Don’t Worry, There’s Always The Sock!

We live in a place where wildfires happen. Earthquakes also happen sometimes. And mudslides. Floods. You might wonder why we would live in such a dangerous place. The answer is that it is Marin County and it is paradise. Plus those things probably won’t happen to us as they only happen to other people. But if they did happen to us it’s ok, because we have The Sock.

A while ago, I finally caved to all the pressure and got an earthquake kit together. This is a really tedious thing you have to do when you live in earthquake country. Ideally, it involves filling several large plastic garbage cans with enough food, fresh water, and provisions for your family to survive out in the open for something like six weeks. When the Big One comes and your house falls down, you live out of your plastic garbage cans. You know, in a tent with foil blankets and canned beans and valium. 

In my old house, I had an earthquake kit that took many months to put together. I was very proud of it because it even had food for the cats and dog and a bottle of wine to ease the pain when the house fell down. Periodically when I ran out of wine I would raid the earthquake kit and drink the really bad bottle I had stashed in it. But I always replaced it. I am really glad there was no catastrophic earthquake while I lived in that house because it was a very damp property and eventually the earthquake kit became really moldy. If the Big One had come and the house had fallen down, we would have been forced to live in a moldy tent with moldy blankets drinking very bad wine. 

When I left that house, I had no earthquake kit for a while, because in my new place I barely had furniture so a kit full of emergency supplies was pretty low on the To Do list. But eventually I got furniture and I made it far enough down the To Do list to purchase one of those ready-made online Earthquake Kits that come in fancy backpacks you are supposed to keep in the trunk of your car. I keep mine in the basement because the trunk of my car is full of adult diapers and wound care supplies. When my house falls down in the Big One, I am hoping the basement will still somehow be accessible. Otherwise we are screwed.

With the fancy online earthquake kit backpack came an extensive guide on things you should do to prepare for an earthquake/wildfire/mudslide/flood. It gave me a headache just reading the first page, but one thing that caught my eye was that in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, the grid could go down and you won’t be able to get cash from the ATM. So you should keep some cash with your kit. 

I have always secretly liked the idea of keeping all my money in a sock. It’s not that I don’t trust my bank. They are a credit union and they treat their customers really nicely. But I know that when my back is turned, they use my money for other things without telling me. So it has always appealed to me to buck the system and keep all my wealth under the proverbial mattress. Since my wealth would not be very voluminous even if it were dispensed to me in quarters, I figured I could hide it pretty easily somewhere around my house.

One day I withdrew two thousand dollars from my bank account in hundred dollar bills. I brought it home and I rolled it up and put a rubber band around it. It made a pleasingly fat roll of cash. I felt a little like a drug dealer. Then I looked in my sock drawer for a suitable sock. Most of my socks are black. But I had this pair in the back of the drawer that I never wear, principally because they have a frill of lace around the top of them and even though they looked really cool in the store, when I got them home and put them on they looked really stupid. This happens to me more than you might think, and not just with socks.

So I put the wad of cash in one of the socks and then, so it wouldn’t look too suspicious, I folded the companion sock’s top over the wad of cash sock. I put them in the backpack where I keep our passports and other important papers, and I slung it on the top of my wardrobe. That night, I mentioned to my daughter that there was two thousand dollars in a sock in the black backpack on the top of my wardrobe. She was suitably impressed. So were all her teen friends who happened to be over at our house that night. So, I instructed the teens, if there’s ever a wildfire and I’m not home, drive far away immediately without observing speed limits, but bring the black backpack from the top of my wardrobe.

You might think I was a bit stupid to be telling a bunch of teens where all my cash was. But you would be wrong. I totally trust my daughter and all of her standup friends. Besides, it was not them I needed to worry about. Over the course of the next few weeks, I kept running out of cash at inopportune times. This was not a new phenomenon. Mostly when I look in my wallet there is a single dollar bill in there. Sometimes there’s, like, six or eight dollars and I feel really good. But now, I had The Sock.

So you can imagine. The two thousand got a bit whittled down. Sometimes Jessie would text me she needed cash for something and I wasn’t home. Take it from the sock became a bit of a habit. Soon there was much less than two thousand dollars in the sock.

Eventually, it felt like there was no real point having such a tiny sum of cash stashed in a sock on top of my wardrobe because if the Big One happened it would scarcely buy us dinner. So I replenished it. This time, I added a sticky note with $2000 and the date written on it. I reckoned it would be psychologically harder for me to keep taking hundred dollar bills from the sock if I had to write down on a blue sticky that I was doing so. Accountability, you know? It was not that much harder.

Plus I had told all those teens about The Sock, and every teen knows about ten thousand other teens on Instagram. So you really couldn’t call it a secret stash any longer. I may as well have put a message up on Facebook. Wildfire? Earthquake? Cash is in the frilly sock on top of my wardrobe.

My life is sort of a financial feast or famine. Sometime there is enough money in the checking account to cover all the bills and even to do something extravagant like buy airline tickets to somewhere very far away. Other times, I look at my balance and I go that can’t be right! Did my employer forget to deposit my wages? And I get confused about how the hell I could be a relatively well-paid professional and yet the sum total of money in all of my bank accounts has fewer digits to the left of the decimal point than I believe it should have. As you may have gathered, I do not spend a lot of time staying on top of my financial affairs. 

But the advantage of that relative looseness is that sometimes I have more money than I thought I had. So one day, I had a weirdly large sum of money in my checking account and I took some of it out and fully replenished The Sock. Now it contains the same sum as the one I mentioned at the start of this blog post. Nearly. Except for that time last week when I needed groceries. 

Plus I have moved the sock. It was just too obvious, the whole top-of-the-wardrobe thing. And it was hurting my arm every time I had to drag the backpack down from there and sling it back up. That thing is full of important papers and things I think I will need in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, so it is heavy. Now it is in a top secret location under my desk and only Jessie and I and a few select teens know about it. So you know what? Get your own sock!

Shock Waves and Revolutions

I wrote this post a year ago but it was too raw for me to publish at the time.

I want to write about shock, because one day last Summer I sustained two shocks in quick succession and it was interesting afterwards to watch how I reacted, how the body reacts, how the mind responds to assaults that come out of the clear blue on an ordinary day.

As a hospice nurse I am no stranger to death, but all deaths are not equal. The slipping away of a 94-year-old who has been bedbound for months with Alzheimer’s disease is not trivial, but it doesn’t shock me. Sometimes, however, I get a patient I immediately love and become very connected with, someone I am thrilled to get to know, and whom I know from the start it will hurt to lose.

One summer I had two such patients: both with cancer, both wonderful women in very different ways. They came on service within days of each other, even lived near each other, and I had an uncanny feeling their deaths would be near to each other too. 

One Thursday I started my work day as usual, by checking the after hours reports to see if any of my patients had issues overnight. Sure enough, the family member of one of these women had called in. I called her, asked how their night had been. It was terrible, she said. Now if this woman said things were terrible, I knew they must incredibly bad. These were not people to complain. I told her I’d be there after my first visit, which was to the other patient, who was at this point actively dying. As soon as I put the phone down, the word terrible echoed in my head. I called her right back and told her I’d be there immediately. I could hear the relief in her voice. 

On my way there, I had a sense of dread. I was going to have to recommend more care to them. My patient would hate it: strangers in their home, a hospital bed. Just the day before when I visited her, she had declined the bed, shaking her head and smiling. I’m not there yet.

I walked into their home. My patient was lying on the couch and I saw immediately that she was dead. A wave of shock hit me. It was so sudden, I had not seen any signs the day before that she was this close. My own grief washed over me at the loss of this extraordinary woman, and then I realized that her family member was in and out of the room, that she didn’t know, and I was going to have to tell her.

She came back into the room. I summoned all my strength, took a breath, and told her. I remember that my exact words were “I’m so sorry, L, she’s gone.” It seemed like such a small, naked word for what had just occurred: gone. We stood there in the living room and the tsunami of her shock and grief swirled around us. I watched myself go in and out of disbelief, just as she did, but I also felt her emotions jog me back into my professional role. I watched myself put my feelings over to one side, something that I have been adept at doing my whole life, for better or worse. Shock! I’ll deal with this later. For now, what do I need to do?

I stayed there an hour, until more family members arrived and I felt it was okay to leave, promising in response to their request that I would return later in the day to sit with them and the body. 

My team leader had texted me, asking me to call her when I could. I called her from my car, and quickly told her the story of the death and how shocking it had been, how sudden, the anguish I felt that I hadn’t had time to prepare them in the way I like to. She listened compassionately, as she always does, and then she said I’m really sorry to have to do this Sara, but I have some bad news to tell you. A coworker nurse of ours, they had just found out at the office, had taken his life the day before.

A second shock wave hit. Wait! He’s dead too? This was a young man, very beloved at hospice, an excellent, meticulous and very kind nurse. He had a partner and many friends. She told me the manner of his death and I cried for a minute in desperation, thinking about how he must have felt in his last moments. I felt myself casting about for a way to incorporate this information into the day I had already had. It was too much, and at the same time, I knew I could handle it. Again, I remember consciously putting my feelings over there, to the side, where I would deal with them later. I had three more patients to see, including my other lady who was actively dying, and honestly I did not know what else to do at that moment besides to go on with my work. It’s what I know how to do, it’s what I need to do right now. I knew that in my own shock, it would ground me to have to enter the homes of people in great stress and help them to deal with their trouble. This was not altruism, but the knowledge that dealing with someone else’s suffering was preferable at that moment to dealing with my own.

One of the great benefits of working for hospice is that they really know how to respond to death. A gathering was organized for 3pm that afternoon. About a hundred of us sat in a circle around a photo of our coworker and some flowers. Led by our chief spiritual counsellor and another grief counsellor, we were encouraged to share not only stories of him and how we knew him, but specifically what we were doing when we heard the news, how we heard it, and how we felt in our bodies and hearts when we heard. 

What was I doing when I heard the news. The phenomenon is familiar to anyone who lived through the assassination of JFK, the day John Lennon was shot, or 9/11. But it is also familiar to many people who have had someone close to them die. The moment they heard the news is imprinted vividly on their brain: what they were doing, where they were, how they felt. It’s an important part of grief work to be able to tell that story. All of us in hospice have listened to those narratives a thousand times.

As the stories poured out, some themes emerged. Why didn’t he reach out to us? Did we miss the signs? Were there red flags and we didn’t see them? It struck me how often the nurses in the room used the word isolation. Hospice nursing in the field can be a very isolating job, particularly for intake and night and weekend nurses. We talked a lot about the need to take care of ourselves, to detach from the job, do things we love, and be with the people we love. That bears repeating: be with the people we love.

I finally worked up the courage to talk, which I sometimes find hard in gatherings like that. I told how I had received the news immediately following a shocking patient death and watched myself put my feelings to one side to deal with later. I told how a patient later in the day had asked me how I was and I heard myself say I’m great! I wondered aloud when I would be allowing myself not to be so great. I know I was far from alone in the room in my way of coping. 

That Friday night and Saturday, I went out with friends, listened to music, and cried a lot. I also went on a long bike ride. Just the act of clipping in and rolling out made me feel deeply calm and reminded me of the pure joy in my life, the simplicity of watching my wheels go round and round. Riding distills life down. All I have to do is focus on the road, staying safe, getting up this next bit of hill to the corner. I rode to a place where I knew my patient had gone on her last outing, and it healed some of my sadness to think about her there.

Sunday morning I checked my work phone, because self care only goes so far and I have poor boundaries. My other patient had passed very peacefully early on Saturday, just 44 hours after the first.