WRITE NOW

I am back in physical therapy for the stubborn left shoulder that won’t fully heal following surgery. My therapist has given me a series of targeted exercises. Some are repeats of those I did after surgery last year; some are new. All will go into a folder marked “shoulder,” which sits within a larger folder called “PT.” In there are also maneuvers for hip, ankle, and lower back. These are presented in drawings, photographs, and instructions for at least thirty distinct exercises.

cluttered brain I don’t take this folder to the gym, of course. Instead, I’ve tried to memorize every one of these, with limited success. After all, I also need to remember to do them every day–and to sit up, stand up, lift my head up, roll my shoulders back, pick up my feet—in short, apply my brain to the conscious maintenance of a body challenged by the passing of time.

My brain has other things to do as well: rewrite the first half of my new novel by the end of the month, walk and feed my dog, take out the garbage, plug in and check on the basement dehumidifier, pick up a prescription, arrange for a ride to the airport, prepare to present in front of a book club, take my vitamins. This while I’m trying to remember where I put my iPad or what I went upstairs to fetch.

I have an online calendar for the important appointments that the Cloud shares with my devices. I also make lists. If I start more than one, something I almost always do, I must remember to blend the two and compare them with whatever I’ve written online. I suppose I could have Alexa or Siri or Gaga (my name for Google Assistant) remind me but I don’t yet trust technology to make distinctions between “buy fence for back garden” and “buy plastic border for front garden.”

It’s a lot to ask of an aging intelligence—or is it?

Research about the older brain has been a roller coaster ride of good and bad news for at least forty years, according to an article in Newsweek that summarized more recent findings. In September of 2016, Harvard Health Publishing wrote that although we naturally lose brain cells as we age, we can grow new ones. Then, in March of this year, research published in the journal Nature indicated scientists could find no new neurons in adult brains. The next month, Cell Stem Cell published a study showing that we can potentially continue to make neurons in the hippo-campus until we’re almost eighty. The factors include the aforementioned exercise, a healthy lifestyle, enriched environment, and social interactions.

As to the last, the National Institute on Aging says “Social relationships are consistently associated with bio-markers of health.” They are also the hardest to maintain, owing to the natural isolation seniors encounter. Absent meaningful work and/or close family, struggling with mobility issues and grappling with feelings of purposelessness and irrelevance, older people find it challenging to build or keep relationships.

I’ve got the exercise and healthy lifestyle down, thanks to a dog and a bike. I consider books and engagement with arts and politics to enrich my environment, not to mention the lovely home I’m fortunate enough to own. Social interactions are trickier. I’m a widow engaged primarily in solo endeavors like writing, which means I’m constantly out of practice. While I am expressive and articulate on paper and, I hope, online, I’m far more introverted than most people realize.

Without a doubt, though, socialization is probably the single most effective antidote to friend in kickline pain and depression I’ve ever encountered. I recently spent two days in the company of a group of wonderful women I first met online. I walked miles and forgot about my aching shoulder, back, hip, etc. We ate and drank and laughed and hugged. I’m still riding the afterglow.

What this suggests is I have even more to add to my to-do list. Somewhere between “schedule doctor” and “buy paper towels” and “finish chapter three,” I need to remind myself to text or email or message or call a friend and make a plan. It’s not just about maintaining friendships. It’s about strengthening your brain.

Parkland shooting teen survivors You see them after every tragedy: the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, friends, and colleagues who have lived through what is an unimaginable event for most people. Somehow, instead of hiding away, they are out front, dealing with the inevitable mash of cameras, microphones, journalists, bloggers, well-wishers, and hangers-on. To add to their suffering, they must deal with entitled opinionistas, naysayers, trolls, and the genuinely ugly folks who feel compelled to issue threats via social media.

Yet they persevere, these physically and psychically injured people. Despite pain, loss, and soul-crushing grief that would lay most people low, they’ve appeared in public shortly after their experiences. They ask for understanding. More often than not, they advocate for change. A few might insist on assigning blame; far more insist on accountability.

Recently, a group of teenagers at Florida’s Parkland High School escaped death by yet another mass shooting. Now, some of them are calling on legislators to control, regulate, or ban the kinds of weapons favored by shooters at malls, rock concerts, and schools. These weapons–semi-automatic, self-loading, or whatever we choose to call them–are designed to inflict maximum damage in a minimum amount of time and they’ve been easy to procure by people who are crazy or just angry.

While the teens are widely supported, they’ve also encountered plenty of social media haters quick to accuse them of being either naïve children dazzled by the attention or opportunistic spot-light seekers backed by calculating adults. Some suggest that activism in the wake of tragedy is inappropriate. There are even those who suspect—or pretend to suspect—these poised and focused teens are paid actors.

How familiar that all sounds.

My husband died on 9/11. I spent a little time thrashing around my empty house. Social media didn’t really exist in 2001, just a few AOL chat rooms where eager participants engaged in conspiracy theories. When the journalists first called, I spoke about my husband. It helped, a little, but I remained at home and that was not a good place for me to be. My first steps at advocacy involved getting help for the families and also, to be honest, trying to articulate the painful peculiarity of our position: our grief was personal but also shared. We were in the public eye, like it or not. My voice, which had literally disappeared after my husband’s death, began to return. My will to live followed, although it returned far more slowly than I let on.

Finally, I screwed up the courage to express myself about the fallout from the attacks: a war with Iraq (a country that produced none of the hijackers), a deep division about how to treat Muslim-Americans, the ways in which 9/11, like so many tragedies before and since, became a shield for bad policy-making and fodder for the haters. Some of what I said put me at odds with other family members, or with talking heads, particularly on Fox News. The push-back hurt. I didn’t exactly shrug it off, but I didn’t stop, either.

The students who’ve chosen to be front and center impress me. I get why they’re speaking out. Because they’ve identified a single, absolutely relevant issue around which they can unite. Because they’re articulate, in the way smart, engaged teens can be. Because, yes, they want to make sense of an event that upended their young lives and ended the lives of their friends. Because the grief is too strong to lay quietly within them. They’re grieving, yes, but in their grief, they’ve become hyper-attuned to anyone who is trying to tell them how they should behave or how they should feel.

I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. They push back against the critical, envious outsiders and against those who try to politicize their actions, as if safety and common sense were simply one side of an argument. No, they insist, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t call us children and still fail to protect us. You can’t call us opportunists and then fail to listen to what we say. You can’t take our grief, our pain, and our resolve and use it to further your own agenda. We call that b.s.

I call it hope.

At 7:30 a.m. on a summer morning, the northern Wisconsin air did not yet hint at the promise of another typically beautiful day. Our twelve-year-old selves, denied the future pleasures of hot coffee, had stoked ourselves with pancakes and bacon.

Dressed in the camp uniform of blue shorts and white blouses, some of us with navy cardigans to ward off the lingering chill, we made our way to the platform, picked up our .22 caliber rifles and lay down. Ahead of us-it wouldn’t have been more than fifty feet-were an array of targets. My goal that day was to continue to move through the NRA-designed program and also move into a sitting position with a qualifying score.

Camp Whispering Pines for Girls was a full-throttle camp that offered instruction in a variety of water and land sports. I was a middle-class klutz with no talent for tennis, no build for competitive swimming, no chance of winning a footrace and enthusiasm but little experience on the back of a horse. But I could handle a rifle. It felt natural. It helped me focus. I understood the concept of the easy breath, the slow pull, the steadying opposition of the rifle butt kicking against the shoulder, and most of all, the exhilaration of hitting the target.

My uncle was an outdoorsman and a hunter, so I had a chance to fire a rifle at other times of the year. I never went hunting with him; I couldn’t bring myself to shoot at an animal, even a duck. But Uncle Bob was as enamored of sport shooting as I was. At his farm, we took aim at bottles and cans lined up on a fence and even clay pigeons shot into the air. Sometimes we used pistols but honestly, I was always most at ease with a rifle.

I had fun for a while. I impressed a high school boyfriend or two by winning a couple of stuffed animals at the State Fair. I briefly joined the National Rifle Association as a junior member. For eight years, I indulged my interest in marksmanship. Then the times changed and so did I. Physically and philosophically, target practice no longer attracted me.

Much later, after several intermediary careers, I’ve discovered writing produces a parallel sense of accomplishment. My “target” is a story with a voice, one that transcends the material and reaches the reader. Of course, it helps to write what you know. My two non-fiction books were both prompted by my experiences as a “9/11 widow”-how the death of my husband changed and didn’t change me, how it altered and didn’t alter the culture.

Fiction, I’ve learned, is trickier. As author, I have to relate to the characters I am creating if I expect my readers to do the same. It also helps if I can understand on some level what makes them tick.

Suzanne Foster is the protagonist who anchors my suspense novel, The Former Assassin. She’s a wife and a mother. She’s survived a neglected childhood, time living on the street, a stint in the Army, and twenty-five years in service to a criminal for whom she killed. She struggles with moral quandaries related to her career that I’ve never had to face. Nothing in her resume accords with my personal history.

Well, almost nothing. Suzanne and I have both known loss. We’ve both been rendered helpless by ill-advised choices and worse, choices denied. We’ve experienced the redemptive power of love, the frustration of moving beyond one’s history, the unbidden rage that lives just beneath the surface, and the ever-present awareness of our own mortality.

And we both know how it feels to get off a good shot.

This article originally appeared on The Refresh

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Nikki Stern

(Brain) Food for Thought

Not All Grief is Silent

Shared History