Christmas with the Cullivans

Christmas was always Teri’s favorite time of year.  It was about gathering with family in various places over the years, in the Bay Area or Kansas, in Columbus, Chicago or Milwaukee.  Playing violin and piano (however reluctantly), writing letters to Santa on Christmas eve, finding unique stocking stuffers and presents, recalling memories of past holidays, playing games and eating comfort and holiday foods ... and her first grandson, Jack.  And now, here we are – Ben, Dad and I – are at the hearth of John and Rachel, Jack and Naomi in Mendham, NJ.

We experienced a white Christmas with an inch on Christmas eve and 3-4 more on the 28^th.  And Rachel turned this holiday into a warm, well-organized, welcoming and relaxed festive time replete with toddler tickling, baby bundling and holiday cheer.  Teri would be proud.

In 9 days, I have fallen under the spell of Naomi’s rhythm, eat, poop, smile, look, coo, and sleep without all of Rachel’s responsibilities.  I also see Jack’s rhythm of play, eat, watch Umizumi, play trains run carrying a balloon, build/knock down megabricks ... fighting naps and bedtime.  I’ve witnessed Naomi’s transformation into a social butterball as she chows down and once fed makes incredible eye conversation, smiling and

cooing at you for 5-10 minutes straight. 

We all can visualize Teri carrying on, doting, snuggling, kissing and hugging Naomi and napping with her just as she did with Jack. 

Jack is traversing his mini-terrible two’s, but is more than equally engaging by grasping my finger to guide me to his ‘boy cave’ with alphabet floor, reading tent, slide and Mom-made rocket ship.  He knows all of the alphabet (da ba You) and numbers.  Yesterday he was given a magnifying glass and ingeniously turned it into a racquet swatting balloons up, down and around like a tennis ball.  Today he reluctantly then thrilled took his first sled ride down the hillock behind the house.

It is quite incredible that we have a 92+ year 4 generation span right here at the Cullivan’s.

Becky, Jeff and daughter Perry came to visit and bring Chinese dim sum.  Separately, Lois and David and Suzanne and Al came to visit and brought dim sum and Chinese noodles (haw fun, my father’s favorite).  Each of Teri’s long time college friends from NYC came several times to Milwaukee to spend time with and cook for Teri.  Lois organized the ‘awake wake’ for Teri.  Memorable memorial.   

John and I took Dad to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the 26^th but none of his professional friends on staff in Asian Art were there that day.  He knew all about each of the Chinese ink painters on display dating back to the Southern Song dynasty 1100’s. 

Ben was here and became Jack’s ‘The Uncle Ben’ as in ‘The Ohio State University’ – very, very distinguished.  He continues to memorize his way through mountains of material at the 1.5 year mark and while here asked me to help him study, as if I still could.  Nevertheless I was honored and tried.

Back tracking

In October, I (Tony and Ying) took Dad to see three Chinese movies at the Milwaukee Film Festival – no small logistic feat since there is no handicap access or parking and he requires full arm support without his walker.  He said he didn’t understand two of them but enjoyed the documentary on Ai Wei Wei.  At the annual NASPGHAN meeting, I gave the first annual Teri Li Education Award to a young Chinese-American pediatric gastroenterologist.  Thank you for your contributions.

In November, an invited trip to Taipei for the World Congress (#4) of Pediatric GI was a highlight for me with two talks, one a keynote to the Taiwan Pediatric Society.  Most humorously, they made a bobble head of me from my picture.

Two night markets.  Palace Museum twice.  Visits with Li Chun-yi (an artist and art history PhD under my father’s PhD recipient Claudia – 2^nd generation), Xia Yifu (an artist my father helped) and Hsu Ming (art dealer) on my father’s behalf.  They want me to bring my father to Taiwan to honor him this next year – a daunting challenge!  On the return, I stopped in Japan to meet with a pediatric GI colleague and his colleague from Okayama, sight see and stay in his traditional Japanese house.

Meanwhile the electronic medical record was implemented at Children’s Hospital and is life altering for an ancient practitioner like me.  Not all in a good way – loss of eye contact with the patients and families, the templated ‘writing’ is at a 1^st grade syntax, and a serious case of Epic elbow (with all the keyboard activity) for which I am receiving PT. 

Thanksgiving was at Steve and Mary’s in Madison with the usual 25 members of the extended family eating Steve’s magical matzo ball soup, turkey with all the trimmings and extra, and pies.  He organizes an outrageous trivia contest.  As a common discussion theme, we all are facing elder care issues and demises ... and look to our next generation and thinking will they be there for us? 

In December, Prof. Wang’s UW-Milwaukee students in her course on modern Chinese painting came over to view our paintings and listen to my father expound.  He was his old professorial self, animated, full of extensive detail.  I invited several of my favorite GI fellows over and actually cooked.  My default invite cuisine is Chinese hot pot (aka huo guo, Mongolian hot pot, shabu shabu) where I make the guests cook for themselves.

My state

I think and dream of Teri daily, some so visceral that I can almost feel her touch  Life goes on with work (just reduced to 0.9) and evening and weekend efforts managing on my father’s medical, fiscal, housekeeping/food affairs as well as my own.  Because of all the changes in caretakers, I am now doing the evening cooking.  It takes until 9:00 pm before I sit down for myself.  He often forgets what I told him yesterday, but he remembers 1928 (age 8) as if yesterday.  But all in all, doing well for a 92 year old. 

When I feel self pity juggling my and all of Teri’s jobs, I just remember that nearly all women everywhere do it.  My modicum of balance comes from daily exercise, biking, spinning, running, yoga, Tai Chi and steam.  I watch the Buckeyes, study Chinese, and read – How Children Succeed by Paul Tough (I highly recommend).  I miss my partner, her companionship, my sounding board, my moral compass, my course corrector.  I wonder while will happen if I have another bike accident (2003 – broken scapula, two broken ribs), who will rescue me, who will fill in for my father …

Life is outwardly resuming normalcy, although internally it remains a challenge.  The future still seems mysterious.  I look forward to new adventures.

Naomi's world

Teri is smiling.

Naomi opens her eyes!

Hewow.

Enuff dat, let me sweep.

Here I is, cute as Anne Geddes bug.

B says hi from Taipei.

Naomi rides in on the tail of Sandy

Baby Naomi fortunately arrived 4 days late on Thursday at 4:00 pm.  7# 5 oz. 

Naomi stayed safely inside under Rachel’s protection through the torrential winds and rains that took away their electricity from Monday evening.  Fortunately Sue, John’s mother, found a generator in Massachusetts and brought it down.  It powered one at a time, the sump pump, a light, the fireplace, TV …  

 From Jack’s perspective, what could be better than his own flashlight and staying in pajamas all day long and camping in.

It is hard to imagine ... so many stories from friends in the east.

Rachel and Naomi went home Saturday morning.  John was able to find gas, 75^th in line, just before it ran out.

Then, the electricity finally came back on Saturday evening. 

Wow, what a beginning!

Inaugural Teri Li Education Award, Rachel is due!

Inaugural Teri Li Education Award

Last week I took my annual sojourn to the NASPGHAN (pediatric GI) national meeting held in Salt Lake City, and, the last meeting of my six year term as the President-Elect, President and Past President.  As you know, the last third of my term as President was truncated due to Teri’s catastrophic illness.  It was a heart-strings plucking experience.

It was like being amongst my large family.  Many of my former committee chairs and councilors came up to me and personally thanked me for the opportunity, encouragement and synergy they felt working with me.  Many others asked how I was doing.  Many good conversations.  Alan, the Distinguished Service Awardee from Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard mentioned me as ‘his patron saint’.  He is a model educator and also the chair of the Teri Li Education Award selection committee (in good hands).

We were able to establish a permanent endowment to support this award and now want to expand its platform to support pilot innovative educational grants …  NASPGHAN published the names of all 92 contributors in the Awards Ceremony brochure.

In my introduction to the inaugural Teri Li Education Award, I showed a picture of Teri and Jack and described her passion for education and for the young, both of which are evident in this award for education by a young (‘adolescent’) faculty member within 10 years of finishing fellowship (≈ < 42 years).  Jeanie was selected as the inaugural awardee.  She is a young star educator in our society who has already made huge educational contributions to our field.  Besides that, she is an Asian American woman and one who has endured a successful bone marrow transport in one of her children.  Teri would be triply proud of her.

I was given the opportunity to give the lead talk at the Annual Post-Graduate Course, on what else, Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome.

Old friends

The week before the meeting, Modena and Gary came up from Chicago to visit.  I hadn’t seen them for 6 years since we moved up to Milwaukee.  Modena and I go way back 39 years to the antiquities, both in medical school at Kansas U. and pediatric residency as the U. of Wisconsin.  It was a time of remembrance of shared experience and Teri.  At NASPGHAN, I had dinner with Phil and Joanie, Phil a fellow medical student at Kansas U. who went into pediatric GI.  We recalled 41 years of intermittently shared experience starting a medical student newspaper together and attempting to begin a medical student commune (5 couples).  Kids, grandkids and eldercare are common themes.  Hopefully we’ll be on the receiving end of the latter. 

Rachel is due!

Rachel is due today just as the hurricane hits the East Coast.  Jack turns 2 on Monday.  They are stocked up on water, food, generator, gas and prepared and in laws.  Becky checked up on them.  I was going to go but she advised me to hold off.  Stay tuned!

For those of you who has asked how to contrinbute:

NASPGHAN Foundation – Teri Li Education Fund

NASPGHAN

1501 Bethlehem Pike

PO Box 6

Flourtown, PA  19031

Thank you!

APAMSA unites us

Sunday was one of those quintessential crisp fall days for my drive back from Ann Arbor.  Blue skies with a few cumulus clouds scattered, the trees changing into their fall clothes, replete with shimmering, luminescent reds, oranges and yellows.

At Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, one of the delicatessens in the country, I bought a Sherman Rueben for the trip home and cookies for my nursing staff. 

I stopped at the Phoenix Restaurant in Chicago Chinatown to pick up my father’s favorite ho fun (beef rice noodles) and told the owner Eddie and daughter Carol about Teri’s passing.  Eddie said told me about a friend who also died of acute leukemia and said pragmatically, “Life goes on.”  Teri and I used to eat at the Phoenix every several weeks, the best dim sum in the Midwest, rivaling the coasts.  I picked up cha siu bao (roast pork buns) from St. Anna’s Bakery and cha siu hanging next to the dripping ducks at the BBQ King, just as we always did.  Memories.

Backtracking to a fatherly-sonly Saturday.

I was invited to speak at the national APAMSA conference as I continue on my mission to help Asian Americans succeed as 3^rd year medical students, and sequentially as physicians and professionals.  My usual topic is on educational profiling of quiet Asian Americans medical students during their clinical rotations as ‘passive’ with it pejorative effect on their evaluations, and ways to counteract it.  Ben said that his group felt my presentation was the best one of the conference.  No bias there.

It was so so unique and heart warming to be able to share this APAMSA experience with Ben who attended as a representative of Michigan State.  Ben has been to NASPGHAN annual meeting but this was a conference where he was an official attendee and we both highly engaged in Asian American professional development and health issues, he in the present tense, me in the past tense.  He experienced an adolescent APAMSA that I helped give life to way back in 1995 at this 19^th national conference.  He even listened to his old man say something that was directly pertinent to him.  Ben volunteered to provide feedback during a workshop exercise on leadership and I got to listen to my young man provide insight that the workshop leader acknowledged was astute.  Perhaps a father-son scenario a father could only dream about.  Wow, how cool is that!

Backtracking to a surprise Friday.

After driving from Ben’s apartment in Lansing to Ann Arbor, I met with Chris a friend and fellow pediatric GI who is the interim CEO of Mott’s Children’s Hospital.  We go way back and besides being constantly reminded of our Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, we resonate around the attitudes that we look up at the world as underdogs, have a strong sense of justice, and don’t take ourselves too seriously.  After asking me about what I wanted to do when I grow up … he suggested I consider looking at a potential global exchange position at UM that would place me in China part time.  It’s nice to be wanted.

I invited Ben’s MSU delegation (7) and our MCW delegation (2) to APAMSA to dinner at Kai’s Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor.  We had about 9 or so dishes, and finished them all. It’s amazing how much these skinny Asian women can eat.  Afterwards, Serena (MSU) and I lit a 30 candle, ‘surprised’ (suspected it at the last minute) Ben and we all sang Happy Birthday to him.  I got to share lovely stories of how Teri busted him after he came home red-faced from a party and how the cops brought him home in handcuffs at 4 am just before the start of his freshman year (for TPing).  Ben has done well on parole.

Post-conference

I paid a visual tribute to Teri and Jack, highlighted her last teaching lesson and dedicated the talk to her as part of my plea for Asian American medical students to join the bone marrow donor registry.  Mike, one of the conference organizers of the APAMSA conference wrote to me, “Teri sounds like an incredible person”.  Teri is still making a difference.  

Pictures to come.

The one year anniversary, today

Thanks to family and friends for your cards, thoughts, prayers, lit candles, e-mails, and phone calls.

Today was a quiet sunny blustery warm day.  I went for a 22 mile bike ride and gazed out at the azure Lake Michigan thinking of Teri and how much she loved water … watching, swimming, snorkeling.  I talked to the kids who were handling the day in their own contained way. 

Many of you have asked how I am handling it.  I think of her daily, have flashbacks, fond memories big and small, dreams … and today is no different.  The memories are vivid, seemingly recent.  But today, there is an abiding emptiness, which food and memories can’t fill. 

Two weeks ago, Rachel, John, little Jack, Ben and I gathered at Lakeside MI at a bed and breakfast where Teri, I, Lyn and Subbhash used to stay.  Situated on a bluff, we walked down 104 steps to a private white sand beach, stretching to shallows over sand bars 200 yards out.  We swam out to the sand bars that Teri and I used to conquer.  Jack played endlessly in the sand and knocked down little sand towers we made just for that purpose.  We had a little ceremony and spread some of Teri’s ashes in the water.  

Teri was with us.

We let one of Dad’s caregivers go and his favorite also had to go.  Involved story.  The last two weeks, I’ve done everything.  I have a professional agency providing two women, but I’m still doing the evening cooking and care.  Next week, after I give grand rounds in Kansas City, I will take my father back to the Kansas to visit the friends he hasn’t seen for more than 3 years.  They will have a luncheon for him at the Nelson-Atkins Museum where he was a research curator and a dinner at a KU faculty home in Lawrence.  It will be a homecoming.

Rachel is 8 weeks and counting down.  She and John move into their new home next week in Mendham, NJ.

Keep in touch.

P.S.  Someone sent me a tiny glass bluebird, but I don't know who.

Vancouver, full of memories, and another on the way

Teri’s last visit

Teri, I, Dad, Rachel (+Jack), John and Ben were here in Vancouver exactly two years ago after Teri had recovered from her first rounds of chemotherapy.  She was beat down by chemo, as is always the case, but beginning to recover herself, her energy, appetite and hair.  It would turn out to be her best period of her whole 19 month illness! 

She wanted to do everything, eat, sight see.  She wanted to eat everything Chinese, northern (her style) Shanghai, seafood (crab, lobster …), dim sum, comfort foods that one cannot usually buy in restaurants.  We live within several hundred feet of three food courts and they have steamers full of meat-filled buns, bingzi, sticky rice rolls, dumplings, zongzhi, a Taiwanese night market stand (no stinky dofu) besides prepared Chinese foods and unprepared sushi.

She loved to shop next door at Daiso, the Japanese $2 store where you can buy everything for $2 (kitchen ware, envelopes, bungee cords, belts).  One of our accomplished artist friends buys all his art supplies there!  She wanted to go up to Grouse Mountain (ski) north of Vancouver and we even took Dad up there but stopped short of the ski lifts.  We went to the point of the Richmond, and saw 7 bald eagles nesting.  She was so happy to be surrounded by her whole family and was so full of her usual high energy! 

As I am at home, everything here reminds me of her, her aesthetics, her practical touches, her forethought.  We purchased the furniture together, but she outfitted the all of the kitchenware and bathroom ware …  This time, every time I need something, I just look and there it is … a rice scooper, a tape measure, tongs …  All of the necessary phone numbers are taped in sight, as are the instructions on opening and closing the place.  Most of the bills are on autopay.  She listed places to go.

Dad and I reminisce about how much of herself she put into the place and how much she would have continued to enjoy it to its fullest.  It was more than food.  It was the cultural milieu, Mandarin-speaking, Cantonese-speaking, and English-speaking, all in one sentence.  She felt TOTALLY at home, comfortable.  Ironically, because my 1^st year Mandarin is book learned Cantonese (my parents’ dialect) dates back age 3, I’m uncomfortable because I feel I should speak Chinese but don’t, and don’t meet the expectation that I do.  That is changing.  As I spend more time here, sounds come back to me, even Cantonese.

Richmond where we live is changing.  More and more mainland Chinese are emigrating.  A new 6 story shopping and business center is going up right next door.  Endless Chinese (northern, southern, Szechaun, Hunan, seafood, buffets, hot pot, noodle shops, dim sum) restaurants all signage in Chinese.  More and more condos, but half end in rentals.  It is like being in Hong Kong, but better, weather etc.

We are located right next to the Sky Train.  Ben came for four days and we took the Sky Train and shuttle up to Capilano suspension bridge across the bridge in North Vancouver where it is replete with an elevated tree walk, and a new suspended glass walk off the face of a cliff, 300 feet down to the bottom of the gorge.  Ben is in LA for the summer volunteering/researching at Children's Hospital of LA.  The same day he left Vancouver, he flew to Nicaragua to volunteer doing health education and observing in a town just outside Managua.

Hey, hey, hey, another on the way

Rachel, John and Jack skype to keep Dad and I in his little loop.  He is energetic, always motoring and happy as a clam.  Rachel and John bought a house in Mendham and will move in a couple of months.  Did we share the big news that a little sister coming soon in October!!  Teri would be sooo happy.

Dad

Dad is comfortable.  I take care of him.  He is not walking as far and so I push him seated in his walker.  He does most of his self care.  He has a social circle, mostly Chinese artists, art historians and art critics, former art history students of his and close college friends from China, now those remaining all nonagenarians.  They come to visit.  We go to dim sum.  They have a party.  We hold a party at a restaurant.  Some bring Chinese ink paintings to look at.  Others bring catalogs of their paintings.

There has been some confusion/fantasy, not new, that led to his wanting to take action and a resulting conflagration and impasse but we survived.  Ben helped us through it.

He is convinced that I will be appointed Dean of the UBC Medical School and has told several people here that.  I walk him through the fact that I don’t have the proper administrative experience to qualify for that position.  He clings to that notion, perhaps in the hope that we would move here.  At least, his fantasies are relentlessly positive.

Me

As part of my cutting back, I took four weeks to bring Dad to Vancouver.  I never know whether it will be the last time. 

We are eating, but have cut down from the gluttony of the first week.  In between these social visits and repasts, I have been remarkably productive.  I work on three presentations (Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Taipei) and one abstract, and on research back in Milwaukee by e-mail.

I exercise > once/day, elliptical, running, bicycling, weights, Tai chi.  I shipped my 1987 Nishiki Tri-A steel chrome-molybdenum and was able to resurrect it with a few tools.  I’ve been riding 15 miles 3X/week.

I’ve been taking a Tai chi class 3X/week with Master Paul doing the Chen 24 moves.  He is a national kung fu champion specializing in Southern Fist.  With correct exercises and posture, my thighs ache.

I restarted learning Mandarin beginning with Rosetta stone about six months ago and am becoming more disciplined.  Everybody here says I improved, but given my starting point that’s not necessarily a huge quantitative compliment.  I decided to get a tutor and we meet once a week and skype several nights a week.  Since Rosetta stone is big on repetition but not on explaining conventions, she is taking the opposite tack and I feel I have someone to whom I can pose questions and meaning, nuance, structure.

I also wrote 80 cards to those of you who donated to the Teri Li Education Fund at NASPGHAN to fund an educational award and pilot grant to young educators in our pediatric gastroenterology society.

Almost finished Ghost Wars Steve Coll's 600 page Pulitzer-winning account of the Afghan/Pakistani/Saudi/US mess that let bin Laden through its grasp and led up to 9/11.

I reheat/cook, clean, do laundry, shop, wheel my father around daily, but so do most women around the world.

Whew, all in all, a full day’s work and play.  I sleep well.

How am I doing?  Good question.  I still grieve and/or dream and/or think about Teri every single day.  I sometimes feel so lucky to have met Teri and remained completely in love with her for 40 years.  Did I show it, enough?  And, I feel loss.  And, I learn daily how she affected other people, Dad, and especially how she affected Rachel and Ben.  And I see with new eyes how she saturated my whole environment with beauty, memories, and love.

P.S.  I spent quality time with two of Teri’s nieces, Jeanine and Jennifer, the last several months during my travels, as Teri undoubtedly would have accompanied me and done.  Indeed, part of my motivation in selecting those meetings/invitations was the chance to get together with them, and I added on am extra day.  It was delightful.  They are both strong and good young women!  Teri would be so proud.  

40th anniversary & mother's day (5/14 & 5/13) - Travels 2008-2009

Buenos Aires - El Caminto

Hospital Italiano - Marina & Daniel peds GI

Iguassu Falls (275 total), Brasil

Yellow Mountain, Anhui Province, inspiration for Chinese landscape paintings

Zhouzhuang, Water town, near Shanghai

Up and down the mountain

B's cousin in Taipei

Taiwan Pediatric GI Society leaders

Bullet train 288 km/hr to Kaohsiung

Ahhh, foot bath, 24 hour massage ...

Chapel Tonghai U. Taichung, designed by Dad's friend Chen Qikuan

Katsura Royal Villa, Kyioto

Good friend, Nagita-san, peds GI, Kyoto

Teri and alter ego in Venezia

Spanish steps, Roma

Gelato, gelato, gelato ... Firenze

Pasta a la Roma