Hewing Hope in Everyday Ramblings

I know, it is the middle of winter…so why am I posting these starkly beautiful pear blossoms? I walked by this tree a few hours ago. The branches are completely bare, preparing for the new life to come in a few months. I took this picture last April. With the weirdly warm weather and no lack of rain we may see blossoms in March this year.

We have an African American minister even though we are almost exclusively a white congregation. He is a great guy, very well known both here in the states and around the world. He gave a sermon this morning about Selma, voting rights and all the many things that went into what happened there in the sixties. There was actually someone in the church today who was there on Bloody Sunday in Selma.

One of the songs we sang had lines talking about hewing a stone of hope from a mountain of despair.

I am focusing on that with Carlo sleeping in my lap while I wait for my cat sitter.

None of us got much sleep last night. My oldest sister had a crisis late Friday night and was moved to ICU early yesterday morning. She has sepsis and is on a respirator. The prognosis is not good.

Kes started packing late yesterday morning to drive up to Seattle. Saint Joe is in Death Valley this week shooting nature photography with his uncle and I have to do his job while he is out.

By the time Kes hit the road the storm was blowing in full blast with high winds and a whole heck of a lot of rain all at once. She did her best but after a terrifying hour on the freeway with unconcerned arrogant truckers hydroplaning water in high blinding waves she decided to pull off in Portland and called me.

She came over and we spent the evening, talking, eating and mostly paying attention to the cats. They slept with her. She was honored. And we got up early, had breakfast and she drove up under much better conditions.

So she is there with my oldest sister and niece. The antibiotic they are using does not seem to be working but the doctors are hoping against hope to get her stable enough so they can get a CT scan and see if they can locate the source of the infection and make better choices about how to treat it. Getting her blood pressure stable is the best we are hoping for now.

She is heavily sedated and unless there are encouraging signs we are all in agreement to keep her that way. She refused to deal with signing a POLST or a DNR and this possibly puts my niece and nephew (they are not speaking, long mysterious story there) in the horrible situation of having to decide to take her off the ventilator.

So we wait, we hope and in my case, begin the work of accepting the irreversible loss of the person who had had the most influence on the course of my life besides my parents who made me and are long gone.

I am so sad.

Last updated January 18, 2015