Birthdays

My mom posted this photo today, with the caption "He is still making me smile." Yep, even though he took the leap across the Great Divide on Leap Day, we still feel his presence. I was grocery shopping last night, and saw a jar of Taco Bell salsa on the shelf, and I imagined I heard him laugh right next to me.

I loved hearing all the stories about Dad as the family gathered in Kentucky. One of my favorites was in a display at the funeral, a framed printout of a 2007 blog entry by my sister Monica. It was one of which I had only a glimmer of a memory, since I only lived with him for two of his birthdays. (Although I think I might have lived there for the sewing machine birthday.) Just to continue the tribute to this great man, here's the story of the unusual way in which he liked to celebrate his birthday:

"Most children get excited for their own birthday; it's your turn to be lavished with attention and gifts. However, my father's birthdays were more thrilling to me than my own, because he always got exactly what he asked for. SERIOUSLY.

Let me explain. One year it was a new sewing machine for my talented mother. Another year, it was an ice cream maker for the whole family. The best was the year that it was seven blue pairs of roller skates in each size of the children old enough to skate. My parents rolled up the woven rugs, and the entire downstairs of our home became our roller rink for the night! These gifts make perfect sense, because that is my dad--always putting the needs and happiness of others first."

I also was reminded that his favorite flavor ice cream was neapolitan, as there were enough flavors to please (almost) everyone. (One granddaughter admitted she didn't like neapolitan, because the strawberry tainted the chocolate. You can't please everyone!)

There were many stories told of my Dad's selflessness, but this was one of my favorites.

Proud to be the 11th of 10 Children

Today's service was a great tribute for the man at the epicenter of this blue-and-white clad swirl of humanity. The entire center rows of pews were filled by 80 family members, a visual representation of a life spent devoted to family. He would have been uncomfortable to receive such attention when he was alive...he probably would have snuck out for a Taco Bell run...but we wrapped him in layers of love and memories before we laid him to rest.

Hug the next loved one you see, smile at the next stranger you meet, and help the next person you know who needs help. Rinse and repeat ten thousand times or more, and you will have lived a rich and beautiful life like my Dad's.

RIP, Gene Wach. I hope they have hot sauce in heaven. : )

Surreptitious Gifts

Funerals are sad family reunions with splashes of happy, bittersweet, grateful, etc. thrown in as stories are shared. This one has been exceptional in that regard.

After the viewing today as we gathered at the house, my foster sisters told the story of how my foster brother, who was married with young children while attending dental school, told my foster dad that something was wrong with the gas gauge in his car and he needed him to look at it, as it always read full and he was afraid of being stranded somewhere when the car ran out of gas because of a faulty gauge.

Turns out his dad was going over to his place at 3AM on his way in to work at the airport and taking the car and filling it up. That was quintessential Gene...charity performed circumspectly (with a dash of humor thrown in.)

On the way to the viewing, my foster mom unveiled a similarly surreptitious act that benefitted me, one that went way beyond free gas.

"You were never our foster child," she told me.

I figured she was speaking metaphorically. She wasn't.

Turns out when the social worker visited for the home inspection as part of the foster home licensing process, they were informed they couldn't be licensed because they had too many children in the home for the number of bedrooms. So they had a judge sign guardianship papers instead.

I continued to live with them, thinking they were pretty special because they'd become foster parents just for me. I had no idea how special.

I knew they were experiencing financial hardship at the time because Flying Tigers, the freight airline he worked for, had recently cut all wages to the 10 years previous pay level as part of a desperate bid to avoid bankruptcy. (It didn't work.) He was supporting a wife and 10 children on $26K/year. But I felt good that they were at least receiving ~$236/month for me from the county.

Well, no they weren't.

Guardianship didn't come with compensation from the county.

"I keep telling you that we considered you one of ours," my foster mom said.

Make that "my mom said."

Feeling awed, and speechless. These two truly are Latter-Day Saints!

A Sky Full of Stars

Listening to Coldplay's "A Sky Full of Stars" as I gazed out the airplane window at Cassiopeia and the North Star above the cloud layer covering the Carolinas as I approached Charlotte in the pre-dawn hours, with many more brilliant accompanying stars than I normally can view even from northern Idaho, it struck me that this was yet one more unexpected gift from my foster dad...I never would have been seeing this incredible celestial view if I weren't on this journey prompted by his loving presence in my life. 

Thanks, Dad, for the stars, and for keeping me calm during the turbulence by imagining you had signed off on the maintenance log yourself. : )

A Servant's Heart

My foster dad passed away in his sleep on Monday at age 75. I'm catching the red-eye out of Lewiston to Louisville, KY tonight to pay my respects to someone I only lived with for 18 months, but who helped fill a very empty hole in my heart when I came to his family at age 16 with nowhere left to go. He and his wife became foster parents just for me. If that doesn't make you feel special when you're a foster kid who's been told by her social worker that there are no families who want to take you in, I don't know what else would.

He was an amazingly gifted mechanic who fixed airplanes and taught others to do the same. He worked for Flying Tigers and UPS, and they would sometimes fly him half-way around the world to fix an airplane that nobody else could. He had the heart of a servant; he commuted several hours a day in awful traffic to LAX and back, and still managed to fix my car or someone else's, not to mention leaky faucets and bikes and toys and anything else that needed fixing, before he'd get 5-6 hours of sleep and be ready to do it all over again.

He spent 60 years with his sweetheart, DeAnn, who mirrored his servant's heart perfectly. He was mischievous and a great tease; he had 50+ grandkids, and called them all "George." He taught me how to fix a flat and use a tire gauge and change the oil and check the fluid levels and clean the battery terminals in my car so I wouldn't be a helpless female. He was as honest and dependable as the day is long, and the world needs more like him.

I can't say as I'll ever be as patient or kind or giving, but I'm grateful to have had his influence in my life. Here he is at my wedding with his wife DeAnn (who looks as young as I did at age 22, even after having 10 kids!) and the youngest 8 of his 10 kids.

Tomorrow at this time I'll be en route from Seattle to Charlotte, NC, where I connect with my flight to Louisville. I'd like to think he trained at least one of the mechanics who worked on the planes I'll be aboard. I'm looking forward to seeing the dozens of family members who will be there, even though I wish I was seeing him at the end of the month for a family wedding in Seattle as planned instead of saying farewell to him...our father, who art in heaven... in Louisville.

The Impossible Girl

For fans of Dr. Who, you will know that "The Impossible Girl" refers to one of his companions, Clara Oswald, who seems to be rather typical but turns out to have quite a surprising life story. That, in a nutshell, describes Anandi. 

Last week, we took Anandi to Spokane for a sedated ABR, which tests the function of the auditory nerve. She'd recentlly failed an electronic test of her cochlea in both ears in the frequency range that would correspond with a quieter speaking voice and below, which explained why she had started saying, "What you say?" and "I can't hear you!" at times. She had never been able to reliably complete a standard hearing screening that involved raising a hand in response to a tone administered through headphones, as her responses were too random. But over the years, speech therapists and others had reassured us that she seemed to have normal hearing, as she was able to imitate all the phonemes correctly, even though she needed a lot of coaching to pronounce things correctly on a consistent basis. She also had had a normal tympanogram (functional test of the middle ear/eardrum.)

Nevertheless, David and I too often experienced her as functionally deaf, and our gut instincts said we needed to follow up with further testing. We were also growing increasingly concerned by her expressive language delay, as her speech gains were no longer tracking her chronological gains.

The results of the ABR were unequivocal, and the doctor gave us a diagnosis of Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD), formerly known as Auditory Neuropathy/Auditory Dyssynchrony (AN/AD). Functionally, this means that while Anandi can hear (although even that is impaired in the lower frequency ranges), her auditory nerve doesn't properly synchronize the incoming sounds so that they're intelligible to her. The analogy we were given is listening to static between two radio stations. You can hear words being spoken, but you have to struggle extremely hard to decode the words being transmitted. It tends to worsen throughout the day as the auditory nerve becomes fatigued, which correlates with our observation that after school and in the evenings she would become increasingly withdrawn, irritable, irrational, etc. It also makes it extremely difficult to impossible to distinguish speech when background noise is present. Hence, she has used her cleverness to follow cues and imitate what others are doing when she hasn't been able to understand in classroom settings, etc., and thus has managed to fly under the radar for having a severe hearing disorder diagnosis.

The amazing thing about this diagnosis is that it's normally given to much younger children, as their lack of language development would lead to this testing much earlier on. Only recently has she begun to verbalize not being able to hear/understand at times, but this isn't a progressive condition; she's most likely had it since birth. It's a very rare condition to begin with, but fewer than 1 in 14 diagnosed with it will ever develop normal speech and language. The fact that Anandi has coped and adapted to the distorted sounds she has been hearing and managed to develop the level of understandable expressive language she has (currently about a 4-year old level at age 7-1/2) without any interventions whatsoever is bordering on the...well, impossible. She has had to struggle with a very uncomfortable sensation for years without her parents and teachers being aware so that accommodations and interventions could be made. She has, in fact, been quite a trooper! I feel both humbled by her miraculous accomplishments despite our missing this staggering piece of information, and ashamed in retrospect for how impatient I've been with her at times for her "not listening" to me.

We will be following up with an audiologist to try both FM transmitters and hearing aids; the former is useful in classroom situations to boost the signal when there is background noise, and hearing aids to boost it in general. But sometimes the hearing aids merely amplify the static. Cochlear implants have sometimes had dramatic effects, seeming to synchronize the auditory nerve transmissions and clear up the static, but other times they have had no discernible effect, and we are by no means ready to consider such a drastic intervention. So we will be moving forward with prayer and hope that we will be able to find a way to improve her hearing, and that our "impossible girl" will have an easier time of things moving forward.

2400

My 11-year old and I figured out a short time ago that there are approximately 2400 days left until June of her senior year. It might not be the day she graduates or moves out, but it was a good marker of how many days of her childhood we have left to spend together. And her "childhood" is certainly going to pass by long before then. It gave me pause to put a hard number to those days.

"2400" is now a mantra for my daily interactions with her, as I know it's so easy for me to focus on her exasperating habits or annoying shortcomings, especially since she has entered puberty and is approaching teen-dom. This numeric reminder now serves to help me put those annoyances into perspective. "2400" I think as she rolls her eyes at me when I ask her to pick her clothes up off the bathroom floor or unearth her desk and bed from the mound of random belongings piled on top of them. "2400" I think as she grumbles about bedtime or TV limits.

"2400" also serves as a gratitude counter, filling me with joy that I have that many more days still to enjoy her unique and funny and unpredictable presence. "2400" I think as she rushes blurting mid-sentence into the kitchen, her cockatiel perched on her shoulder, pointe shoes on her feet, as she answers my beckon to unload the dishwasher. "2400" I think as I watch her perform ballet and Celtic dance on stage, draw in her sketchbook, or ride her horse into a herd of cattle to separate out a steer with a blue ear tag. "2400" I think as we snuggle together and watch a gripping episode of "Agents of SHIELD" or "Dr. Who." "2400" I think as I tuck her in and read a chapter of Redwall aloud to her, grateful that she still appreciates and cherishes our bedtime routine.

Of course, 2400 is no guarantee, either. It could be 1400, or 400, or one. Tragedies befall even those who are cognizant of the clock ticking.

I remember snippets of song lyrics: "Life is just another terminal disease"..."Live just like you're dying"..."I want to live like there's no tomorrow." There is wisdom in those words, to be sure. But for me, "2400" has proven to be the most potent reenforcement of the idea they contain. And the sad thing is, I know that number is now in the 2300's, as we calculated this a few weeks back. My hope is that our good days will outweigh our bad, and that the days we spend enjoying each other's company will have the effect of multiplying those days. Sometimes I think the feeling we get of time passing too quickly is a result of time spent unsatisfactorily, that unhappy days seem to subtract more than their actual total from our allotment of time with our loved ones.

So here's to multiplying today by two...or three, or more!