We live in a society more concerned with corporate wealth than public health

March 25, 2024 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

My late wife Linda during the first year we’d met in the early 1980s

Tomorrow, March 26 of 2024 will mark eleven years since my late wife Linda Cudworth passed away. She survived through eight years of ovarian cancer, a Stage IIc diagnosis that proved persistent and aggressive through multiple surgeries, chemotherapy treatments (literally dozens in cycles of 5-8 at a time) and the pursuant side effects ranging from destroyed taste buds to feet and hands numbed by neuropathy so bad she could hardly manage to do the thing she loved most, which was gardening.

Yet persist she did. Long enough to see her son Evan graduate from college and begin work. And nearly long enough to see her daughter Emily graduate as well. It wasn’t an easy period for either of them, working in New York as Evan did at the time, and Emily looking to finish up college at Augustana while her mother’s health declined. Those events and the aftermath affect us all to this day.

Corporate wealth versus public health

But I also want to talk about something I’ve never fully addressed. That is, how the world and its work and healthcare systems treated us from the minute we received that initial diagnosis back in 2005.

At the time, my mother was also already fighting lymphoma with oral chemotherapy because she wanted to stay healthy enough to care for my father Stewart, who had a stroke in 2003 and never really recovered. His apraxia and aphasia stole his speech, and paralysis on his right side took away many of his other activities.

That made me the primary caregiver for both of my parents. So when the cancer diagnosis came along for my wife we were already dealing with considerable issues related to insurance and caregiving. That November, my mother was additionally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died after one chemo treatment that produced in her a life-ending stroke.

At the time, our family healthcare plan was administered through my employer the Daily Herald, a newspaper media company. We chose an HMO to save costs, but what that really meant was that our doctor options were limited by our plan. We were balancing our healthcare needs against all the other expenses we faced in life at the time with kids in high school and college.

We were just trying to get along. In the early 2000s we lived on my salary of $75,000-$80,000 a year. I also made an additional $15-20K per year freelancing, often working early mornings and late evenings as a remote freelance creative director and copywriter for an agency I’d later join as an employee. We used my wife’s preschool teaching income of $18K to save up and pay for my son’s college costs at the University of Chicago because our FAFSA was about $16K per year.

The Gold Standard

Linda had surgery in 2005 to remove the remainder of the ovarian tumor that the naive gynecologist had broken during exploratory surgery to check the cyst. That accident revealed the cancer, and it also unleashed millions of cancer cells throughout her abdomen. These implanted on the abdominal wall. We were grateful to find in our HMO a premiere gynecological oncologist named Dr. James Dolan who did investigative surgery to remove cancer. In a post-surgery meeting with me in a closed room, he quietly told me that her abdominal wall “felt like sandpaper” thanks to the cancer cells growing there. “I extracted as much as I could,” he told me.

After that, we proceeded with intravenous chemotherapy to kill as much cancer as we could without killing Linda. Then they recommended a “Gold Standard” tactic of dumping chemo directly into her abdominal cavity through a port in her belly. The nurses actually nudged the port loose with one treatment and the chemo spilled out making a white stain on her skin.

We probably could have sued over that, but our biggest concern was getting through the chemo so that she could return to something resembling a normal life after months and months of her being sick and tired and fed up with the entire debacle.

HMO ills

Our annual family vacations to Seven Mile Lake in Wisconsin were a tradition

All the while we wrestled with HMO bills and tried to keep up with our payments. Upon signing up for the HMO, we had to switch family doctors, leaving behind the physician that Linda trusted most. That practice, one that I’d been attending since I was twelve years old, no longer accepted the Blue Cross HMO we’d chosen. It’s a tragic thing when an insurance system takes medical decisions out of people’s hands.

To make matters weirder for me, during same time period my boss at the newspaper decided to conduct a 360-degree review on my performance at the company. Needless to say, I was a bit distracted that year. Thus the review held plenty of criticism. I’d been Administrative Associate of the Year in 2003, so I wasn’t a slouch of any kind. But thanks to the burdens of caregiving for my wife and parents, juggling bills and kids in college, and commuting all over five Chicago suburban counties to run the marketing efforts of six bureau offices, the year 2005 was not easy for me under the circumstances.

Yet despite these pressures, I still managed to grow a literacy project that represented $27M in market value to 375,000 families. My role also involved conducting 200 annual events as well as several dozen awards banquets, symposiums and sales programs for a newspaper with a circulation of 140,000 or so. Amid this flurry of activities, I had some problems, yes. But it also would have helped not to have been put under a 360 degree microscope while dealing with everything going on at the time.

Bigger money

I ultimately left the company in 2007, joining the agency where I’d been freelancing. Linda’s health was by then stabilizing. We felt like it was a good time to make the change given the failing nature of the newspaper industry. The Internet was stealing revenue and kicking the ass of nearly every newspaper in the country. Dozens were going out of business. I’d just won a $1M account for the agency by leading a pitch to a giant men’s clothier chain based out in Richmond, Virginia. My new salary would be $110,000 a year, almost $30,000 more than I’d been making at the newspaper.

But then tragedy struck again. Within a month of starting that new job in the summer of 2007, Linda’s CA-125 numbers began rising. The surgery and chemos she’d endured the previous years were not keeping the cancer at bay. It came back hard and fast that summer. The disappointment of having done the “Gold Standard” and having the cancer come back so fast was too much for Linda. She had a complete emotional breakdown, screaming in anger when we got the call that cancer was back. Her personal affect collapsed. Her parents spent time at our home during the day yet I spent every other hour at work checking on her as needed. My own performance suffered, and before long, the agency elected to fire me.

I get it. Company leadership wants positive, high-performing employees. The boss of that firm once looked at me and complained, “I like you better when you’re smiling.” I was just trying to survive at the time. I’d spent so much time on the phone during those months that I received a $500 cellular phone bill from our cellular provider. I took the bill to a local store and explained our situation. They told me that they’d credit back the entire bill. No charge. Obviously I thanked them profusely.

Back on the job hunt

But I was still out of work. At that point, cancer families have a choice to make, and it’s not pretty. Within a month or so, payments must be made to continue COBRA insurance coverage. That means the patient assumes the total costs of insurance. In our case those costs totaled $2000 a month. That’s a ton of money to pay before even considering monthly bills. So there I was, out of work with just a nest egg of cash available, suddenly thrown to the insurance wolves.

It took months for Linda to emerge from the depressive episode brought on by the emotional collapse. She could only bear to leave the house for short periods, usually with me, or sometimes, with her parents. Even that was tough. Meanwhile, she’d developed a condition called ascites, a swelling of the abdomen due to fluids caused by cancer. One night I walked in to find her lying on her side with the light in her eyes flat and nearly lifeless. I helped her into the car and we rushed to the hospital. The medical techs proceeded to drain several liters of fluid out of her gut. That can only be done a few times as the procedure has risks of causing infection and other problems. We needed to get her back into chemo to kill off the cancer that returned. The rest of 2007 was spent getting those treatments as occasionally her most trusted friends sat with her at the cancer treatment center if I had job interviews or freelance gigs to handle.

Making do

I got to work again by 2008, accepting a lower-paying job nearer to home at an audio-visual company. The salary was just $60,000, about half of what I’d been making at the agency. I took the position because there were some energetic young associates that just started at the company, which planned to launch a student response system for the education market. There was growth potential if that succeeded. Mostly I took the job so that I could be near enough to home to take care of Linda. She was going better again, having survived even more chemo and another surgery, but this time her hair fell out even faster and her hands went numb. She bought wigs and wore gloves to do her gardening.

The bills continued to escalate during that period. The costs of chemo and surgery shot up so high that we could not afford to pay for it all, a total of nearly $100,000 built up. I learned that the hospital where we having treatments done was a non-profit offering financial assistance. To my amazement, they reviewed our financial situation and agreed to pay 90% of all our bills. I sat at home that night crying in thanks. On that subject, I greatly admire wealthy people moved to support healthcare and hospitals. They rightly deserve to have their names on the facilities. Thank you. That’s indeed a beautiful thing that wealthy people do.

Ugly questions and healthcare roulette

That still leaves some ugly questions. Why does our insurance system work like this? It’s clear that no one really knows what’s going on with actual patients and their medical bills. I’ve long been a proponent of a national healthcare system for these reasons. The US should be like so many other countries around the world, investing in the health of its people rather than forcing them to play healthcare roulette.

In this country, real, everyday people feel the ugly brunt and abuses of the for-profit healthcare It’s an ugly process in which insurance companies, healthcare providers, the government, and employers small and large all battle over who should pay for what. All we know is that the costs of health insurance rises year after year. During the eight year reign of President Bush, the costs of health insurance rose by *96% and millions of people remained uninsured.

*Source: Crain’s Chicago Business

Money drains

That leaves people heading for the emergency room if they’re uninsured, driving costs higher and reducing effectiveness of care for everyone. It’s unexcusable that a developed nation such as the United States of America carries on like it does claiming that it offers the ‘best healthcare system in the world.’ Yes, we have many advanced and amazing healthcare opportunities in this country. But what does it mean that our doctors hate it because they’re in debt up to their ears from paying for their medical education, and the cost of insurance for their practices is skyrocketing too. Meanwhile, nurses suffer long hours and hospital systems try to nick every dime out of patients just to stay afloat. Money consistently drains down the sinkhole of the American healthcare system. It’s a national debacle. A shitshow.

To make it all worse, many companies fear having their insurance rates go up every year. This is true for companies small and large. Once the recession hit in 2008, there were many small companies struggling to survive month-to-month while banks refused to offer loans to cover payrolls or operating expenses, much less insurance costs.

By 2010 my job at that little audio-visual company came to an end when the rescue dollars offered by the Obama administration to fund educational technology ran out. “Sorry,” I was told. “We don’t see the same business coming through this year. We have to let you go.”

Well, that was also a lie. I’d researched and landed a former business line with a huge educational supplies company eager to sell our firm’s AV equipment through their national channels. But because that firm competed with the localized dealer network and the Good Old Boy system it relied upon, the company’s President and top salesperson fought the supposed incursion upon their territories.

I’d studied the previous sales reports showing that the education company had once done $600K in business with our firm. With another salesperson I visited the education company, re-opened those sales channels, helped train their people and provide them with marketing materials, and brought in a quick $1M in restored business that year for a firm doing $20M annually.

But our internal audience was not in favor of the change. “Our dealers don’t like their salespeople calling on their schools!” they protested.

“When was the last time any of those dealers actually called on those schools?” we responded.

“Well, they plan to…” was the weak response. We’d learned that the new sales channels threatened their anachronistic methods of doing business.

We might say the same thing about our healthcare insurance industry and its anachronistic corporatized structure. The “old ways” of doing business are clearly not efficient or effective for anyone. The possibility of competition from a national healthcare system to regulate and negotiate prices is too much of a threat to Big Pharma and the likes of United Healthcare and other monopolistic healthcare insurances hogs feeding at the trough of unrestricted data, access and profits from the American population.

No agency at another agency

I searched far and wide for a new job and got a position at an agency forty miles away. During the onboarding process, which was conducted by the wife of the company’s owner, I hesitated filling out the information on the health insurance forms because it would mean revealing my wife’s cancer. I considered not telling the truth, but reasoned that could lead to a lawsuit. So I filled out the paperwork honestly and turned it in, knowing that it might raise red flags in the minds of the couple running the company. From the get-go, I worried about that.

Sure enough, after month I was suddenly shifted to an inane sales position requiring me to drive all over the Chicago area handing out bottles of promotional pepper sauce as a device to land marketing work for the agency. It never worked, and of course, I didn’t land much business. I quietly asked, “Shouldn’t we be using the marketing techniques we teach our clients to market our own firm?” For some reason, that was ignored. Ultimately, they pulled me into a meeting one day and said, “You’re just not cutting it. We have to let you go.”

I resisted and specifically pointed to the fact that I was shifted away from the original responsibilities to engage in a crazy proposition that no one could fulfill. Later that day, I wrote them via email because I’d done my research before leaving and talked to the broker that sold them healthcare. “I can stay on their plan, right?” I asked. He assured me that the law required that I be offered that opportunity. But the company tried offering me a $1500 stipend toward whatever insurance I could find. At that point, I contacted a lawyer friend. I accepted their $1500 offer and also stayed on their insurance until I found a new job.

Bad scaffolding

As I understand it, the entire American healthcare system is built on a scaffolding of bad policy originally constructed as a sort of “incentive” or “benefit” to attract employees. The healthcare system we developed relies on this quasi-capitalistic notion that we should all get health insurance through our employers.

But if supporting and defending capitalism were truly the mission of the American healthcare system, businesses would have nothing to do with health insurance at all. That would eliminate the massive costs and time spent by HR resources negotiating and managing company-sponsored healthcare plans. Our corporately sponsored healthcare system is a fraud. To make matters worse, the politicians responsible for legislating healthcare are in many cases funded by the profit-based companies benefitting from the waste and corruption integral to our system.

The laws governing small companies are vague and frankly, rife with loose language and utter bullshit about what they can and cannot do to hire and fire employees, much less provide access to healthcare insurance. If a company has less than twenty employees, they get a ton of leeway in how they can screw people over. I know that it’s hard to run a company of any size. I’ve seen it firsthand. But I also know that there’s a right way and a wrong way to treat people. I’ve seen that firsthand too.

After I left, one of the employees at the first who knew my situation called to offer condolences. She told me, “Don’t fuck around with these small companies,” she warned. “You need to get a job with a big firm with good insurance.”

A CMO still hiding the Big C

I tried to abide that advice, but the job market was still tough in 2011. I applied and was hired for a position as Chief Marketing Officer at a PR firm. Things went well for a year. I earned a number of national public relations awards for clients large and small, even bringing 2000 people the grand opening of a ReStore.

The company’s owner knew and liked me, yet in the back of my mind I remained cautious because during the interview process she’d openly stated, “The only reason we can offer insurance here is because no one’s had cancer.”

I have a labor law attorney friend whose firm once faced rising insurance costs. His partners were angered by the fact that his wife had a couple surgeries to fix scar tissue related to horseriding injuries. “Your wife is driving up our insurance costs,” they complained. But when the broker from whom they purchased their insurance explained the rising costs, he told them. “It’s not her surgeries making the costs go up. Both of your wive’s are in their child-bearing years. That costs more money to insure.”

The fact of the matter is that virtually no one understands our insurance system in America.

Fortunately, in the case of that little PR agency, I was able to fill out and submit our health insurance forms without sharing them with the office manager or anyone else at the firm. I mailed them directly to the insurance provider. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to work. And don’t HIPPA laws require it in some fashion? Yet many small firms ignore such requirements.

Even with that precaution, I’d soon run afoul of that firm’s insurance fears and other policies related to employment.

A grudge and payback

After traveling to Colorado Springs on a client recruitment trip at an event where large firms met with PR firms like ours, I was accosted by a fellow employee who was angry that the owner had spent $35K to attend. “We won’t get a bonus this year, I bet,” he complained. In turn, I explained that we were trying to up our game and bring in new and larger clients so that we’d all make more money. Instead, he bitterly blamed me for supporting her venture. In fact, he made a practice of complaining about her every time we went to lunch. I didn’t know that his disenchantment would soon cost me directly.

In the spring of 2012, Linda’s cancer came back. This time it would require yet another surgery involving a complicated extraction of cancer from her liver and colon, where it had spread. With the surgery approaching and the need for some time off possible, I considered telling the company about her condition. Yet I feared getting fired if they found out my wife had cancer. I’d been enough nuttiness to know that anything could happen.

As an insurance against my own risks, I worked hard the last two weeks before the scheduled surgery trying to land a big client. I figured that might stand up against any potential costs we might incur if our company’s insurance coverage shot up.

On a Sunday night, a bit anxious to make something happen I’ll admit, I opened up my personal website and posted one of the successful creative campaigns I’d just produced with an in-house designer. I was trying to reach a network of people through my own website that might be able to provide a referral for new clients.

The pressures were getting to me, so I decided that Monday morning to tell the owner and the HR director about my wife’s condition. They expressed complete support for our family. After all, I’d attended every company event and brought some recognition to the firm, including a complete re-write and design of the company’s website. I thought I’d built some loyalty and value. They assured me that I had.

But that afternoon the post of content to my website generated a Google Alert about the client’s name. At that point the disenfranchised employee came to my office with a stern look on his face and said, “You need to take that down right away.” So I did. It had stayed on my website no longer than ten hours. It was highly unlikely anyone even saw that post. But the copy mentioned the client’s name. Technically, I’d committed an error in judgment.

Getting fired is no fun

I walked into work the next morning to be greeted by the owner, whose stern look told me something bad was happening. The entire office was silent as they led me to the company conference room and informed me that I was being fired for breaching the company’s policies on client confidentiality. “That’s weird,” I responded. “They’ve already published that work in a magazine.” They didn’t care, they told me. I’d put the company at risk.

The lawyer they hired sat in the room and read me some legalese. Then I was told to gather my personal effects and leave. If you’ve never been fired from a job, it really is no fun.

That afternoon I contacted my best friend who is a labor law attorney. He gave me some advice to follow for an upcoming hearing on unemployment insurance but he was busy with his full-time job the day I was to have the hearing. It was conducted by a Chicago employment judge. In advance, we were told to exchange relevant materials so I submitted proof that my post had done neither the company or the client any harm. However, I never received the information they were supposed to provide me.

Upon mentioning that to the judge at the start of the hearing, he told me not to speak until spoken to. From there the case was railroaded and I was also blocked from collecting unemployment insurance. In sum, that disgruntled employee had fucked me over in spiteful revenge over my support for the boss’s investment in client recruitment.

Lessons learned

I’ll end this story there, because not long after that debacle my wife’s condition got worse. Her own father died of heart complications in late 2012. Then on December 26 of that year we learned that her cancer had migrated to the brain.

The doctors told us, “That’s not supposed to happen.” But it did. We engaged in brain surgery using radiation. Then they put her on steroids for the swelling. That made her kind of energetically crazy in early 2013. We even had to counsel her to stop teaching preschoolers because her judgment just wasn’t right. That broke her heart. And mine.

When the steroid treatments ended her body mercifully gave out but her mind never did. We’d done our praying and told each other of our mutual love. She died peacefully the evening of March 26 after the hospice team visited her that afternoon.

I’ll admit I was grateful and relieved that she was freed from the misery of the cancer that caused her distress all those eight years. Despite it all she lived as fully as anyone could, planting amazing gardens, raising monarch butterflies from eggs on milkweed leaves, and loving her own children and those she taught with all her heart. She was 55 years old.

But my point in this essay is that I still cannot believe this is the way that human enterprise is supposed to treat those facing illnesses such as cancer. In its broadest sense, society is still primitive, tribal and brutal in its methods of care as far as I can see. Corporations can toss people around at will, it seems. Our healthcare system favors the rich and spits on minorities, women and anyone that fails to fall under “covered categories.” Is there any more inhumane system on earth? Probably so, but we’re supposed to be better than that. Instead, we’ve got greedy fake Christians and their hypocritical political partners claiming to be Pro-Life while constructing death panels based on who can afford to pay for insurance, and who cannot.

Fortunately, there are still many kind and wonderful people who break through the ugly facade of America’s healthcare system to offer great care and financial support. But they fight against a system more concerned with corporate wealth than public health. And that’s the real cancer in America.

biblical literalism, caregiving, Christopher Cudworth, God is love, Grace appreciated, science and religion, the Right Kind of Pride, trusting science

Strong bond in the recent and distant past

January 5, 2024 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

Mark Strong and Christopher Cudworth 2024

In the late spring of 1970, the Cudworth family unrooted itself after seven years in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and moved 750 miles west to the small town of Elburn, Illinois. My father was laid off from work at RCA back east and landed a job with a company called National Electronics (now Richardson Electronics between Elburn and Geneva) as a sales engineer.

For me, moving that far west meant leaving close friends behind back in Pennsylvania. The only thing that made the move enticing for me at the age of twelve was a Polaroid photo of a basketball backboard with a square behind the rim that my father sent back to show us what our new home would look like. As a kid deeply into basketball at the time, and caught up in the “new look” of the game with squares at which to aim a bank shot, that single photo made it seem partially worthwhile to deal with such a big change in life.

New friends

That still left it for me to make new friends in a small town situated on the railroad tracks forty miles west of Chicago. Fortunately, news got around town that I could dribble and shoot a basketball like it was magic, and I met a couple of guys named Mark Strong and Eric Berry.

Within weeks we began hanging out and doing what twelve-year-olds going on thirteen typically do. We played sports and tried to get the attention of girls that lived in town. There were always older guys around with their cars and muscles and cool haircuts, especially in the summertime. The girls were most interested in them, but we still got to hang around with a couple of girls named Allison and Twyla. Both had the last name Anderson.

These were my “new friends” in Illinois.

Nicknames and other games

That summer I went out for baseball as I’d done back east where the team I’d joined won the prestigious Lancaster New Era Championship. We were schooled in fundamentals and played at the highest level for our age. But the first team they put me on in Elburn at 12 years old was a town team for 8-12 year olds. I threw a perfect game and the coaches all gathered ’round and told me that I’d have to move up to the American Legion team for sixteen-year-olds and above.

That set the stage for playing Elburn baseball the next few summers, and my new friend Mark Strong played on that team along with some guys I’d met through school. Our friend Eric Berry wasn’t that interested in baseball, so our friendship ebbed and flowed with the seasons. Yet we still got together to ride bikes around the small streets until well after dark. We’d get bored now and then and with my baseball pitching skills I grew adept at breaking streetlights with roadside rocks. It was small-town entertainment at its “best.” Not.

During the summer months, Mark and I often headed out to the fields beyond the east edge of Elburn where giant ponds filled the clay holes where topsoil had been graded off to prepare for new homes. We’d play army in the dirt or blow up frogs with firecrackers. In winter, Mark and I took his shotgun out for sport. Even though I’d become a birdwatcher by the age of thirteen, I’ll confess to shooting a few sparrows with his 12-gauge. They mostly disappeared.

One early winter day we used our BB guns to peg house sparrows off a large bird house behind his home. What we thought were echoes from our BBs striking the bird house turned out to be a ton of holes in the neighbor’s large glass window. Yes, we had to pay for the damages.

For all our juvenile delinquent instincts, we also served as the town’s paperboy service for several years. Mark and Eric (better known as Eeker, his nickname) owned the route first. They handed the route off to me when I was a freshman in high school. The route paid about $8.50 per week, enough to keep me in candy bars and cinnamon rolls at Kaneland High School. I’d collect the papers at Smith’s Bar-B-Cue in downtown Elburn and deliver them inside the doors of the thirty or so homes on the route.

Competitive natures

For all our friendship endeavors, Mark and I were immensely competitive with each other. We played sports all the time. As luck had it, Mark’s father was the elementary school principal in town. That gave us access to the school gym. On cold winter days we’d head to the school to play basketball or try to beat each other in a game we invented, call it Wall Ball. We used one or two of those ugly red recess balls with the seashell patterns on them. The game had simple rules. You could throw the ball from up to half court and the object was to hit the far wall below a tile line without letting the other guy block it. That was worth one point. Hitting the basketball backboard was two points and actually shooting a basket was worth a whole five points. In the heat of that game, we sank more shots than you might think. We’d play Wall Ball for an hour or more sometimes.

Once we got into high school, Saturdays were when Mark played football for Kaneland High School and I ran cross country. After that, we’d meet up at his house for even more sports stuff. My legs would be sore and tired from racing three miles, and Mark was bruised from football, but we’d take turns playing receiver while his dad played quarterback. Mark was bigger and stronger than me, but not as adept or quick. All told, our games were typically even. Yet I remember a day when I got the best of him for one reason or another and as I left to go home I could hear his father counseling him on not giving up.

Neither Mark or I were the type to quit anything easily. But life has a way of sorting things out no matter how determined you might be to do something. As an 8th grader, I’d won the town Punt, Pass, and Kick contest, advancing to regionals. Part of me apparently thought that throwing and kicking the ball was what football was all about. My father knew better and never let any of his four boys go out for football. He’d seen what it did to his high school and college friends who came away with busted up knees and shoulders. On the day that I was ready to sign up for football my freshman year, my father grabbed me by the scruff of the neck at the locker room door and said, “You’re going out for cross country, and if you come back out of that locker room, I’ll break your neck.” My dad was right. I made the Varsity as a freshman and would likely have been crushed in football. I weighed 128 lbs.

So it was football for Mark and cross country for me. Our mutual friend Eeker drifted into the arts and theater, interests that matched his musical talent. His brothers all played instruments and they’d rehearse playing CS&N and Beatles tunes in the upstairs of the local Catholic Church. The Berry’s were one of the wealthier families in town. Their dad Ed Berry would eventually become mayor.

Eric and I did cross sporting paths in track, where he excelled in pole vault like his brothers Mark and Chris. The Berry boys all had a wild streak and vaulting paralleled their love of thrills that included downhill skiing in the winter months. I also accompanied the Berry Boys in some late-night thievery as they had set their eyes on some fat tire slicks on a vehicle downtown. I never had any instinct for motor sports and didn’t see the thrill in doing “burnouts” in a car, but I crept around to help them get the prized slicks off the jacked-up car. The closest I ever came to laying rubber was making skid marks with my Huffy three-speed bike.

For all our hijinks, there was a moral side to Mark and I as well. We both joined the confirmation class at the downtown church pastored by Rev. Wilhite, who was also my next-door neighbor. Our confirmation class discussions covered everything from the radical scope of the new musical Jesus Christ Superstar to what it means to believe in God. Reverend Wilhite was an able guide as he spoke to church doctrine while remaining open-minded to the coarse speculations of young minds.

My parents attended a church in Geneva but I had decided on my own to get confirmed at that little church in Elburn. I wasn’t alone in that. Many friends from Elburn and Kaneland Junior High joined us in that naive but earnest effort to commit ourselves to faith in some way.

A social kid

Mark and I remained friends into our high school years but being in different sports did drift us apart a bit. Plus, the social system at Kaneland was often harsh and involved a ton of hard teasing and worse. I remember times when our peers mocked both Mark and I for various reasons. They gave him the nickname Roy, which wasn’t a compliment. My nickname was Woppo based on a mistake I’d made in some half-assed art class where I wrote my name Cudwopth rather than Cudworth. First came Cudwop, then Woppo. Mostly it was a term of endearment, but always with a tone of snark to it. I was a popular kid yet still a dopamine-driven dreamer with a lack of self-esteem. A classmate once walked up to me during a track meet and muttered, “Cudworth, you’re just a hayseed.” Honestly, that was pretty accurate. I was a child of the outdoor margins, happiest when trouncing about in the Elburn Forest Preserve finding new bird species.

But I always came back to the realm of sports, and during the winter months that meant hours playing basketball in one sphere or another. My homework suffered and my Converse shoes wore holes in the bottom. More than one set of glasses met an awful end thanks to the elbows thrown in basketball. That’s me, #10 in the photo below.

I don’t recall if Mark went out for wrestling but that would not have surprised me. He was a tough-minded guy in many respects. In classic guy fashion, had quite a protracted arguments on subjects such as whether basketball or football players were better all-around athletes. Mark said football. I said basketball of course. I was loyal to the game because I was decent at it. It gave me self-esteem as even older kids invited me to play games at Morris’s barn, an actual farm structure with a b-ball court in the upstairs.

By the time I was a sophomore I’d become class president as a somewhat popular kid. I didn’t know a damned thing about what I was supposed to do in that role other than choose the class ring. That was one of many moments in life when I accepted a job without a clue about what it involved.

An ordered mind

Mark was a direct contrast to that approach. I seem to recall him working a summer job inseminating cows at a big facility north of Elburn. He described the work of plugging cows with semen packs and I almost puked thinking about it. The truth is that Mark had a pragmatic streak that bordered on stubborn. He didn’t blanch at hard work or being honest. For that attribute he became the butt of teasing at school as I recall. I may have joined in on some of that too. We all did.

Kaneland (like so many high schools) was at times a cesspool of ridicule. There are always smart people in every social circle who engage in dumb rituals by making fun of others. We’re seeing it in spades in the United States these days. The habit of mocking or ostracizing people to gain social or political advantage is common in American society. Anyone who strays from the “straight and ordinary,” or thinks or acts differently is open season. When those belief systems become institutionalized in any way it can tip whole societies.

My painting of a bird house and wren in my mid-teens

Those of us trying to buck those trends at any scale find it hard to swim upstream. I got mocked for my birdwatching during high school. Even as a successful athlete I got manipulated by guys with less talent to stop believing in myself. People often tried to bring you down a rung or use some social cue to make you feel inferior. I even recall have female friends that I trusted and being told they weren’t worth it if I wasn’t somehow trying to get something from them or “hustling them.”

As a person eager for approval, I might have fallen prey to some of those pressures had our family stayed in Elburn. That wasn’t to be.

Moving on, moving out

In the middle of my sophomore year my father announced that we were moving from our big home next to the “deaconry” in Elburn to a little house in St. Charles. I was torn in two by the decision because I’d worked hard to make good friends at Kaneland, yet at the same time sensed there was always opportunity for change.

Rumors floated that I was “recruited” to St. Charles by the track and cross country coach Trent Richards, a Kaneland graduate that had coached me in Elburn baseball. Frankly, I wasn’t that great of a runner to be the subject of recruiting or any other tactic. I was just a kid who could run decently trying my best to make a place in the world.

The process of leaving Kaneland for a nearby school was awkward at best. Some of my classmates thought I was doing it on purpose, but the facts were different. I never had any say in the matter. Twenty-five years later, my father told me that we left Kaneland so that my younger brother (6’6″) would not have to play basketball for the slowdown offense at Kaneland. As it turned out, my dad made a good decision. My brother earned All-State Honorable Mention at St. Charles and earned a D1 scholarship.

When my father told me why we moved, I replied, “What about me?”

“I knew you were a social kid,” he responded. “I knew you’d get along.”

No goodbyes

I don’t recall saying goodbye to either Mark Strong or Eric Berry when we moved or as some painful goodbye after the last day of school at Kaneland. That day was anticlimactic, as I recall. My dad picked me up after the last day of classes and we drove away on a warm spring day.

After that I lost touch with most folks at Kaneland except when my buddies at St. Charles wanted to meet the pretty Kaneland girls. I told them, “Look, I didn’t have an inside track when I went there. What makes you think I could do any better now?”

As an athlete in St. Charles, I’d wind up competing against Kaneland in cross country, basketball and track. I was admittedly jealous when the Kaneland track team won the state championship during our senior year. On that front I wondered what it might have been like to stay at that school. Would I have been better or worse off?

A partial answer to that question came weeks after the last day of high school. My “former friend” Mark Strong called me one day and said, “Come on. Let’s go to a party they’re having outside of town. I have some new music for you to hear.”

We piled into Mark’s car. It was good to see him again. He turned the key and started the engine. Then he popped a tape into the deck and started blasting Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Born to Run.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets
Of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory
In suicide machines
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin’ out over the line
Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run
Yes, girl, we were

Mark looked over at me and smiled. “I knew you’d like this…”

I had not yet heard of Springsteen. Then he played some new Supertramp from Crime of the Century. The lyrics in the middle of song nearly knocked me out.

Write your problems down in detail
And take ’em to a higher place
You’ve had your cry, no, I shouldn’t say wail
In the meantime hush your face

Right (quite right), you’re bloody well right
You got a bloody right to say

It felt good to connect with him again. But later at the party we got separated and I was left to wander a backyard bash rife with all kinds of drugs and booze. I was now completely out of my league. The most I’d ever done in high school was drink a few beers. I saw people on speed and pot, drugs that were completely unfamiliar to me. I don’t remember how I got back home that night. Perhaps I found Mark and he drove me to St. Charles. I was relieved. Not saying that I blame Mark for that experience. Quite the opposite. In many respects if was revelatory. I’d learned all I needed to know about the previous two years. I think he was trying to tell me, in some ways, that he was a survivor.

Perhaps it was our mutual experiences dabbling in Christian thinking when we were just 8th graders. Or maybe it was just riding our bikes on quiet streets in downtown Elburn with the stench of the meat packing plant filling our noses that taught us the world could be a stinking place to be. I know now that Mark went on to some challenges in school and such, just as I had done. But he emerged a thinking man and these days, as we recently shared over coffee, he’s a man of strong faith and in eager pursuit of truth related to his religion.

The Sodom Dig

So we caught up recently and I learned that Mark has spent the last several years as an active archeologist working a dig that is suspected to be the city of Sodom, famous in the Bible for its destruction by some cataclysmic event. The dig is ongoing and was the subject of an article in Nature magazine. This is one of those cases where science converges with religion and people are trying to figure out what it all means.

Mark shared one fascinating perspective with me about the findings there and other archeological work in Jordan and other Middle East locations. “We’ve disproven the lineage of Adam through Jesus,” he wryly noted.

“Whoa,” I replied.

“Yeah,” he chuckled.

This is the aspect of Mark Strong that I find most interesting. He unrelentingly follows what the information tells him. Yet he’s also a saved, born-again Christian. In other words, he’s exactly the kind of Christian this world needs if it’s going to be honest about the tradition, history and truth of scripture and everything after.

That’s interesting because while I approach scripture more from the aspect of what I call “outcomes” related to religion and history, science and politics, we have engaged in what one might call “convergent evolution” when it comes to our respective beliefs. Mark is clearly a bit more “conservative” in some aspects of his worldview. I am certainly more “liberal” in my outlook, believing that Christian tradition has gotten many things wrong over the years. But look at us now. We’re still capable of having the same kind of healthily competitive relationship that we did fifty years ago.

We’ll meet again sometime soon. Because while we laughed at some old stories, our worlds now convene very much in the present. He said a prayer for me before we left. I was graced by that action and don’t take such sincerity lightly. That is the right kind of pride, to care and be cared for. We should all be so lucky to cycle through life with that in mind.

Art, caregiving, Christopher Cudworth, the Right Kind of Pride

“Why are you a substitute?”

December 7, 2023 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

For the last few years, I’ve been substitute teaching in four different public school districts in our area. I attended school in two of them, Kaneland from 8th through 10th grade, and St. Charles from Junior to Senior year.

That all came about from having transferred from one district to another during my sophomore year in high school. That wasn’t fun or easy, but I made it work thanks to my interest in sports and general ease in making friends. Twenty-five years after those events, I asked my father why we moved. I said “Dad, I was the top runner and Class President at the Kaneland.” But he told me, “I didn’t want your younger brother to play basketball in that slowdown offense at Kaneland.”

“What about me?” I replied.

“I knew you were a social kid,” he smiled. “I knew you’d survive.”

He was right. Thanks to cross country, basketball and track, plus art class and writing and Key Club and Prairie Restoration, I made lifelong friends.

But while the social and athletic side of life went well enough, I struggled with some subjects from an early age all the way through college. I would not learn until later in life that I was “blessed” with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. From grade school on I’d crush some subjects and do poorly or fail at others. In that respect, I had great company in an artist that I’d come to admire, one my favorites, in fact. Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a bird painter from the early 1900s. He was an artistic genius who also had a tough time with certain subjects. Here’s a clip from his biography.

That was me, too. I spent far too much class time either drawing or dreaming that I’d “come awake” at some point to the fact that I’d entirely lost the point of discussion. Teachers hated that. Attention deficit was poorly understood back then. I recall my mother having meetings with teachers to discuss my progress through the elementary and middle school years. My mother was a teacher also. She tutored kids at our home during after school hours and once told me, “These children have some learning challenges, so we don’t talk about them at school, okay?”

From fog to clarity

Throughout junior high and high school I felt moments of foglike distraction. It would take over my brain during certain classes, especially math, and of course algebra, a subject that bored and exasperated me. Once you’re behind in that class, you stay behind. I got a series of Ds in high school algebra.

But algebra required a type of executive function and organization at which my brain did not excel. I don’t care.

I did well in geometry because it involved shapes. I picked up a love of perspective and measurements from a seventh grade Industrial Drawing class in which the teacher was an taskmaster. We worked to be as perfect as possible during his guidance. I loved the demanding atmosphere. We took blocks of various construction and mapped them out with precise measurements to draw images on light green industrial drawing paper. Then we carefully labeled our drawings in all capital letters. I started write in all caps in everything I did, a habit that reverberates to this day. It all started in seventh grade.

An able substitute

That brings me to why I’m now a substitute teacher on top of my prime occupations of writer and an artist. As so often it happens in life, our perceived strengths can turn out to be weaknesses, and vice versa. Given the fact that I had trouble learning certain subjects in school and processing specific types of information in the work world, I’ve had a professional career much in keeping with my academic experience. Massive successes accompanied by distracted failures.

Many times I’ve wondered if I chose the right career path at all. About fifteen years ago, during a period when my late wife was fighting cancer and I was out of work taking care of her, I wrote a friend about getting back into the marketing world once she was well enough. In a kind and assertive way, he told me, “You know what? You should be a teacher.”

I’d considered that early in life because my mother was a teacher all her life. So was my brother, and I married a teacher back in 1985. That meant I visited tons of classrooms over the years. While I talked to much in most of those teaching opportunities, I slowly learned that teaching is actually getting students to learn by discussion rather than just telling them stuff. Based on that foundation of understanding, I’ve become an able substitute, certified to teach based on my college degree and education.

Those who can’t do, teach…

Perhaps I was haunted during my college years by a statement someone once made in my presence. It was patently false, but it sank into my conscience and never let go. They said, “Those who can’t do , teach.”

Along with my reading of Ayn Rand,’s The Fountainhead during my early 20s, I’d embraced the idea that creators of any kind cannot compromise their principles by “teaching” rather than doing. In my rebellious youth I came to view the teaching profession as somehow “giving in” or “giving up” on the things I loved to do, especially art and writing.

After watching the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, I was moved by the character’s struggle to complete a symphony while juggling his commitment to teaching. Along the way, his “work” as a teacher motivated hundreds of students to “try hard things” as so many arts instructors encourage kids to do. That included a woman student who went on to become governor. The movie ends with a surprise performance of his “American Symphony” that encompassed influences from rock to classical music. It symbolized his desires to create and also stood for the advocacy he had for the arts in the face of the music program he loved being cancelled for lack of funding.

What Mr. Holland learned was that he should not be ashamed at having chosen the teaching profession. It did not mean that he “could not do.” Instead his gift was encouraging and demanding effort from others, and ultimately, from himself as well. His life was not perfect, yet some things were perfected as a result of his trying.

Another lifetime

I can’t say that I would have been a great teacher if I’d allowed myself to pursue that profession. I might well have run afoul of administration with my propensity for self-expression and a strong sense of social justice. I’ve known several teachers that were chased out of schools for the same thing. Yet I remain a strong advocate for public education. I believe in it because there is a darkness about privatizing education by allowing it to be taken over by those who want to censor reality in favor of ideology. There’s a genuine threat of that here in the United States of America. I’ve written books about that threat.

So I haven’t wasted my time or opportunity at what I’ve done. But one can imagine what it would be like to pursue a different path in another lifetime. I do have a talent for teaching. Once after an internal presentation at the marketing company where I worked as the Senior Copywriter, the head Creative Director came up and said, “You should do this for a living.”

That was ten years ago. Now that I’m at the age where getting hired in the creative industry is difficult due to factors such as ageism (“He must not be any good if he hasn’t retired yet…”) I am pushing forward with my art and writing. There are still bills to pay, and I learned the hard way that accepting Social Security when you’re earning too much results in penalties. I had to play catchup after eight years of caregiving through cancer survivorship with my late wife. That’s not easy.

So I’m a substitute teacher because it is the perfect balance of earning income and level of time commitment. Right now I’m in a full-time sub position for an art teacher that tore her Achilles tendon at a trampoline gym and needs a few weeks for rehab after surgery. Over the last three years I’ve taught everything from Pre-K (the age my late wife taught) to Middle School and High School. Every one of those assignments is interesting in its way. The little kids say the darndest things. The middle schoolers try to figure themselves out and the high school kids appreciate if you treat them like actual human beings.

One of the art projects the kids are doing is a self-portrait with one side realistic and the other their interests. My prep sketch.

I do love teaching. I’m not afraid to push kids when the subject presents opportunities to learn. I get them asking questions and let them proceed at their own pace at times. I’ve taught kids with learning difficulties, and have great empathy for them given my own academic history. That includes working as a paraprofessional at times, supporting kids one-on-one through the day if necessary, or just watching them so they don’t wander off on the playground.

I’m a substitute teacher because I like it. Grant you, I’ve got retired teacher friends who still help out in the classroom. Others are so done with teaching they never want to go near a school again. So it’s a they say, “To each their own.”

My approach is taking pride in what I’m doing at any given moment. That’s the Right Kind of Pride. We all arrive at circumstances in life from different timelines and varied perspectives. As the ending of the book Candide observes, and I paraphrase, “We must cultivate our own garden.”

And keep growing.

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Coming to grips with ADHD

October 10, 2023 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

With my late wife Linda Cudworth in 1983.

In late 2012, just a few months before my late wife passed away, she attended a preschool conference presented by an insightful man talking about the effects of attention deficit disorder, or ADD. She came home that day and told me flat out: “This is you.” To her credit, she was offering the advice of a hard-headed woman. We all need that.

While the signs were all around us, we’d never talked about the subject of my occasional and sometimes persistent attention deficit disorder. Up to that point in life, I’d concentrated on coping with the effects of anxiety in my life. I’d been an anxious nailbiter since birth, a condition exacerbated by childhood trauma centered around physical and verbal abuse in the family. In an echo of that youth, I woke up pounding my pillow in anger at the age of twenty-nine.

By that point, I was taking steps to become mentally healthy after muddling through my twenties after a couple of years running full-time in a journeyman’s address of unfinished business. For me, running became the best form of therapy for anxiety and depression. Yet I ultimately needed to back away from the fact that it also ruled my life. I ended my competitive running career at the age of twenty-seven after getting married and conceiving our first child. I’ve always thought that was a mature step to take. I still do.

I still needed to assuage some of the anger resulting from life’s earlier experiences. By my early thirties, I’d sought therapy a few times without any grand results. One psychologist told me that I just needed to be stronger for my wife, and that would cure things. Sometimes we get shitty advice at the worst times in life.

On my own accord, I’d left a messed up job at the terminally corrupt Boy Scouts of America. From there I worked first in sales and then twenty-plus years in marketing with long streaks of career success interrupted by emphatic blunders. Those resulted from my lack of executive function as well as a propensity to talk too much in business situations and uncomfortably overshare because a mind consumed by ADHD unwittingly desires such things. I take responsibility for it all.

Collateral from the literacy program I created and built.

By the time 2005 rolled around, I was working as a marketing manager for the third-largest newspaper in Illinois. I’d built a burgeoning literacy program in collaboration with more than one hundred seventy public libraries serving 375,000 families. That same year, my mother passed away from pancreatic. Instantly, I became a caregiver to both my wife with ovarian cancer, and my father, who’d been a stroke victim since 2003.

Ironically, I thrived on the focus and pressure of caregiving. Little phased me in dealing with medical emergencies or day-to-day needs. Like most competitive distance runners, I thrived on challenges. That’s the stuff I could handle because ADHD actually embraces those functions. I had no problem turning my attention to what my wife or father needed. Hyperfocus is the superpower of ADHD.

It was always boredom that I dreaded. Quiet moments with nothing going on. God Forbid. That’s why I eventually took up cycling to complement the running. And later on, even swimming. Because moving is my salvation from inattention. It calms my brain. Allows me to think. I solve problems and come home ready to deal with reality. Boom.

Then there was the writing and the art. For those eight years with my late wife going in and out of remission, dealing with countless chemotherapy sessions and surgeries to boot, I’d sit my ass down and write my way through the stress. Or paint. The blogs I wrote to all the people supporting us through a caregiving website became the book I wrote about that journey. I titled it The Right Kind of Pride, pointing to vulnerability as the best kind of honesty and virtue.

As things wound down in 2012 and my wife struggled with seizures caused by cancer that had moved to her brain, she kept on teaching at the preschool where she worked. That was her salvation. Keep on keeping on. Yet after brain surgery and intense radiation treatments in early 2013, she needed steroids to cope with the bodily inflammation. Hyped up on powerful drugs, her personality went off the register and she lost functional capabilities and judgment. The preschool teaching had to end.

Yet before that period when her own health and mental state were fragile, she’d taken a cool look at my version of reality and shared that she’d seen enough in that presentation on ADD to know that I was definitely on that spectrum. All those years of lost keys and forgotten appointments, unfinished projects or commitments not quite fulfilled had taught her that I was possessed of a type of mental illness that didn’t just “go away” on its own.

I needed help. Yet for all her prescience, it would still take a few years to act on her wisdom.

Sometimes help comes in tangents, not in straight lines. During a therapy session with a counselor from Living Well Cancer Resource Center, the psychologist noted that I’d done well for years working with my demanding father despite age-old differences and emotional conflicts. “You seem good at forgiving others,” she observed. “How are you at forgiving yourself?”

That was an eye-opening observation. From that point on I was less harsh on myself for emotional failings and/or taking blame for familial disagreements. I’d stayed strong for my dad and my wife all those years despite many career and financial challenges along the way. I’d stayed the course. Forgiven what was needed to move on. We all do our best. That hasn’t resolved all the issues of course. Life is always a work in progress.

The big issue left to resolve was how to work with how my brain actually works. After all, I’d managed to produce plenty in life. Solo art shows. Written books and published limited edition prints. Placed articles in national magazines. That shit wasn’t all bad!

Yet it wasn’t until recently when my son Evan raised the issue of ADHD in our lives that I fully accepted the impact it has had on us. Looking back, I recall teacher conferences in which my mother (herself a teacher) met with instructors to discuss my lack of attention in class. Later on, through high school, I nearly failed subjects such as algebra if they disinterested me. Yet I got A’s in subjects I liked. I made it through college with a 3.1 average out of 4.0 but suffered some bad grades along the way. That’s life with ADHD. You can do nine out of ten things well, but the tenth one will bite you in the ass.

To this day, I realize that ADHD impinges on my ability to grasp certain kinds of material. That has cost me jobs, money, and even relationships. While I pride myself on paying attention to friends and family, sometimes I miss what people really want from me. There is considerable pain that comes with that gap in action and understanding.

Coming to grips with the impact of ADHD is not an easy thing. While forgiving yourself is a direct process, and dealing with the inevitable outcomes of an inherent mental condition is vital, seeking forgiveness from others isn’t an easy task. All we can do is keep trying.

In the meantime, I pat my pockets whenever I go out the door. To that end, I am vigilant about ADHD. I also remarried and my wife Sue looks at me differently than anyone I’ve ever known. An occasional “forget” is no big deal to her. Lacking that pressure, I seem to forget less than ever as a result. A hard-headed woman is a good thing to find. I’ve been blessed in life with a couple of them.

Art, caregiving, character, Christopher Cudworth, community, the Right Kind of Pride

Ten years on: and then some

March 20, 2023 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

I am chagrined to realize that the last post I wrote in this blog was a year ago. On that front, I can simply state that my energies went into completing a book now published. It is titled Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How to Make It Happen. If you want to keep up with that project and how it relates to the world we live in today, you can find me on TikTok as @genesisfix.

Today, on this blog, I have a testimonial to write. It has been ten full years on March 26, 2013, since my late wife Linda Cudworth passed away after eight years of ovarian cancer survivorship. She’s the reason I wrote the book The Right Kind of Pride, A Chronicle of Character, Caregiving and Community. The book talks positively about vulnerability, the aspect of character enabling people to be honest about their circumstances and trusting that other people will understand.

The actual definition of vulnerability is somewhat harsher than my description above. Vulnerability: the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.

Perhaps that’s why people shy away from the idea of being vulnerable at all. Fearing attack for showing their true selves, they feel safer keeping their distance or even letting a sign of supposed weakness show at all.

We purchased her a bike to ride when neuropathy made it hard for her to do the daily walks she loved.

For us, I can testify that showing weakness turned out to be a sign of strength. We were blessed by the support of so many people that at times the help almost overflowed. That’s not bragging. That’s an expression of gratitude. Without the help of others through years of cancer treatments, chemotherapy, surgeries, medical challenges + emergencies, emotional breakdowns, loss of work, financial stress, and finally, a move into palliative care and hospice, those eight years would have been hard to endure. My brothers helped. Our friends helped. Even strangers helped. In some cases those people became friends. In others, they were practical angels when needed most. All were appreciated.

We made it through to enjoy periods of remission where things sort of felt normal. She got to attend school plays and concerts, see her kids graduate from high school and watch one of them graduate from college. She only missed seeing her daughter “walk” during college graduation by a few months.

So this isn’t a complaint or a “woe is us” moment. This tenth anniversary of her passing is a statement of respect and love. She lived as fully as anyone that I ever met. In fact, her example resonates to this day with all that knew her. I still get messages from people whose gardens still blossom with the plants she divided and gave them over the years. I also meet the parents of the former preschool students that she taught. They recall her kindness and loving nature with fond hearts and gratitude. Those were her two loves outside God and family. Her garden and her “kids” were always close to her heart.

The watering of her lilies and garden in late June.

She loved so many things that I used to kid her that I was glad to be ranked in her “Top Ten” any given week. She’d laugh a bit because we kidded each other often. But Linda was also known to have a biting sense of humor on many occasions. Despite her sweetness, there was a sharp intellect and cutting sense of humor inside her. She used it mostly with those she loved the most, creating inside jokes that made potentially dull moments more interesting. She’d also tease our kids sometimes, but mostly she found ways to praise them.

Our children Evan and Emily Cudworth posing for a Christmas photo with a Red Ryder BB gun famous from A Christmas Story.

She looked for ways to bring unity to many situations. During a family reunion up north in Minnesota, she wryly nicknamed the handsome young (often shirtless) dock attendant Mr. Boat. That was his job, fetching fishing boats moored away from shore, and whenever one of us wanted to go fishing she’d chirp, “Better call Mr. Boat!” Her powers of observation were that way about many things in life. She chose her favorite shows based on a high standard captured in the phrase, “This is interesting,” which was not given out to just any old show. Usually, that meant the show was either refined or educational. She also loved historical dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs the series Downton Abbey, and nature shows narrated by Richard Attenborough.

And yet, she loved the silly stuff too, as with shows such as 30 Rock, where an episode could send her into fits of giggles if the absurdity caught up with her.

Nothing captured her imagination quite like gardening, however. She’d pore through catalogs seeking the best new plants, especially specimens few other gardens had. A walk through a typical garden center with her elicited winces and looks askance at the colorful yet commonplace pansies or petunias. Her garden pots as a result were works of genuine, living art. And once during my participation in an Artists In Action event in downtown Geneva, Illinois, her dried plant arrangements outsold my artwork by a far margin. I didn’t hear the end of that for quite sometime.

During one of our fall travels to the Morton Arboretum. A small portion of her ashes were discreetly placed in the Daffodil Garden.

I loved her for all these reasons. Yet I also knew that once the cancer diagnosis hit, it would be tough for her to live it out beyond a certain number of years. Had I not chased her to the gynecologist that spring of 2013, she might not have lived even a year beyond whenever it showed up at last. But getting checked out saved her life in many respects. It took aggressive surgery and chemo treatments to knock back cancer, but she/we did it time and again. She was tough as nails so many times. Even her doctor, a highly respected gynecological oncologist with many years of practice told her, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.”

A formal portrait from our church. We moved to a more open-minded congregation during the last year of her life.

That was her will to live at work. Obviously, I was her closest admirer, but there were many whose involvement in our lives proved vital to her survival. But by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist saw that she could not rise from the examination table on her own, I was pulled aside to learn that it was time to prepare for the end. That’s when I really knew. It was time to say goodbye.

In truth, and I don’t say this with shame, I’d been preparing myself for many years before she passed. This is called anticipatory grief. It takes place when you see parts of someone you love being taken away. People dealing with situations in which loved ones or friends aresuffering from diseases such as dementia or Parkinson’s know the process too well. Bearing witness to the disappearance of that person you knew is painful. Indeed, my freshman-year roommate and running teammate Keith from Luther College was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long after losing his wife Kristi to ovarian cancer. He dealt with its effects for more than a decade, including slowed speech and movement limitations. Yet he kept his wry sense of humor. Yet what a strange thing to have to happen in life. Those two 18-year-old kids that roomed together as cross-country teammates at Luther College could never know that both of our wives would battle the same disease.

My roommate Keith leading our team. I’m at left in the second group.

Keith and his wife Kristi had been together since they were high schoolers. She and my late wife had quiet conversations about their respective cancer journeys whenever we were all together at college reunions or other events. Recently, one of his daughters sent me a Luther College Bear made from some of his tee shirts. We keep each other company in spirit.

I wrote a poem about the anticipatory grief experienced in preparing for Linda’s passing. That’s the only way I could put all the thoughts together. I’ll place that poem here for your consideration. Perhaps you’re experiencing a change in your life that brings grief about in some way. I hope you know that you’re not alone. And if you feel moved to do so, you can share your experience at chris@christophercudworth.com. I’ve communicated with many people over these years. Sometimes it helps a bit to share.

Anticipatory Grief

At four o’clock a.m., she woke me from sleep

and shook a sheet of paper calling out, “I found the car!”

She’d been up for an hour researching new Subarus

on the Internet and that fact alone was shocking

because she despised almost everything

about technology and how it seemingly ruled our lives.

Our car is still rolling ten years later.

She dug into the website of Gerald Subaru to look through the selection of Outbacks and found the bronzy brown color she desired and printed out the sale sheet with all the stats so that we could go that day and buy the car.

Already we’d experienced the side effects of steroids

from the cancer that passed through the blood-brain

barrier even though it is never supposed to do that.

On December 26 we met with the neurologist

who explained the procedure he proposed

in fine detail, with the clamp on the head

for excision and radiation followed by

a prescription of steroids to stop the swelling.

Her personality grew my increments as the drugs

did their job, reducing inhibitions dramatically

as she spent money we did not have and looked up

cars that we probably should not buy

because I was taking time out of work

to care for her needs.

Fortunately, my credit rating was so high up on the charts

that the car dealership didn’t ask too many questions

and we drove the new vehicle off the lot

with that strange sense of hope enhanced

by that new car smell.

She would get to ride in that car just three more times

as the steroids wore off and her body slowed down

unable to keep up with the rolling effects of ascites

and everything else that goes with ovarian cancer.

It had been years since her first diagnosis

in late spring when my mother also learned

that she was fighting a different kind of cancer

and my father was tied down with the effects

of a life-changing stroke.

Upon hearing these bits of news, a longtime coach

and friend called on the phone with encouragement

saying, “Your whole life has been a preparation for this.”

All that run training, patience, and perseverance learned in athletics

was called upon in caregiving for years to come.

There were late nights sitting in hospitals waiting

for surgeries to finish, and days spent perched

on partly comfortable chairs waiting for her body

to recover with some sign of digestive activity

usually indicated by a loud fart of some sort

at which the nurses often cheered.

We found humor where we could and between

repeated rounds of chemotherapy there were periods

of remission in which she could return to gardening

her primary love in life along with God and family.

My job was supporting these efforts no matter which direction

they tended to move, and without the help of so many

there were times when I might have frozen in place

lacking hope where there should be some despite all the worries.

The prayers piled up as high as they could go

and people even laid hands on her in a religious attempt

at ridding her body of disease, but she hated it,

the ceremony I mean, because it felt to her

like testing God, or what we knew of such things.

Her main goal was to be free of cancer somehow

and did not like being the center of so much attention

or the need to get so sick that life itself felt like a cruel prank

in the face of nausea, neuropathy, and skin peeling

from her hands as she was gardening.

Linda in her parent’s backyard on the 4th of July, one of her favorite holiday. But she loved them all.

Eventually, her hair was all gone and never came back

while the veins in her arms were so tired from injections

that the nurses had to warm and slap the skin

just to find an entry point for the medicine

or whatever one might try to call the poison

that cancer treatment so often requires.

The wigs she chose evolved from modest

to a bit wilder as she said “Fuck it!

I’m going to look like I want to look with the time that I have.”

Yet she was never negative, only resolute.

Visiting my Paoli apartment during our second year of dating in 1982.

For exercise, she wanted a bike because walking

numbed her feet so we picked up a matte green

Trek and she went pedaling on the Great Western Trail

while I rode along behind because I did not want

to pressure her to go too fast. That was how we proceeded

in many things, because I wanted her to last.

She let it all out that day with a burst of speed, clinging to the wig

on top of her head as the tires rolled on crushed limestone

taking her away from the feeling that life was limited.

I rode along behind feeling the breeze of anticipatory grief across my face.

In some way she knew what was coming as well,

and that Subaru was a last grasp at life itself.

A week later she could hardly get off the examination table

And by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist

pulled me aside, there was true empathy in her recommendation

that we go to palliative care.

Sharing a kiss after I’d won a road race in 1984.

In many respects, I’d been there for years

because the woman I’d known, or the person she wanted to be

had been slowly stripped away by cancer’s rigors

and all that it represents. That means letting parts of yourself go

because there is no other choice.

She gave up calling me by the nickname “Lover”

and used the name Chris whenever we talked.

During those last weeks, I sat by her bed

asking forgiveness for whatever ways I might have failed her

if that was the case. In response, she turned to me and said,

“Oh, Chris, I’m sorry about all the stuff.”

She referred to all the keepsakes and everything kept in boxes

throughout the house from basement closets

to kitchen cabinets, and while she was no hoarder

I found more than thirty baskets in different styles

along with some money kept in quiet boxes

as a stash for new garden supplies.

Never did I begrudge her a dime spent on her love because

she’d sit outside facing her garden with a gin and tonic

admiring her work as the sprinklers graced the lilies

with moisture and the bergamot shared its wild bee scents

on summer evenings. Bats flew overhead and an occasional

nighthawk with its odd reaching up to a partial moon

as evening fell.

These things sustained her determination,

as she didn’t quit living even to the day she died.

We had to move her from the back bedroom

to a living room medical bed

and the EMTs rolled her through the house

on a computer chair in an act of inelegant

practicality. When she was settled back in bed

She looked up at me with a laugh and said

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to suffer.”

As the medical team went about its work that day

It was advice from her gynecological oncologist

that stayed with me. “This is coming to a close,”

he advised, “There’s nothing to be gained

in being negative. So be positive. Lie if you have to.”

Linda with my parents and Evan, our firstborn.

Those are the mercies of reality

because let us not fool ourselves with false positives

or true negatives. Instead, reckon with the truth

in each our own way. Years before, I’d ushered her

through an emotional breakdown brought on

by the fact that the cancer was back.

That truth was far too hard to condense

and much harder to swallow and I lost my wife

for a while to wherever the mind goes

when it can’t take it anymore.

A close friend and nurse then told me

“She’s going to need you now more than ever,

as her entire affect is off, and she’s afraid

of everything but you.” That was true,

so we held hands everywhere we went

until the shock finally wore off

and we invited short visits from trusted quiet friends,

those women she loved that could comfort her soul.

One of the many monarchs we “ranched” and released from her Batavia garden.

We never knew how cancer took hold, the disease

perhaps emanating from baby powder or talcum

as the legal advertisements later implied,

yet far too late for a cure, or recompense.

There is no room for second-guessing the past

when the future bears down on you from behind

and the difficult part about dealing with death

is how to handle it with children still facing most of their lives.

Surely, I did not handle that perfectly well

because anticipatory grief is an advance

salve for the soul before it all comes to pass.

That is also why on the week that she died,

I attended a Good Friday service and my brother told me,

“Dude, you’re walking straight into the pain.”

At the service, an interim pastor greeted me

with a tear in his eye and said, “It’s good that you’re here.”

Who knows the proper way to handle

the passing of a spouse of twenty-eight years

and four years of dating before that?

The immediacy of life’s endings all depend

on practical facts such as when

the afternoon nurse gives way to the night nurse,

and things seem to be winding down.

I recall her presence well, a slight woman with deep dark skin

and an even deeper appreciation of all that was about to transpire.

She stepped in the door and greeted me with something different

than a smile, but not sad, instead taking a long look across the room

at the woman in the home hospice bed breathing deeply.

Then she moved into the kitchen to prepare for the evening.

My son and daughter and I remained in the living room

with their mother and my wife for hours as her breathing grew heavy

and finally the night nurse came into the room and gestured to us

to gather at the bed, each family member holding a hand

or gracing her face with a kiss. Then it grew quiet

because there was nothing more to say.

I glanced at both my children, as each had come

from different places, one in New York and the other

from college to be back with their mother

who’d survived eight hard years to see them

grow into adults, or at least part of the way.

A trip to Chicago during one of her remission periods.

Then the arrangements began and we knew not what to do

but retreat from the finality of her last presence

as the funeral people took over for the transition to ashes

as were her wishes, but not her hopes.

That night the three of us could not bear to be apart

so we joined as children to watch the movie “Wreck It Ralph”

and its playfully destructive theme seemed just right

to distract us from the woes of loss and pain

and numbness, a heartfelt stain that does not always go away.

Our family was always able to talk

But never so amusingly as the day

that I dragged them all to therapy

when the news first hit

that Linda would be fighting cancer

and I wanted us all to be on the same page

in holding our bonds together.

They all participated patiently yet after the session

my son turned to us and said “I could have done all that.”

He proceeded to describe all of us in terms of personality

and how we got along and then he said some words

that I vowed to respect when he advised,

“Dad, just tell us the truth.”

That is what we all tried to abide during all those years,

allowing concessions for caution when the news

was not clear or the prognosis was still being determined

and only then could we be truthful enough

to offer direction, a parent’s prerogative.

These words are begging forgiveness for my own vain need

to tell all these stories as the means to process

what so many others go through in so many different ways.

I only hope they aid some others familiar

with these transitions in life.

I will also confess to needing affirmation on many fronts,

even going so far as self-aggrandizement on more than one occasion.

Also noted are mistakes made during all that caregiving

and one stands out in my mind, the day that she

needed to choke down the most awful liquids

in advance of a barium treatment test

and I grew impatient with her knowing

that her chemo regimen made even good food taste bad.

Yet I still stepped out on the back porch to chide her

with a call to just get it done. Her eyes flashed

and she raised two middle fingers with just two words

that to go along with that gesture,

and I deserved that.

The real object of her fury was the disease itself,

because it was the cause of all that trouble

and deserved to be told to go away

in the harshest of terms.

As they say, we “lost a good one” on March 26, 2013,

and yet there was one more moment of mysterious reckoning

when a friend of my daughter stayed over one night

as night as a gesture of support in the week following

her mother’s death.

The young woman lay on our couch with her feet facing

the spot where my wife’s head had been positioned

in the medical bed, when a set of three orbs of light,

one green, one white, one red, appeared glowing

in the darkness. Her scientific mind hesitated to tell us

that next morning, but we trusted that what she’d seen

was genuine and real.

A photo from our honeymoon taken at Waterton north of Glacier Park, 1985

These events form a helix of memories and realities

that we all seek to unravel with time, yet my perspective

on finality has forever been changed by the people lost

to life’s vagaries and its inevitable conclusion.

Call it anticipatory grief if you will, but I’ll not forget what

the night nurse told me after my wife had passed away.

“She was already gone before I arrived.”

A year after the world changed I sat next

to one of my wife’s closest friends who told me,

“You know, she told me that she knew you’d date

after she was gone.” I thanked her for that,

but related that I was glad she waited to share

that information because we all still need to make

our own decisions in this world. They are often

no easier to make than any other, and whether

we lose a wife or a father or mother,

there still remains a path to walk or run

and it takes resolve to not come undone.

appreciate what love means, character, Christopher Cudworth, community, God is love, love abounds, the Right Kind of Pride

Enneagram wisdom: “True strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable”

March 24, 2022 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

Taking pride in vulnerability does not mean always being scared or sad. It’s quite the opposite. It’s about being authentic in whatever situation you find yourself in life.

One of my new work cohorts encouraged me to take an Enneagram test to see where my personality fits on the spectrum of such things. I signed up on Truity and paid $19.99 to get the full results. The outcomes were interesting, with all my best qualities and flaws laid out in black and white.

Somewhere late in the PDF, which is replete with graphs and charts about personality and life traits, I noticed a quote highlighted in the headline of this article. “True strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” I sat there a minute and thought: “That’s exactly what I meant by calling my book “The Right Kind of Pride.”

The Right Kind of Pride is precisely that: the consistent action of taking pride in the willingness and courage to be vulnerable.

As for that book, I’m pretty sure that some people are scared or uncomfortable about reading a book about cancer survivorship. But it’s not JUST about that. The eighty-plus blogs I compiled speak to the the value of authenticity in all situations.

Here’s the basic fact: All of us must be survivors of one kind or another. Plus, none of us gets out of this world alive. All I can say is that when it comes to getting through the tough things in life, vulnerability is truly powerful.

Caregiving

Over eight years of caregiving that was the principal way that I found hope and support.

Originally, I oversaw my mother’s journey through lymphoma and pancreatic cancer, followed by a stroke and finally hospice. Her passage left me in charge of caregiving for my father Stewart Cudworth, a stroke victim from 2002. I would remain his caregiver through his passing in 2015 at 89 years of age.

That all began in 2005, the same year that my wife was diagnosed with Stage IIC ovarian cancer. Immediately I was graced by an offer of support from the preschool director and her team of teachers at the school where my late wife Linda taught. For the next eight years, those people and many others (thank God) were willing to help us through the ups and downs of cancer treatments, including surgeries and recovery, chemotherapy, prodigious drugs and side effects, and emotional challenges deeper than we’d ever imagined possible. We’d make it through one segment of treatment to remission only to have the cancer return. That progressed with rapidity like the sound of a ping-pong ball as it taps out from its original dropped height.

During all that time I blogged to our caregiving support group about the blessings and challenges we experienced, and things we learned along the way. Those blogs formed the bulk of the book I wrote titled The Right Kind of Pride. Then I wrote a prologue and epilogue, including A Goofball’s Guide to Grief. Because I am. A goofball.

Making the most of my hair before it all went away in my late 20s.

Personal journal

But I also kept a personal journal for thoughts that were not ready for public consumption at the time. I’d actually forgotten about those words until recently when I opened up a thick journal given to me by my mother-in-law for my July birthday in 2012.

I’d been thrown out of work earlier that year by an employer who fired me the day after they learned my wife had cancer. So I was freelancing and trying to cover everything from COBRA insurance costs to the daily costs of living. Fortunately, I was able to find bits and pieces of work to tide us through, all while dealing with the difficult fact that Linda’s health was decreasing in quality. She started having seizures in the fall of 2012, and then we discovered a brain tumor that required surgery, radiation and steroids to treat, and after that, things got really tough.

Calm realizations

At that point in February of 2013, I landed a new job and was trying to do my best at it. But the daily challenges of helping her through were significant. By February 11, it was even tough for her to get around. “Linda sleeping on the couch upstairs,” I wrote in the journal. “Chuck is on the Ottoman, leaning on my leg until a few minutes ago. Following me around all day. Linda improved a bit, for a while anyway. Big day tomorrow. Meeting Dr. Ferris and Dr. Dolan.”

We made it to the appointment with the medical oncologist Dr. Ferris. But things didn’t go all that well. She could barely stand to lie on the table, and the doctor pulled me aside and made a calm recommendation of palliative care going forward. I knew what that meant. And besides, Linda was too exhausted from gut swelling and fatigue to make the trip from Warrenville to Advocate Lutheran General to see the physician that treated her so well from the outset. I could barely get her home.

Constructive thoughts

I wrote in the journal on February 14, Valentine’s Day 2013, “Well, my objective with this journal is to focus on constructive thoughts rather than destructive, which so many other journals in this house seem to have been. In a constructive fashion, therefore, it is still important, most important, to acknowledge that Linda Mues Cudworth––or Linda Ann––is in the process of dying. She has been a most wonderful wife all these 28 years, and wants to continue if only she could. But her cancer is catching up with our dreams of going places together and doing things. We had both promised to get to Glacier this year––together, if her health would allow it. Now it seems more likely she will be gone, the earthly part of her that I so love anyway. Our relationship has gotten richer these past 8 years. Richer than money and wealth combined. Our mutual failings and weaknesses have fallen away. She has told me that she loves me and I believe her now. I have told her that I love her and she knows it now. Our wedding vows have been fulfilled; for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”

We made many trips to Decorah, Iowa over the years. One of the prettiest spots in the Midwest.

Reading those words again nine years after she passed away on March 26, 2013, gives me both sadness and satisfaction. We did the best we could all through those years. “Sunrises and sunsets still await,” I continued writing in the journal that February. “And spring as well. Hurts so much to know that she may not be with me. So soon. So sudden. Yet we have lived well together, the best we know how. I love you Linda. I always will. God Bless your kind and spirited heart. Forever.”

The promise of vulnerability

It would still be weeks before the end of her life came. But we opened our lives at that point, trying to bring our children and family, friends, and associates into the sphere of vulnerability. If you absorb nothing else from these words, please embrace the truth that “true strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” We lived that reality and I can promise you that while things don’t always happen or end how you’d like or expect, the courage to be vulnerable is one of the most valuable human traits of all. It expands all the good things that life has to give.

It’s fascinating to study yourself objectively through a test like Enneagram. It’s a valuable thing to learn what emotions and character traits drive you from within, and how that translates to life and relationships. And it’s the core of who we are that matters. Letting others see that in you can be a wonderfully empowering force in life.

Linda Cudworth passed away on March 26, 2013. While appreciating her life, I am grateful for the things life and love continues to bring.

appreciate what love means, caregiving, Christopher Cudworth, community, love abounds, the Right Kind of Pride

A December 26 one cannot forget

December 27, 2021 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

The day after Christmas in 2012, my wife Linda and I were scheduled to meet with a neurologist at the Central Dupage Cancer Treatment Center. We managed to have Christmas together with her family that year even though her father passed away that winter. He’d had a heart attack while sawing up a giant oak in his own backyard, Following that incident, he developed dangerous swelling in his legs that ultimately led to kidney failure.

All that fall, we teetered back and forth between hope and reality for my father-n-law. He did kidney dialysis, and it seemed to work, but swelling kept coming back.

Meanwhile, Linda was experiencing an series of seizures. We thought they were a side effect from yet another set of chemotherapy treatments. In any case, it was scary stuff. We’d be out for a gentle walk and her body would start to tremor and shake, but she refused to give up her love of movement and being out in the sunshine.

A combined team of oncologists from Central-Dupage hospital and our longtime gynecological oncologist Dr. James Dolan conferred on her condition. Finally a test was ordered to check the condition of her brain. On December 26, we found out the disturbing news. The ovarian cancer that had afflicted her since 2005 had reached her brain.

“It’s not supposed to be able to breach the blood-brain border,” an oncologist told us. “But here we are.”

We sat together facing yet another shock on December 26, 2012.

It had been a long and difficult year. Back in March, I’d been fired from my job the day after the company learned that she had cancer. We’d kept her cancer a private matter when I started the job, but I finally had to tell them when it came roaring back late that winter. I knew that she’d require more attention with driving her to appointments, staying with her through chemotherapy and taking care of her in between treatments.

Granted, we had a wonderful caregiving team built up around us, but there are always some things that only the immediate family can handle, especially in a life-threatening situation. So I explained our situation in simple terms to the company where I worked, and they promised us support. That was on a Monday, but by Tuesday morning they came forward with an accusation that I’d breached company policy by posting an image of the work I’d done for a client on my personal website. When I walked into work that day, I came face to face the owner, an HR director and a lawyer equipped with all kinds of documents telling me that I’d somehow put the company’s reputation at risk.

No consideration was offered for the stress I might have been under, or how that situation might have affected my judgment. I was out the door and soon forced to pay $2000 a month in COBRA premiums to hang onto medical insurance. All because the owner was frightened that my wife’s condition might increase the company’s insurance premiums.

I appealed the case to the Unemployment system and was blown out of the water by the judge holding the teleconference. He introduced all the evidence the company presented and disallowed everything that I’d provided in relation to the case. I was railroaded, in other words, by a labor-sympathetic judge. Even my best friend, a labor law attorney, was disgusted by the outcome.

But rather than dwell in that space forever, I chose to reach out to that owner in subsequent years and we talked about all that had happened. Forgiveness took place.

But that didn’t help us in the near term.

Little miracles

That summer we struggled to make bills, and sat together praying one night that I’d find a freelance job to cover the $3500 we needed to make ends meet. That next morning an envelope arrived through our front door. It was stuffed with $3700. We hadn’t spoken to anyone about our situation. Other money from our church came our way as well. We hung on, kept her treatments going, but the cancer was relentless. By fall, a tumor was discovered next to her colon. If it could not be removed, the whole colon would need to come out. Then she’d need a colostomy operation. I admit that I was not looking forward to that outcome.

The gynecological oncologist did miracles in the surgery room and my selfish prayers were answered. And then, the day my wife got out of the hospital after surgery, we drove straight to the hospital where her father lay dying.

Crash course

My cycling jersey after the bike crash in September of 2012

As if that had not been enough challenges to face in 2012, I was still recovering from a bike accident that happened earlier that fall. In September I was cycling in a rare weekend getaway with friends while my wife staye back home to spendtime with her family. During the ride, I was cruising down a long hill at 40 mph when a case of bike wobble set in. I crashed in dramatic fashion, flying off the bike and tumbling down and embankment where I lay in shock with a broken collar bone. My friends didn’t know where I’d gone. One of them was ahead of me by fifty yards and the other had not yet crested the hill when I crashed. So I got help from a band of other cyclists who called for an ambulance. I wound up in a tiny Wisconsin hospital in Dodgeville. They pumped me full of Vicodin until someone finally reached the wife of one of my friends. She’s a nurse, and she came to gather me up for the trip back to our campsite.

All that time, my wife was at her parent’s house having yet another seizure. My daughter begged her to go to the hospital, but in typical fashion, wife refused. When the call came that I’d been in a bad bike crash my daughter was in the center of all sorts of trauma. A dying grandfather, a mother shaking to death from cancer, and a father now injured badly after a bike accident.

The effects of trauma

We tend to take these traumas too much for granted in our lives, but they do have long-term effects. We grieve, but perhaps we do not fully process what’s gone on. We move out of that emotional space, but probably not all the way. We deal with what we can in the moment, but life has its demands. So we trundle on. Not fully healed, yet not terminally damaged. If we’re lucky.

During the late stages of my wife’s life, my son was working in New York City. He had to deal with all this strange news from afar. “Do I need to come home?” he asked. It was hard to tell him everything that was going on. It was even harder to figure out what expect of him. My wife said, “Tell Evan I’m fine. I don’t want him to worry.”

My daughter was finally off at college after two+ years of coursework at a community college. She was doing amazing things in her communications studies, even doing live spots on public radio that summer. Her mother was so proud and amazed. We’d sit close to my Mac listening to the live stream and she’d turn to me and go, “That’s Emily!?” Hearing our daughter work professionally on the radio was a welcome joy.

Dealing with the options

But the events of that year kept overwhelming us. And that brings us back to that moment in the cancer treatment center when we found out that my wife’s cancer had moved into her brain. “Here’s what we can do,” the neurologist told us. “We can go in through the top of the head and excise it. Then we’ll apply radiation.”

We sat there thinking about those options. My wife did not have to think long. “Yes,” she said with resolve. And she smiled, “I mean, why not?”

Why not, indeed. We’d been through multiple surgeries, countless rounds of chemotherapy and many times, we got back to some form of ‘new normal.’ But this felt different to me. I looked over at her and smiled. She gave a thumbs up sign when she was ready to go.

Before the brain surgery and radiation. I’ve kept this photo for ten years.

So we came back for the treatment. They didn’t even have to shave her head. She’d lost her hair several times over through treatments, and this time her hair had not come back at all. She stripped off her wig and they began the process of affixing a stabilizing unit to her skull. It consisted of a circular metal band with screws that would be used to hold her head completely still. She posed for a couple quick selfies using the Photo Booth application in my little black Mac Laptop, and off she went.

The treatment worked. They captured and killed the cancer in her brain. The seizures stopped. They gave her a steroid prescription to deal with the swelling caused by the surgery and radiation. From there it was off to the races. Those steroids turned her into a Survival Machine. Her personality became magnified. She cleaned and cooked and sat up writing lesson plans for the preschool classes she taught. But as the steroids added up in her system, her sense of judgment disappeared. She spent money we didn’t have. One night she researched a new car, and that next day, we drove to the Subaru dealership and bought it. I wasn’t sure if she was getting money from her parents or what, but I sensed that something final was happening, and decided to go with the flow.

The steroid effect

Toward the end of February, she could no longer handle teaching at the preschool she loved. Her spaciness increased, and it frankly put the children at risk. I collaborated with her director to ease her out of the position. That was absolutely necessary. Yet despite our efforts to be kind, something in her broke the day that she learned she could no longer teach.

Once the steroid prescription was eased, her body and mind fell slowly back to a normal state. That was when I knew that she would not live much longer. The stress and fatigue of eight years of cancer survivorhood wore her out. During one of our last visits with the oncologist before bringing her home for palliative care, she was too damned tired to even get off the treatment room table. I spoke quietly with the oncologist that day. She was kind. And honest. And earnest. “Take care of her,” she told me.

Linda Mues Cudworth passed away peacefully in our home in March of 2013. My son and daughter were together with me that night. It is both a blessing and a strange truth to be present when someone you love that much passes into eternity.

Aftermath

We’ve all gone through gyrations in the wake of her passing. My son suffered through depression and a period of addiction. He’s emerged with a will not just to survive, but to help others process their mental health in constructive ways.

My daughter was just coming into her own as a young woman when my wife passed way. In many ways, that left a void in her that is hard, if not impossible, to completely heal. Every year, she recognizes more of her mother in herself, and the pain of losing her mom keeps turning over. Those are legitimate feelings. I know other women that have lost their mothers. I wish at times they could all talk with my daughter.

As for me, I’m not sure that I fully processed all that happened that year, or perhaps the many years before. During my wife’s eight years of cancer survivorship, I was also the primary caregiver for my father after my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2005. That was the same year that my wife Linda was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

My father lived another four years after Linda died, and I did my best to take care of him. After my wife’s passing, I admit that what I wanted most was to be free of the constant pain and fear involved in caregiving. But there was still a job to do.

Coping

During the eight years of caring for her, I’d been on and off supportive medications such as Lorazepam to help me deal with the anxiety of caregiving. It did its trick as needed, but some of that stress sinks deep into your soul.

I recall trying to ride my bike with friends during that period. I’d be out on a fifty or sixty mile ride with them, but when it came time to ride hard or compete, as cyclists love to do, I often did not have the will to keep up. I’m pretty sure that what I experienced was an active sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not the kind that comes from being in a war, or witnessing a murder, but the kind that comes from not being able to deal with personal shocks over and over.

As a form of therapy, I started blogging to our caregiving group to communicate some of the feelings I had about the things we were going through. Much of that was quite positive, and I’m proud that we found ways to find blessings and hope in all that trauma. That’s the right kind of pride. This blog is an echo of all that.

Anniversary

But this year, when December 26 rolled around, I realized it’s been ten years since that strange day when we found out that the cancer had moved into her brain. Once we knew the cause of her seizures, it explained quite a bit about what was going on with her body

But it also brought on conflicted feelings in my mind. Should I hope for her to continue going through the stress and pain of cancer survivorship? At that point, I began to grieve in real time. I understood that I no longer wanted to see her go through the awful stuff. The sickness. The numb feet and hands. The fear. The trauma of surgeries. The loss of life quality. Giving up the things she loved to do. None of that is ever what I wanted for her. It certainly wasn’t what she wanted. Some part of me was relieved when the pain was over. Through faith and reason and love of life, I began to move on.

For these reasons, I got ahead of most of the people in my life by recognizing that she was not going to make it through the year in 2013. I didn’t know how long it would be before she died, but I knew for certain that it would happen. Even her doctors were astounded at the job she’d done for so long in staying alive.

That’s not the kind of news that people want to hear from the primary caregiver, so I kept it to myself. Perhaps that was a mistake of some sort. But my wife had plowed through so many obstacles during her years as a cancer survivor that none of us could imagine it coming to an end. She was so tough about staying alive it did not make sense to question her. She surely showed us all what it means to love life. She loved her children fiercely, almost to a fault at times.

Endings

So we didn’t make end-of-life elaborate plans. We were so occupied with keeping her alive that we never discussed what to do when she died. But earlier in life, we’d talked about cremation, so that’s what we did. Her ashes rest under a grave marker next to her father in the Lutheran cemetery in Addison where she grew up. That town was the place where she attended the church gradeschool, then moved on to Addision High School. She graduated Magna cum laude from Northern Illinois University.

We met in October of 1981 and she lived until March of 2013. In all, we had a great life together; full of family, friends and most of all, our children.

The lilies being watered in our garden, circa 2011.

She also loved her garden so much that it’s hard to describe the satisfaction she got from her green craft. She’d sit in our LL Bean Adirondack chairs staring at her garden with a glass of wine, or a margarita, or one of her strong gin and tonics in her hand, and just enjoy.

Perhaps that’s why I moved on quickly from the trauma of her last year of life. That’s not how I wanted to remember her.

I chose to remember her cherishing the work she loved. She also told a close friend, the preschool director who served as our close caregiver for all those eight years, that she knew I’d date if she ever passed on. But that friend waited a full year to share that quiet bit of insight with me. I thanked her for waiting. We all need to make decisions on our own terms. I’m grateful to have had a wonderful life with my late wife.

I’m also enormously grateful to have found love again.

Gaining traction

Life is often complicated, and even the people closest to you have a hard time understanding the reasoning or motives behind some of the decisions we make or the changes and impacts that come with them.

Ten years on from December 26, I hope that people gain from reading this and find ways to embrace life even in the face of trauma, and even if life turns out different from what they expected.

It’s indeed a strange thing to go from the traditional joys of a December 25th to facing moments when the world itself seems to shift underneath your feet. Sometimes the best thing to do is to keep those feet moving, to find traction in the things we do and love every day. And please, let’s forgive ourselves for wishing the world would just stand still now and then. Take some time. Look at your garden, whatever that means in your life. It is the work of your life.

Christopher Cudworth, the Right Kind of Pride

Different I am, but a drummer I’ll never be

August 25, 2021 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

The late Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones drummer.

Yesterday one of the most famous drummers in the world died. Rolling Stones member Charlie Watts passed away at the age of eighty.

Drumming is an occupation that I could never do. Nor am I much of a guitar player. Which is why I write instead. I know how to play a keyboard because we learned to use a typewriter in high school.

Musicians in general amaze me. People that “think in music” impress me with their ability to translate ordered notes into nuanced sound. At one point in life I could read music and played the clarinet. I hated the instrument and gave it up along with piano lessons. The allure of sports was much more appealing to me. It produced more excitement, for one thing.

I only picked up playing music again in my late forties. Even then, my role was a simple rhythm guitarist playing in a church Praise Band. The music was nothing special. Much of it was maudlin and overwrought. I just had fun getting up there every week to play and sometimes sing with the band.

Drummer types

We had several drummers over the years I played in the church band. Each had a different style. Some were more ornate and loved to fill songs with a flourish or two. Others concentrated on a steady beat, and my guitar strumming helped with that too.

My closest relationship with a good drummer was a fellow fraternity member in college. His name was Mark, and I heard him play the drums one night in a rock band performing at a pub and was astounded at his natural ability and complex style of playing. Like most drummers, he didn’t have a high opinion of his abilities. He clearly loved to play, but most of the musicians I’ve met in life, especially drummers, know there’s always someone that can play better than they do.

That made his abilities all the more fantastic to me. I mean, if he was that good, and he knew that there were many people better than him, the world is absolutely an infinite place!

That Thing You Do!

One of my favorite movies is the Tom Hanks production “That Thing You Do!” It’s a lighthearted look at the rise and dissolution of a late 60s rock band picked up by a record label when their hit song takes off and rises up the charts. The central character is the drummer recruited from his father’s appliance store to do a one-time gig at a local music contest. His favorite style of music is jazz, so the rock tempo is nothing hard for him. Only he takes off drumming a little fast during the contest, and the band has to immediately adapt. The crowd goes wild and they’re on their way.

It’s the sound! The beat! His happy mistake takes them places they never dreamed possible. Of course, it’s all too good to last. But who among us would turn down such a thrillride?

Whiplash

By contrast, I watched the movie Whiplash a few years back. The movie studies the life of a talented drummer and his unforgivingly critical mentor played by J.K. Simmons. I watched that film in near terror as the young protege is challenged to his limits. There’s even an attempt to embarrass and crush the kid’s spirit through the portal of jazz brilliance that he’s ultimately forced to enter.

That level of pressure and demanding expertise is hard to imagine for most of us. If the scene above does not make you tense in some way, perhaps you have no nerves at all. You should get that checked.

What I’m sharing here is that it takes enormous dedication and the right kind of pride to get good at something like drumming. To get really good requires total dedication. Even obsession.

Which is why, in many respects, it is better for most of us to pursue the things we’re relatively decent at rather than launch off into some endeavor for which we’re really ill-suited. For me, that would be drumming. I’d try it if pressed as a challenge, but I’ve tried keeping the beat with both hands and feet and frankly, it doesn’t work.

Ringo: once and always a Starr

A few years back when I learned that Ringo Starr was not the only Beatle that could play the drums, I was a bit put off by the idea that Paul or John sat in on certain songs. I’d read so much about how Ringo was one of the world’s greatest drummers, and that The Beatles would not have achieved so much without him.

Then I thought about all the solo albums Paul put out, including his first McCartney LP with Macca playing all the instruments, not just the bass and drums. After that, nothing really bothered me about who was playing drums on Back In the USSR or the Ballad of John and Yoko. The fact that other Beatles could play more than one instrument only made them all the more brilliant in my eyes.

What still amazes me, and always will, is how some people can process all that rhythm and physicality into song, especially drummers. It’s a mystery to me, and it always will be.

So I know that I could never be a drummer because I 1) don’t have the talent for it and 2) could never stick with it to get good. <<rimshot>>

Russians that rock

So I’ll leave you with a couple more links to explore. These are YouTube videos of the band Leonid & Friends playing songs by Chicago. They’re all Russians, some of whom don’t speak English, yet they recreate the music of one of the greatest rock bands of all time with such fidelity it will amaze you. All of these people are amazing musicians, and I’ve seen them live twice now. They are incredible. You should subscribe to their channel.

But pay particular attention to the drummer in this band. His playing is so superb even Chicago’s original members are amazed by him. Now that’s the right kind of pride.

Or this one.

caregiving, character, Christopher Cudworth, science and religion, trusting science

the wrong kind of pride

June 29, 2021 Christopher Cudworth 1 Comment

The single most frustrating aspect of living through this pandemic is the persistent strain of obstinance evident in so much of the population.

Obstinance: is a characteristic of being impossibly stubborn. Like a bull that won’t budge, obstinance keeps people from going with the flow.

We’ve seen obstinance from people refusing to wear masks.

Obstinance from people refusing to get vaccinated.

Obstinance by arrogant people gathering in social gatherings without masks to create super-spreader events.

It’s been one bit of obstinance after another.

Obstinance is mostly a matter of false pride. Clinging to a belief that is tightly held, often for all the wrong reasons.

Like mask-wearing. Was it ever a question of personal freedom? Is asking people to wear a mask any different than asking them to wear pants in public? It’s not. But people chose to fight the idea of masks rather than consider the value or the purpose. They branded it an imposition on their “personal freedom.”

But masks work. Look at how low the flu rates were in America this year. Cases were way down. All because people wore masks in most public places. Currently the only places where Covid cases are on the increase is areas where vaccination rates are low.

Like Missouri. The so-called “Show Me State.” The origins of that phrase are interesting, as documented on the website of the Missouri Secretary of State. “The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri’s U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”

Obstinance as a worldview

There’s a degree of obstinance in that “Show Me” tradition. It is a trait of impossible stubbornness. The same sort of obstinance drives certain religious beliefs as well. Biblical literalists known as creationists refuse to accept the theory of evolution because they claim there is no proof. “You have to show me,” the logic goes. “Or I will not believe you.”

Of course, there is evidence of evolution in every single living creature on earth, but the obstinate among us refuse to see it and choose to project simplistic explanations on all of material reality.

But evolution is not just real. It works. One can map out the relationships of DNA among all living things and find enormous commonalities. In fact, the only reason diseases such as Covid can jump from one species to another is that living things share the same basic genetic structure.

The Vail Health Foundation describes how the Pfizer vaccine is designed to work:

“While the vaccine is new and has been produced quickly, mRNA technology has been around for many years. The vaccine essentially takes a piece messenger RNA from the viral cell and causes our bodies to produce the protein that triggers the immune response and antibodies to ward off infection.

An mRNA vaccine does not actually contain the virus itself. An analogy is to think of it as an email sent to the muscle cells at the injection site that shows what a piece of viral protein looks like and then — like a Snapchat message — it disappears. Our bodies will develop an immune response to kill the viral protein and remember how to recognize it in the future. It is an amazing technology and a breakthrough in modern medicine.”

I took the Pfizer vaccine. The only noticeable side effect was a half-day of fatigue after the second dose, then things were fine. I was vaccinated against Covid-19. Not once did I have to give up personal freedoms to achieve that status.

Stubborn defiance

Rather than consider the medical technology that developed the Pfizer vaccine, obstinate anti-vaxxers instead invent all sorts of obstinate reasons not to get vaccinated.

The roots of anti-vaxxer psychology have grown over the years, with some making connections between vaccinations and conditions such as autism and other brain disorders. According to the Global Citizen website, “The CDC estimates that more than 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths among children born in the last 20 years will be prevented because of vaccinations.”

Obviously many of the 600,000+ deaths caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented if a specific vaccine for the virus had been available from the start. That’s not the case when a new infectious disease variant spreads into the human population. Thus it is critical to conduct research into pandemic diseases, which is what the lab in Wuhan, China was doing.

Blaming China

Some ask if Covid sprung free from that lab to infect us all, but there is no evidence so far to indicate that as a fact. The precautionary measures to prevent such an occurrence at all such facility is high. Then there are the cynical among us insisting that China purposely spread the disease and tried to hide the source.

That’s known as a conspiracy theory, an approach to opinion popular among extremists, some of the most obstinate people on earth. Even when faced with facts disproving their “theory” about why things are happening, or how, they cling to a conspiratorial version of “reality” because is it a worldview they can own. It is giving up control that obstinate people fear the most.

That explains the illogic driving anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-science people in today’s culture. They are immensely proud of their seeming ability to provide “secret” explanations that justify their distrust of a world they can’t explain or control. First they deny the science driving knowledge of infectious diseases, then they invent irrational explanations to cover up their ignorance. Obstinance is the last empowering gesture of the terminally disenfranchised and self-persecuted.

Dog whistle empowerment

It is no wonder these folks clamber to authoritarians talking to them through dog-whistle language and obstinate tactics. What they also refuse to understand in these actions is how dangerous and dumb their obstinance is to themselves, and all of us. That brand of obstinance is forever the wrong kind of pride.

Today’s blog on The Right Kind of Pride is titled The Wrong Kind of Pride. It addresses the obstinance of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists and how it endangers us all. But there’s a history there…

Personally, I don’t think the United States has ever been any different. There is a strain of obstinance––the “wrong kind of pride”––woven into the American populace from the beginning. The wrong kind of pride is responsible for horrific moments in history such as the proliferation of slavery and secession in an attempt to protect it. The wrong kind of pride also fuels white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, and anti-gay bigotry. The wrong kind of pride drives religious hatred, wars of choice, and resistance to the truth of all kinds.

The wrong kind of pride is as much a part of American history as the so-called “exceptionalism” with which rabid patriots love to credit the nation. That explains why Critical Race Theory is considered such a threat to the preferred narrative of American superiority. Critical Race Theory is a humble attempt to address American wrongheadedness and prejudice. We can see who’s resisting it with political force. It is the fearful and arrogant among us, the selfish and unkind. It is all those wielding the wrong kind of pride to their own personal advantage.

caregiving, character, Christopher Cudworth, love abounds

That homesick feeling

June 16, 2021 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

The farm in Upstate New York that I loved to visit as a child.

At six years old, most of us don’t have a great grasp of the world around us. Life revolves around parents and family. The rest of life is a mystery until we experience it.

During the summer after my second grade year in school, my favorite aunt and uncle traveled from their farm in Upstate New York to visit our family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When the time came for them to leave, I begged my parents to allow me to go with them back to the farm. To my surprise, my parents agreed.

A half hour later a bag was packed and I was plopped in the back seat of their car for the trip north to Bainbridge and the farm that I loved.

But the next morning, I woke up with a horrid feeling in my gut. I was homesick. If you’ve never experienced that feeling for yourself, it can be best described as a deep combination of longing and loss that penetrates your whole being. All you want to do is go home.

Confession: I was always an anxious kid. Already at that age, I chewed my nails. Looking back through a life of dealing with aspects of anxiety and depression, I realize that homesickness was a product of who I am. Learning to cope with anxiety is a lifelong job. I don’t blame myself for it, and these days I know myself well enough to function healthily. It wasn’t always that way.

The morning of my homesickness, I recall my aunt making a phone call to my parents, who drove up from Lancaster that day to fetch their anxious, homesick son. Apparently all involved had pity on me. Perhaps they knew those feelings well enough to realize there was no cure except to send me back home. Sometimes good caregiving is a matter of listening to the people involved.

Keeping me on the farm a couple days might have cured the homesickness, but I must have been a sorry sight with all those aching tears. I guess I can be grateful that adults had compassion for my condition.

The giant elm that once stood in front of the Nichols family farm where my mother grew up.

I looked up homesickness on the Psychology Today website. It had interesting things to say about homesick feelings. “A number of studies have suggested that homesickness can be associated with psychological difficulties such as loneliness, depression, anxiety, difficulty adjusting to new situations, and psychosomatic health problems. Given that being away from home can be accompanied by the sadness of missing it, one wonders why we form such powerful emotional bonds to our home. Surely, attachment is at least partly the product of all the wonderful experiences we enjoyed during our childhood.”

It goes on to say, “As poet Robert Frost famously explained, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Our bond extends beyond enjoyable experiences. It encompasses unconditional love, commitment, loyalty and enduring connectedness.”

Still, no specific mention of fear as a cause of homesickness. Perhaps there’s no reason. That emotion is woven into the DNA of anxiety and depression. It is both the cause and a symptom of those conditions.

The PT article continues,” Efforts to prevent homesickness must contend with a paradox. Although research findings have been inconsistent, homesickness seems to be more likely when children have had prior experiences with separation from home as well as when they had had little or no prior periods away. If homesickness is the price we pay for attachment to a strong loving home, would anyone want to diminish the quality of a child’s home to prevent the possibility of future homesickness?”

Like many children in that day and age, I lived in a home that was both loving and at times, a conflicted place. My father lost his mother to complications of cancer treatment when he was just seven years old. He went to live with an uncle and two aunts because his own father experienced profound depression at the loss of his wife and also brought on in some ways by The Depression.

So my father’s upbringing was at times gruff. His pain at losing his mother at such a young age was probably never adequately addressed. No doubt there were feelings of homesickness after being shuttled from his family home to a life with a tough old uncle and two unmarried aunts. The sense of loss must have been profound. Thus despite his largely caring character, he bore an anger within him that spilled out at times. His four sons tried to meet his approval but there was an exasperating and sometimes frightening tone to certain aspects of our upbringing.

So that feeling of separation from home as a place of safety and comfort is both a physical and emotional reality for all of us. Yet to this day, I still view our Lancaster house and yard as “home” in many ways. We moved away when I was twelve years old. A type of homesickness has traveled with me all these years. We’d have never left that place if I’d had my way.

A Google Maps photo of the family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Yet that would have denied me all the experiences that were to come and those were good. So while homesickness is real, it is also not permanent and is no way to define or limit one’s time in this world. We have to rip off the bandage at certain times in life, and move on.

All of us have some sense of home that lives within our souls. Sometimes it’s just the smell of a room when the windows are open… or the curl of a pillow as you roll over to face that person whom you love. It can be heard in the song of a bird calling in the trees, or the sound of a car pulling into a driveway.

Take in those sensations and indeed, you’re home again. That’s the right kind of pride.

Note: I’ve shared impressions about homesickness before on this blog because they symbolize so many other aspects of life. May you find that sense of home wherever you are.

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