderful dream. I am standing in my garden when a bright red World War I monoplane flies over. Page is the plot, wearing an old fashioned pilots cap. She leans out the window, calling, “Tootle oooh! Bye Bye” and sails off.

It’s Not Easy: Giving Up Driving

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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GUEST OPINION: ‘I stopped, but it’s still not easy’
By MARYLOU SHIRA HADDITT
Originally published: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 5:11 p.m. Santa Rosa Press Democrat

I am 84. I quit driving two years ago on Dec. 31, 2010. At first it was very difficult. It’s still not easy.

I spent the first six months having anxiety attacks whenever I had to arrange transportation. Two years later, this still happens when I get last minute invitations.

I spent the next six months depressed and introspective while I learned to accept my new self-imposed lifestyle. Now when I hear a neighbor say, “I was bored so I hopped in the car and went shopping,” I confess the sin of envy.

It’s not easy.

I took the better part of the year to assemble a list of available public and private transportation:

Sebastopol Area Senior Center — no charge — but with five working days notice required.

Jewish Family and Children’s Services — with a fee — 24 hour notice.

Sonoma County Paratransit – fee — 24 hour notice.

Sebastopol shuttle — nominal fee — the last bus leaves downtown Sebastopol at 3:30 p.m.

It takes research and imagination. Other alternatives:

Airport Express, $35, takes me to Oakland Airport where my East Bay family picks me up.

Golden Gate Transit is a dreary 2½-hour drive into downtown San Francisco.

Each of the above public facilities has its individual quirks.

It takes creativity. A friend takes me grocery shopping every Wednesday. Good friends live in the country, far from the bus route. Paratransit delivers and picks me up at a restaurant in the village — my friend ferries me to her house. For after-dark events, I have a list of folks who enjoy similar things so I have both transportation and a date.

There were hints to decreasing driving ability. I list them in ascending order: I found it too stressful to drive freeways to San Francisco or Oakland — thus there were less frequent visits with my family. I took three right turns to avoid a left turn. I stopped parallel parking. I drove no more than 20 miles from home. No more night driving. My knuckles turned white when I grasped the wheel in traffic. At the intersection of Highway 12 and Fulton Road, I looked down and saw my foot on the accelerator instead of the brake. I corrected myself, didn’t bash into anyone. But I immediately remembered the Santa Monica man whose “stuck foot” plowed through a farmer’s market full of people in 2003, leaving 10 dead and 63 injured.

I chose to sell my car and gave up my keys.

My four adult children were glad they didn’t have to take the keys from me. Although in retrospect I wonder if I ignored any hints they may have given me. After the fact, one daughter said, “Mom, I felt like I was driving with Mr. Magoo.”

It’s not easy.

I’ve lost two valuable parts of my life: Freedom to go where I want, when I want to and privacy — delicious aloneness inside my car, encapsulated, a special place with windows on the world. Just me with my radio or CDs, sailing along Sonoma County’s country roads. One winter evening, atop Coleman Valley Road, dreaming down at the sea and the sunset, I pushed KDFC and there, miraculously on the radio was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Delicious memory — my car and me.

I kept my expired driver’s license for more than a year.

Ironically, there is a special ID card for seniors that carries the same ID number and looks exactly like my driver’s license —- except it isn’t. And it’s still not easy.

 

Lesbian Archives of Sonoma County: The Beginning

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Activism, Lesbian, Memoir, Sonoma County

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A Personal Summary of How LASC Came to Be

2013

Summer of 2006, JJ Wilson, feminist. retired Sonoma State University English Professor, told me that someone in the SSU History Department was planning an oral history of the Sonoma County women’s movement. JJ suggested I volunteer to be sure lesbians were included.

Well. They weren’t.

A year later, six or eight of us local lesbians attended a well catered luncheon to celebrate the History students’ research and to examine their time line of women’s activities in Sonoma County. We found, to our disappointment and surprise, that absolutely no lesbian groups were mentioned: No Women’s Voices newspaper, no Lesbian Voters Action Caucus, no Women’s Studies department, no Pride Day parades. Nada.

A student’s justification was that the oral history of Sonoma County women was only a small part of the syllabus – the focus was on a history of feminism beginning with the American Revolution. She also pointed out that only the Press Democrat, a NY Times owned newspaper, was their research source. No one knew the existence of twenty-year old Women’s Voices Newspaper.

While their oversight made us invisible, we set out to make ourselves visible by creating an archive which describes the role that lesbians played in Sonoma County activism – and which made things better for all women.

My friend, Ruth Mahaney, feminist, lesbian and former chair of Sonoma State Women’s Studies, drove me home. We sat in my parking lot a long time, simmering down, seeking ways to change the situation.

“Hey. We can’t let this happen. We have to do something about it.”

“We need to organize the lesbian community”, I responded.

“I know. Let’s give a party. We’ll invite every lesbian we can think of.”

“Let’s make it a re-union.”

“Let’s have it out on my place on the Russian River”, said Ruth.

“And a pot luck, of course,” I replied.

We garnered enough names from our address books so that over thirty long time lesbians arrived, food in hand, for the first party. We recorded both video and audio memories and stories. About twenty people came to the second reunion, fifteen or so to the third, and at the last reunion six showed up: Nancy Moorhead, Mary Kowatch, Tina Dungan, Ann Neel, Ruth and me. We gave ourselves a name and formed the steering committee—Lesbian Archives of Sonoma County—LASC. Our purpose: to archive 30 years of lesbian activity from 1965 to l995 on video tape and with ephemera –to build an archive for future researchers and writers with knowledge about Sonoma County lesbian activists in the latter part of the 20th century.

In the past five years, we researched and listed sixty different local organizations and businesses started by lesbians. We have videotaped five individual community leaders and eighteen community action groups (ranging from Moonrise Café to Women’s Voices; from the Gang Band to Women’s Studies to Lesbian Voters and more.) And have more individual and group interviews scheduled for this year and next year.

We sponsored an historical afternoon with long time lesbian leaders, Sally Gearheart and Phyllis Lyons that attracted an audience from the entire Bay Area. With a grant, we purchased video and editing equipment. Our Steering committee has expanded from six to nine with the addition of Nancy Kelley, Tia Watts and Lynn Adler.

…a pretty good record for a handful of lesbians with a dream.