The vacation de-brief

I'm going to be busy today, mostly editing (and taking care of household stuff in the breaks), but I wanted to give you a brief recap of our vacation. My humor column is on hiatus while I run for office (Placentia Library District Trustee), so I need an outlet to tell people about my latest adventure.

As I said in an earlier post, we went to the Plumas National Forest, where we stayed at the Gray Eagle Lodge. This is what it looks like:

We've done this for I think about 10-12 years now, with several families. We are all friends, with children of similar ages, and it's been wonderful and frightening and significant to watch these kids grow up together. This is how I'll always remember them, no matter how old they get:

When I think about the trip, there are a lot of, well, unwonderful things. I hesitate to call them negatives or lowlights. Weirdlights. That's what they were.

For one thing, there was the heat. We left the 100-degree heat of southern California, drove 10 hours (in two days) to arrive in the 90-degree heat of northern California. Wasn't much of an improvement, I can tell you. There were some cool-ish days by the lakes, and we were even rained on once, but every morning's walk was done in short sleeves and bug spray, every evening's meal left me feeling sweaty when I got up from the chair, and we slept with all the windows open and the fan on.

This was not our normal trip.

Then there was the changing makeup of the group. I've written about our friend, Jim Barnes, who used to join us but passed away from pancreatic cancer. This was our second year without him, but I felt his absence even more than the first year. Perhaps we were trying to be too brave and upbeat last year. This year felt emptier.

Now, we have a family in the midst of divorce. I'll spare you the details, except to say my darling friend was blindsided by the husband she thought she knew for over 20 years, which has shattered my trust in him as a friend. They split the vacation in half this year. She took the front end and he took the back end. I enjoy her company so much, I hated to see her go and I hated to see him arrive and I just don't know what to even say to him that doesn't involve striking him with a large, heavy object. Yes, people are fallible and I'm not the boss of them and I need to forgive him for something that's none of my business.

I'm a bad witch, okay?

To top everything with an extra helping of WTF?, it turns out our dear little Lady Spazzleton is not quite what the doctor examined. After a thorough round of finding a scar and palpating her insides, he pronounced that she had been spayed, even signing off on the papers for her license.

While we were on vacation, she came into heat. There is no mistaking it. The licking, the tail-lifting, and the advances made by the intact boy dog at the lodge made it absolutely clear. Now we have to wait a few weeks (dogs are in season for at least 21 days) to get her REALLY spayed. You know, with all that money we have lying around the house after our vacation.

Oh, and she ate another leash.

Otherwise, she had fun at the lakes, except she wanted to be in the water All. The. Time. And if there were ducks or squirrels or chipmunks around, she wanted to catch them. She wanted to catch them badly, to the point of making a whiney-gargle sound if she couldn't at least try. It sounded like a soprano Chewbacca.

Duffy pretty much though she was an idiot.

The kids all had fun, too. They went on the kayak and the innertubes and the stand-up paddleboard, and got sunburned and laughed a lot and seemed to be kids again for awhile.

The thing is, despite the icky parts of the trip, I still remember it with a light heart and believe I had a good time. I hung out with my friends, went on some nice hikes, ate great food, and even managed a horse ride.

Am I delusional or just an optimist?

Friendship

Today's post is brought to you by the letter G for Grief, Good-bye, Gah.

Remember my sassy little book trailer for Freezer Burn? There is a picture of the book on a boat:

That's Jim Barnes. My book is wearing his arms, paddling the kayak on Salmon Lake, in northern California. Here's the actual shot:

I met Jim at the Gray Eagle Lodge in the Plumas National Forest in 2002. It was a fairly innocuous meeting; I honestly don't remember much about him except he was very quiet and went along with whatever anyone else wanted to do.

We kept going up to Gray Eagle every year, and kept meeting Jim and his family and kept forging our friendship. In addition to being quiet and agreeable, I also found out, over time, that he was funny, he played the guitar, and he was nice to hang around with. (This is a pic of our usual campsite. Jim's in the middle, standing.)

Eight years later, we're good friends, even though he's in Sacramento and we're in Placentia, which is about seven hours apart. We don't know the details of each other's lives, we don't speak daily, or even weekly, unless you count our Facebook shenanigans. But we see each other when we can, and if he needed us, we'd be northbound to Sacramento ASAP.

Which made it difficult when we found out he had cancer. Neither Dale nor I are doctors, caregivers, or have any clue about how to help our friends and loved ones go through this awful disease. We can be cheerleaders. We can offer our shoulders to absorb tears, or the weight of the world. We can even stand in the middle of a hospital and yell, "Who do I have to sleep with to get some attention around here?"

Okay, I can probably yell that better than Dale.

So we hovered, as best we could, 400 miles away, texting, calling, and doing the Facebook thing. We saw Jim in August at Gray Eagle. He was taking a lot of extreme medication to control the pain, and had just had the first biopsy. It was either lymphoma or pancreatic cancer, and he'd find out when he got back from vacation.

It's weird, but we were praying for lymphoma. It is, at least, the most treatable and most recoverable.

Several weeks pass, mostly because it seems that his doctors and nurses each want to piss one more day away and schedule things daaaaaayyyyyyssss apart. Not that I'm bitter about the medical establishment and insurance companies… We finally find out it's lymphoma and he's starting chemo.

Yay, lymphoma! (Weird, right?)

His first treatment doesn't go well. He's in pain, he's scared, and all we can do down here is tell him he's in our thoughts and prayers and we love him and if the kids need anything, we're here to help. I see on Facebook that some of his friends are familiar with the effects of chemo and are offering suggestions, and I feel better, knowing he's got such a big support group.

Another few weeks go by and I don't hear anything from him. I send a message to his daughter, Alyssa. "How's your dad?"

"Not good." Her reply is devastating. He is in constant pain. The chemo isn't working. Nothing is working. He asked his daughters for permission to go into compassionate care and slip away. There is nothing else to be done, except to be medicated beyond consciousness and wait.

Turns out it was pancreatic cancer all along.

At 11:25 p.m., the same day I receive this message and alert the rest of his friends in southern California and send a message to Lyssie of love and support, I get a text from a friend of his oldest, non-bio-daughter (not that it matters). Jim has just passed.

There are a frantic few days, trying to figure out whether to run to Sacramento just to hug three girls, or whether to wait until we can be of help, or attend a service, or… or what? What do you do for a friend? When my dad died, we flew back to Illinois to attend the funeral and help my brother clean out his apartment. Services for Jim are still a few weeks away. He has family who are helping the girls.

All I feel I can do right now is get out the tissues and the pom-poms. Cry on my shoulder, Sweeties, and know I'm rooting for you.

And Jim – I'd tell you to rest in peace, but I'd rather you rest on your own terms. Let it be peaceful if that's your desire. Or come back and haunt us if it gives you a giggle. Love you always.

One of our outings was when Jim, along with "Sarica" (Sara, the oldest and her BFF, Erica) came to the Sacramento Convention Center to see Marcus sing with the All State Jazz Choir. He was here, in the audience: