Deconstructing Poop

Today is my mom’s 81st birthday. I hope she has a happy birthday, but I think bittersweet is probably the best she can hope for less than a week removed from losing her husband of nearly 58 years.

Well, poop.

Yes, poop. Poop is what brings us together today.

My mom doesn’t really celebrate her birthdays so much as she tolerates them. She always mentions how you keep getting older whether it’s your birthday or not. She’s the definition of low maintenance. Just let her know what she’s supposed to do, where she’s supposed to be, and what she’s supposed to wear, and she’s perfectly content.

Opposites really do attract. City boy and small-town girl. Michigan man and Ohio State fan. The art of motorcycle maintenance and Zen.

Anyway, the thing I want my mom and her fellow birthday dismissers to understand is that birthdays don’t celebrate getting older. Getting older frames it in terms of mortality, which is the opposite of the point. Birthdays are celebrations of YOU and the fact that you’re alive, here, with us, kicking and screaming or sipping your afternoon tea (yet another opposite, my dad was team coffee all the way).

Birthdays aren’t for focusing on the bad. It’s good only. Just like funerals . . . except for the crying and the somberness and the general state of mourning. What I mean is, after someone dies, you focus on the good things about them, the happy memories, the positives. It doesn’t mean the bad parts and sad memories didn’t exist, it’s just not what you think about. . . . But this wouldn’t be Under Deconstruction if we didn’t spend at least a little bit wondering why.

I was thinking recently about how weird it is that we poop. We eat all this stuff that tastes so good, and then our bodies take what they need and expel the rest—and the rest is absolutely disgusting. (I also just had a dream in which I accidentally got poop in my mouth and didn’t spit it out because there were people around, and I didn’t want them to know I had poop in my mouth, and I also accidentally tasted it, which freaked me out because a) I had tasted poop, and b) I found the taste curious, BUT IT WAS JUST A DREAM, OKAY.)

Anyway, poop is weird. We take the good, we use what we need, and we get rid of the awful, disgusting, nastiness. It’s how our bodies work. I think it’s also how our minds work, most of the time. We take the good. We get rid of the bad . . . maybe too often we suppress it .

One of my sisters mentioned to me some sadness over the fact that my dad had lost his photogenic joie de vivre in those final days, the last several months of which he’d spent shuttling between the ER, a standard hospital room, a rehab facility, and a nursing home (the last two are really the same thing, unless you’re an insurance company) with a handful of hours at home scattered in there. Between COVID and whatever we’re supposed to call this era we’re in now, the toll of isolation and chronic medical problems left my dad looking less than himself, understandably so.

It got to the point where he didn’t really want a lot of people visiting because he didn’t want people to see how he looked. The photos we have aren’t really appropriate for sharing. I wasn’t even comfortable taking them.

This made my sister very sad, considering that version of my dad not really him. But I told her this phase was just like going to the bathroom: you’re still you, but it’s not the time for photos.

The last few months were poop. Everything that happened was a necessary remnant from what the rest of life gave us, but it’s not what I want to hold onto.

As I remember my dad, and as countless people offer their memories of my dad and the fondness they had for him, I still know about the things that were less than perfect about him. I still think about the bad memories and the regrets we so often pretend we don’t have. I remember the poop. But it doesn’t do me much good to hold onto it.

Except sometimes poop is super helpful. I’ll let the musical episode of Scrubs explain:

The poop in life is worth looking at. It’ll give you answers to a whole lot of questions and explanations for many of your problems. It’ll remind you how often you ate corn. It can teach us so much, and it can help make the ground more fertile for growth.

But it also stinks, it’s gross, and you don’t want to wallow in it (or taste it).

You also don’t want to hold it in. Acknowledge it. Let it go. Learn what you can from it if you need. And now, the only way I can think of to end a post about poop: