Gratitude at Christmas

It is Christmas Day. My son is in California and my daughter and her boyfriend are en route to Illinois to celebrate Christmas with his family.

Do you have a lot of Christmas traditions? Do you open gifts Christmas morning? Do you have the entire family (even the ones you don’t speak to any other time of year) over for Christmas dinner?

When I was young, we had traditions in our house. Christmas eve we opened one gift. Christmas morning I remember having to wait to open gifts until we had breakfast. Used to kill me. We would open our stockings at the breakfast table though.

When I became a parent, I tried to have traditions too. Many were the same ones from when I was a child.

Now I am single and my family is spread across the country. Add to that the economy and it is a lean year anyway. I woke up this morning a little down, envious of all those people waking up with a house full of family and friends and traditions to celebrate.

I think though that maybe this is just how it is supposed to be, an opportunity for me to learn more about being okay being alone. I don’t always like it but I have to believe it will get better.

I was reading a blog of a woman I admire. Her name is Lisa Romeo; she has a blog called Lisa Romeo Writes. It has a lot of tips and information but she is also interesting and amusing. She wrote a blog thanking people who have helped her in her writer’s life. It seemed like a good idea.

So with it being Christmas and near the end of the year, and a chance to reflect on things for which I am grateful I also would like to offer some thanks.

Thank you to Sally Schloss (www.thewritingpoint.com) my mentor and the leader of the writer’s workshops I attend. Thank you also to the other members of the writing group, Paula, Loree, Annie, Kara, Kathi, and particularly Cyndi who has listened more times than anyone should be subjected to and offered support, encouragement, and some great suggestions and advice.

Thank you to Mendi, my friend who has listened to me whine, read my worst writing and still supported me, and mainly just been an awesome friend. I hope to be as good a friend to her as she works on her own book(s)!

Thank you to Fred. He was the blogger who I hoped to emulate, a wonderful writer, a great cop, leader, husband and father. As a fellow writer and a fellow cop he read my work, gave me invaluable suggestions, help, and support as well.

Thank you to Jim, as much as he drives me crazy, he was one of the first who made me believe that I might have a book in me and I wrote well enough that people might want to read it.

Thank you to my children, they have supported me even when I haven’t done such an awesome job and now are not only my kids but also my friends.

I’m sure there are lots others I should thank, so I do, thank you.

I am leaving in a couple days for a vacation to Belize. I might be able to get a post in while I’m there but probably not. With any luck, I will be too busy soaking up sun and scuba diving. So, there may not be another post until I return, the first week in January.

It is Christmas morning. Whether you celebrate, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or any other holiday, I hope all of you are with those you love, and are having and will continue to have wonderful and safe holidays. May the coming year bring us all peace, prosperity, joy and good health.

See you all in 2010!

Tragic Weekend

The last couple of days have been a little rough. As you already know, I used to be a cop, I worked for a Sheriff’s Department in California. Sunday morning I learned that a deputy I worked with for many years had committed suicide on Saturday.


Suicide is not uncommon in the law enforcement profession but I don’t think the department I worked for had experienced a currently employed officer committing suicide. The job is stressful, depression is common, as is alcoholism.

He left behind a wife and two children. I kept thinking how awful, that the holidays would forever be ruined for his family, a terrible reminder every year of what he had done.

The news got decidedly worse. It turns out his reasons for killing himself were not because of stress, depression or alcoholism although I am certain he suffered from all three. He killed himself because he had been found out. He had committed a crime, a terrible crime. He hurt a child.

It leaves his co-workers confused. Sad? Angry? Betrayed? All of those. I can’t even imagine the emotions that his wife is dealing with.

So it was a bad weekend. I care very much about many of the people I used to work with, I care about their emotional health as well as their physical health and this kind of thing wears on their emotional health.

I find myself angry as well. I’m angry at him. Yes he had problems. He obviously had much deeper emotional problems than anyone imagined that he could commit the crimes he did. I worked in the Crimes Against Persons unit in detectives at my agency. I know about people who commit those kinds of crimes.

What makes this deputy different than those other criminals that I dealt with? He was intelligent enough and had the training to know what he was doing was wrong on every level. He had the ability and the resources to ask for and to get help. He had the audacity to wear the same uniform I did and pretend that he was one of the good guys. He brought shame to everyone in law enforcement and in our department. And he may have ruined the lives of two children.

Then to add insult to injury he committed the most cowardly of all acts. He committed suicide. When I learned of his crimes I initially thought, maybe he did the best thing by killing himself, sparing a child any more hurt to have to go through any kind of court process. He may have deserved to die.

But he didn’t spare anyone anything. Now the child will have no one to ask why. His suicide let him avoid taking responsibility, openly and honestly for the sake of the children, for his cruelty. And his suicide may have left a wife and children with no life insurance money. There are supposed to be consequences for bad behavior and the only one facing consequences for his are the people he left behind.

My heart goes out to the deputy’s wife and children, may they begin to heal, and to find peace. I ache for my friends and former co-workers. I hope their healing can also begin soon.

Unfortunately this tragedy is one of several incidents of bad behavior, criminal acts, bad choices in a relatively short period of time by some employees of my former department. And it begins to beg the question, is there a point where a number of events in a short time span show a failure of ethical leadership? There are mostly good, intelligent, hard-working, honest, ethical people working at the Sheriff’s Department. The others give the entire agency a bad name.

I believe the moral compass of some of the leadership at the department is askew. And I believe that contributes to the indiscretions of some staff. But, that’s another blog post and a memoir for another day.

For now, it is about the good people left behind to continue to do the important work of ethical law enforcement. You are truly heroes. Please take care of the wife and children of the deputy, they remain part of the family and need you now more than ever.

Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

~ Alexander the Great

Table for One

So last night I did something I had never done before. I went to the movies alone.

You would think that being over 50 years old, I would have gone to the movies alone long before now, but no, I hadn’t. I always had this feeling that going alone said something about me, maybe that I was not good enough to have a date, undatable, unlovable?

Okay, so maybe that’s a little dramatic.

I only recently started to feel comfortable going to a restaurant alone for dinner. When I do, I find myself looking around at everyone else, especially others there alone. I usually sit at the bar, seems appropriate for someone alone, hate to take up an entire table just for me, it just makes it that much more obvious that I’m alone.

Actually, the likelihood is that no one else there even notices me, alone or otherwise.

I check out the people also sitting at the bar, some alone, some with others. Some are there with co-workers, some there on business, some celebrating with a friend. I can sit and try to make up entire stories about the people sitting there, why they are alone, what they are doing there, what is the relationship between them and those they are with. Must be the writer in me.

Sitting alone in the theater, I was a little self-conscious when I would laugh aloud, of course only at the funny parts.

Oh, what did I see? “The Blind Side” with Sandra Bullock about football player Michael Oher. It was good. I liked it. Not necessarily life-altering good, but it was good. I liked it more because it is based on a true story, and an interesting one.

I guess I can cross another thing off my list of things that I will do as I have begun my new life at 50. I have gone from being a girlfriend to a wife then a girlfriend and now I am learning to be just a single woman.

A single woman who enjoys dinner and a movie, sometimes alone.

Life Lessons

I’m feeling restless. I keep thinking to myself, “Self, you know what I want?” … and then there seems to be this long list of what I want. Yeah, unfortunately, some of it is stuff but mostly I want some kind of peace in my life. Then I berate myself for feeling greedy and wanting.

I started reading Eat, Pray, love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I bought it I think when it first came out in paperback, was hearing wonderful things about it. I never opened it. Don’t know why. Sometimes when there is a book that everyone loves, I somehow rail against it.

Maybe it is fear, that I won’t get it like everyone else does. Or, that what everyone else considers a masterpiece I will think is okay but nothing more. Not that my opinion matters more than anyone else’s.

Any maybe it was a little bit of anxiety about the subject, about spirituality, and religion and God. None of which I’m that comfortable with.

A friend of mine asked me the other night if I had read the book. I told her that I hadn’t. She said I had to; she thought I would love it and she was dying to have someone to talk to about it.

The copy I bought? I think it is in storage somewhere. So I went to the bookstore and I bought it again. Yes, there is some message here about how I obviously have to pay for something twice in order to be willing to learn the lesson.

Within the first four or five pages, it is clear, I love this book. This woman is me, well except for the fact that she is about fifteen years my junior, is already a hugely successful published author and had the ability, both literally and figuratively to travel around the world for a year. Nevertheless, still she and I have shared a life at times.

She makes me laugh, out loud, sitting in my house with only the dogs there to hear it, I laughed out loud several times. I shake my head in complete understanding at her fear, her understanding her anger, her love.

I don’t think I’m ready to go find God, or to go live in an Ashram for several months.

I do hope to someday have the same kind of clarity, about what I want to do with my life, what it is I need most to be healthy and happy, because I know I haven’t done it so far.

I went to therapy for a while. It never felt like I got very far in therapy. I’m finally starting to understand something I have heard for years, that in order to love someone else and to be loved, you have to first love yourself. Something I really haven’t done.

I can feel it though, starting, slowly. This feeling that I am a worthwhile person all on my own, that I can and will take care of myself, that is the best way I can be good for myself or for anyone else.

So I will try and calm myself now. I think I know the answer to the question, “Self, you know what I want? I want to know me, to like me, to be okay with just being with me.”

Before I can go find whatever and whoever else I need in my life I first have to find me. I’m working on that.

Eat, Pray, Love will be one of those books that will stay with me forever, I copied quotes from it, reminders of who I was, who I still am at times.

What books have you read that stay with you forever, for what they show you, remind you of, teach you?

Tears for Robin

I have been wondering what I would write about next on this blog. A couple of things have been running through my head but for some reason I just couldn’t get a full post to come out of it all.


Maybe it was that idea that some things just happen for a reason I needed to wait for something to come to me.

And it did.

Quite some time ago, when I first started writing this blog I wrote about my friend Robin who was diagnosed with cancer on her 50th birthday this year. I wrote that post from my heart. I wanted my friend Robin to fight, and I wanted to do something for her but didn’t know what to do. Before I wrote that post, I didn’t ask Robin for permission to write about her. After I wrote it, I told her I had, but assured her I would remove the post if she asked me to.

Robin wrote me a note saying she had started to read it and loved it but couldn’t finish it, afraid if she did she would start crying and not be able to stop, something she was trying her best to avoid.

Robin in high school.

Tonight my friend Sherri shared with me a message she got from Robin. I knew that Robin had not been feeling well lately, that her latest round of Chemo was kind of kicking her ass and she felt shitty. I wanted to do something for her but Robin seemed to be trying to do this on her own, with her partner Bill. She had not been posting much on Facebook, mostly because she felt so bad all the time.

I haven’t talked to Robin and once again have not asked her permission to share anything about her or her condition, but I will trust that she will allow me this, and if she wants me to remove my post I will.

Robin before the Chemo

She told Sherri that she feels the Chemo is not working. She is finding new lumps every week and they hurt terribly. Her words were “dying of cancer sucks ass”. She said she “had no idea how much it hurts”.

She would like to see Sherri but isn’t seeing anyone. I’m not sure if that is because she doesn’t want to see anyone or if she is continuing to be the one to take care of everyone else, doesn’t want others to have to feel bad and make conversation. But, as Robin does she doesn’t mince words, she said she knows she is going to die, she just doesn’t know the date.

I think she is giving up. I don’t think I necessarily blame her, I don’t want her to feel shitty and to hurt anymore but I can’t stand the alternative if she quits fighting.

Robin since Chemo, a beautiful bald woman.

I want to see her, I want to hug her, I want to take some of her pain away, but in the end I have realized she was right … I am afraid these tears that have now begun will not stop.

I love you Robin. I miss you. Please keep fighting.