Brookfield Wannabe

Wisconsin Memorial Park is a beautiful cemetery in Brookfield. My mom is buried there. Whenever I go there to visit, I am always affected by the silence. It seems no matter how many people are present, there is always that silence, a quiet, born of respect, regret, and grief. On Memorial Day, we remember those who passed away in service to our country. In their honor, Wisconsin Memorial Park is resplendent with flowers and flags, but despite the pomp, the stillness remains. That is what grief brings.

This is not a feel-good blog. It is a blog about grief and remembrance, and on this Memorial Day, I want to share with you a book about both of those things. The Year of Magical Thinking, authored by Joan Didion, is an account of the year after the sudden death of her husband. Magical thinking refers to the actions she engaged in during that year that she somehow thought would allow her husband to come back, actions she stopped when she realized he never would. Her book really connected with me, not because her words were comforting but because her words were true. I would recommend the book to anyone who has lost a loved one, whether from illness, accident, or combat. I would like to share some of Ms. Didions truths and some of the ones I have discovered during my own year of magical thinking.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it.

It does not matter how long you have or what you do to prepare for the death of a loved one. It does not matter if you are ready to accept death as a consequence of military service. It does not matter if your loved one has lived a long life. It does not matter if funeral arrangements were made in advance. You will never be prepared. When it happens, although many will sympathize, the only people who will truly understand are the ones to whom it has already happened. During this past television season, on the show Greys Anatomy, the father of one of the main characters dies. When he shares his feelings with his fellow intern, she welcomes him into the Dead Dads Club, and I found myself nodding at her statement. As crass as those words may seem, it is the truth. You just cannot possibly understand until you are actually there.

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows.

In the first few months after my mom passed away, there were times when the phone would ring, and for a second, I would think she was on the other end. I would be at her house, hear a sound, and expect to see her come around the corner. But as quick as those moments appeared, so too did they fade, each time renewing the sadness that comes from realizing that she will never be there again.

Grief is a sneaky visitor. It catches me during the ordinary moments, seeing a grandmother and granddaughter walking hand-in-hand at the mall, hearing a commercial that my mom liked on TV. I feel her absence most in the little things.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

In the months since she has been gone, I have occasionally engaged in my own bits of magical thinking. I have not been trying to trick myself into thinking that she is coming back, but I have tried to draw comfort from a sense of her presence. When times were rough, I would sit by myself, close my eyes, and imagine that she was next to me, with her hand on my shoulder, telling me that I would be okay. For those moments, that is what I needed to survive, and who knows, perhaps for those instances, she was there.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

I hate the phrase letting go. When my mom was dying, people kept telling me I had to let her go. I did not want to let her go, but I knew what they were trying to say. There comes a time when you need to accept that there is loss, that there is absence, that there is a void. One of my best friends who lost her father to a long illness close to ten years ago told me to give it a year. It will be a year in August, and as much as I hate the words, I am still letting go.

(The quotes in italics are from the book The Year of Magical Thinking, authored by Joan Didion, published by Alfred A. Knopf (2005). It is available in paperback. Also, I heard recently that the actress Vanessa Redgrave is currently starring in a one-woman show based on the book in New York.)

I am a self-proclaimed foodie. I love food. I love to watch the cooking shows on the Food Network. I love to page through cookbooks. I just do not like cooking, a fact I was completely honest about with my husband when we first started dating. (In fact, we spent a lot of our time frequenting the restaurants on the east side.) I blame it on parents' who loved to eat out, and they took my brother and I everywhere. We spent special occasions at places like John Byron's in the old First Wisconsin building downtown, Grenadier's, or the original Boulevard Inn. Sunday lunch was also a time to eat out, albeit at a more casual place. Remember Arthur Treacher's? That was a Sunday favorite. Although Arthur Treacher's has long been defunct, Brookfield now has bigger and better options when it comes to seafood: Joey's Seafood and Grill and Mitchell's Fish Market.

Joey's is located in a strip mall on 124th and Capitol, the same mall that contains Caribou Coffee. It offers a wide variety of seafood at very reasonable prices (crab legs, scallops, shrimp, different types of fish and chips, to name a few). Kid friendly, they offered my daughter a children's menu, crayons, and a small container of goldfish crackers upon seating us the first time we were there. (She liked the fact that we were seated next to the aquarium.) She's not a big seafood eater, so she ordered her standard chicken fingers and fries on both our visits to Joey's. The first time we ate at Joey's was for lunch on a Saturday afternoon. The second time was for dinner on a weeknight. The first time there, I ordered the original fish and chips, the two-piece order. The filets of pollock were a pretty good size, had a tasty batter coating, and were fried perfectly. Cole slaw and french fries were the sides. Joey's even has a bottle of vinegar on the table as a condiment if you want to get truly English about your fish and chips. The restaurant does offer take out, but I am not sure how fried foods will hold up over the drive home. The second time I was there I had the scallops sauteed in butter. They were good, but, in my opinion, not as good as the fish and chips I ordered before. As a side, I got the hush puppies, which were better than the french fries I had the first time. My husband ordered the lobster and seafood tacos on our first visit and the coconut shrimp on our second go round. Both were really good. (I always make it a point to taste what my husband is having whenever we are trying out a new restaurant). I ate the leftover coconut shrimp cold the next day, and it held up exceptionally well.

Mitchell's Fish Market is located at Brookfield Square Mall, but there is no mall access to the restaurant. We also visited this restaurant twice. Getting parking close to the restaurant can be a problem. It is on the same side as Barnes and Noble, Hoolihan's Restaurant, and the Bravo! restaurant. So, there is competition for parking spaces. You can bring kids to this restaurant, but the close proximity of the tables when the restaurant is packed might provide a tight squeeze if you want a highchair. They do have a kids menu with, of course, the ever-present chicken fingers for kiddies who are not into seafood. Mitchell's has a big, lobby area and a large bar right off the entrance. The restaurant itself is also large with both booths and tables. The menu contains an extensive list of seafood, including including several varieties of fresh fish which can then be prepared in several different ways. There is also an oyster bar, which you don't see much around here.

The first time there, I went all out and ordered the lobster bisque and the sea bass with the shanghai preparation. The bisque was as good as any other bisque I have had, but the patrons seated behind us had a different opinion. The seabass was steamed, served over sticky rice, and was accompanied by a sweet soy-sauce based sauce. It was tasty, and the sweetness of it made it different from what I have previously tasted in Chinese restaurants. My husband had the crabcake appetizer and cannot remember what he had as an entree. I had a bite of the crabcake, and I liked it so much that I ordered the dinner portion on my second visit. The crabcakes were large and meaty with no hint of green pepper, an ingredient which prevents me from ordering crabcakes at certain restaurants. My husband had steak on his second visit, which was tasty enough that he did not put A-1 sauce on it.

In my opinion, Mitchell's is more upscale in terms of both price and menu offerings. You can take kids to both places, and both have kid menus that offer options other than seafood. Patrons of Joey's were dressed pretty casually; patrons of Mitchell's ranged from the shorts-clad crowd to the after-work business casual bunch. On both visits to Joey's, we were able to walk in and get a table fairly quickly. On our second visit to Mitchell's, we came on a crowded Friday night and had to wait for a table. I'd recommend making a reservation on weekends or if you have a large number of people in your party.

I was floored by an article I read on Tuesday. Federal researchers for the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the overall rate at which women are undergoing regular mammograms appears to be declining. Four reasons were suggested for the decline: long waiting times to get an appointment, decreasing fears regarding *** cancer, a drop in hormone use after menopause, and the usual risk v. benefit debate about the exam.

In response, I have two words: EARLY DETECTION.

On May 2, I went for my annual screening mammogram. Because my mother had *** cancer, upon the advice of my doctor, I have been getting a routine mammogram since I turned 35, five years ago. This year, I was unusually anxious both before and after the exam, but I chalked it up to the fact that I lost my mom to cancer last summer (ironically not to *** cancer but to lung cancer). After the exam, as usual, the technician informed me that I would receive either a call the next day if there was a problem or a letter in the next few days that would state the results were normal. I got the call at approximately 3:00 the following afternoon.

I was informed that the radiologist had detected a nodule in my left ***.

The person who called said that the radiologist wanted me to come in for another exam and possibly an ultrasound. She told me that it did not mean that I had cancer. It could be a cyst or a fold in the tissue that occurred during screening, but I had to come in for a follow-up. Neither the physical *** exam my gynecologist conducted six months earlier nor the self-exams I conducted in the months since revealed the nodule. I had done everything the way I had been instructed, and here I was, like hundreds of women before me, not being able to breathe.

I asked the caller to tell me again what the radiologist had found. She repeated everything. It was Thursday afternoon. I was told that the earliest date a follow-up could be scheduled was Monday morning. I scheduled the appointment, and then I called my sister-in-law and cried.

My husband came home early. For the rest of the afternoon, we watched TV, his arm around me, my arms around my daughter. I did not feel much like talking. I found out later that we were both thinking about the same thing: Who would help to raise my daughter if I was gone.

My brother called that night. My sister-in-law had told him about the result. He works in radiology and was able to get an appointment for me at his workplace for the next morning. He tried to reassure me that 9 times out of 10, an abnormality in a screening mammogram proves to be nothing serious. I could only think about the 1 time out of 10.

The next morning, already teary-eyed, I met my brother at the clinic and met the radiologist who would be reading my films. Seeing my anxiety, she too tried to reassure me that it might be nothing, but we needed to find out. So, I dressed myself in the gown and robe that are always ridiculously huge on me and steeled myself for whatever was next.

My brother was able to stay with me for what he called a spot film, basically a more localized mammogram of my left ***. He said this could be all that was needed, but there was a possibility that the doctor could order an additional ultrasound. After delivering the films to the doctor, the tech came back and said that the doctor wanted an ultrasound. My brother left the room to go and see the films himself.

As I lay on the exam table waiting for the ultrasound tech, I told myself that even if it was cancer, that did not mean I was going to die. So, I took it up as a mantra. I will not die. I will not die. I will not die.

My brother came back into the room. He told me that the nodule did not look like a cancer tumor, but the ultrasound would be more definitive. As the tech passed the ultrasound wand over the site, they both looked relieved. The tech said it looked like a cyst. She took the results to the radiologist to be read. It was a benign cyst.

The cyst measured approximately 1 cm in width. Guided to the spot, I applied some pressure, and using a circular motion, it took a couple of passes until I could distinguish it. If it had been cancer and I had not gone for my annual screening, who knows how large the mass would have gotten before I felt it during a self-exam. If I did not do regular self-exams, who knows how long the mass would have gone unchecked.

Per the radiologist, the American Cancer Society Guidelines recommend screening mammograms and physical *** examinations every year beginning at age 40 for women at normal risk. (If you believe you are at higher risk because of family history or other factors, consult with your physician as to what is best for your situation.)

Do not let fear about a mammogram, either the procedure itself or what you may discover upon its completion, deter you from getting one.

Knowledge is power.