Agitation, Triumphs And Lovely Fragrances Elita Sohmer Clayman

Sometimes we get agitated from everyday happenings and a few weeks later when we think about what agitated us; we wonder why we cared so much, that sometimes we thought we could get a heart attack over it. When my brother, sister-in-law and their baby daughter Barbara moved away from Baltimore, Maryland to Springfield, Illinois in 1954, Mom suffered a heart attack. She was in the hospital for a whole week and my brother felt guilty that he had caused it because of the move due to a new job opportunity.

She survived and had none again ever.  In those days of 1954, illnesses were treated differently and she remained in what was called an oxygen tent for days. It was like a plastic covering over her and it was very scary for me at age twenty to see my mom like that. Dad and I visited her where she was in downtown Baltimore where Sinai Hospital was located then across the street from Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was eerie going down there from work which was not too far from there and meeting Dad who was coming from our home or from his workplace. We would visit and then get a bite to eat in the hospital cafeteria and then travel back home quite a distance on the transit bus. It was dark and winter time and I felt like we were an older man and a young girl traveling from a far distance of the hospital world back home. I felt like I was in a scary movie as a character visiting her mom in a faraway medical facility and going home in the dark of a winter’s night, was even scarier. When we got off the transit bus, Dad and I held hands going home to be secure, because even back then, you had to worry about bad things happening late at night, when people walked the streets. When we entered our home, I was finally feeling safe and hopeful of Mom’s ultimate return home feeling better. My brother always had the theory that Mom never really had a real heart attack; that somehow her regular doctor was misinformed and had put her there thinking it was one. In those days, they did not have the testing equipment and knowledge that there is now. Who knows, though she was treated with heart medications for years and she survived for thirty-one additional years.

There was a movie out at that time and it was called The Third Man and I did not tell Dad then, that I felt like I was a character in that movie which was unnerving and terrifying since he had not seen it, but Mom and I did and we traveled home from before her attack and we were scared stiff and afraid to walk those few blocks to home too.

Finally, she came home and recuperated and never had an attack again. She even got well enough that she volunteered at the then new Sinai Hospital which was so much closer to our home to help others as she had been helped when at the old Sinai.

There is a saying that states: “forget the mistakes of the past and move on to the greater achievements of the future. Take control. Today is a sacred gift from life shared with much love. Flow smoothly along the tide of life to nurture dreams and hopes to calm agitated minds.”

Mom was agitated and upset that my brother, his wife and her first grandchild were moving half way across the country and she would not see them ever again and therefore her anxiety triggered, we assumed the attack. They would call once a week to each of the grandmothers. One Sunday, they would call us and the next Sunday they would call my sister-in-law’s Mom. Then each of the Moms would call one another to tell each family that my brother and his family were doing fine. We looked forward to the call to one of us each and every Sunday for over eighteen months. Long distance calling as it was named then worked like this. When a long distance call was coming, your phone rang about three long, long rings. Then you knew it was not local, it was coming from afar. Oh how backward it seems now, where you can pick up the phone and call a foreign country and get connected in a few minutes. Even the sound of their voices was as if they were thousands of miles away. Finally, they came home because the job did not work out well enough for them to be away from their families. We were so happy when they all arrived home and Barbara was about almost three years old. Now Barbara is a grandmother herself and a physician. She knows that sad feeling, because her daughter and family live far away from her and she is a grandmother too.

There are all kinds of agitation. My mom’s was a sad type, sometimes we can be agitated over a wrong invoice we get from a company, we can get upset over an argument with a spouse or child, or a relative who is obnoxious, a neighbor whose dog barks all day and never hears it, a purchase we have made that turns out to be inferior, at our computer which is acting up and or a multitude of other daily things.

Agitation can lead I am told to a heart attack, as anxiety also can. Once, when I was at a dance competition in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a fellow dancer started to cry so much after the heat she was in and she did not win one of the first six top places. She was a wife, daughter, mother and a young woman of about forty-five who had danced very well. She cried so much that everyone thought she was going to faint or have to be hospitalized and this was only for not winning an award. It meant so much to her that even one award for one dance would have made her so happy, and she danced about eight different ones and did not win one event. That was fine, she had only entered for the first time in a competition and it was a usual happening. You did not win many times on your first try.

Finally, she calmed down and was comforted by her husband who said she was a winner because she had tried and that made her a real competitor, who attempted something hard and still won for doing that.

There are so many forms of agitation in life now days and were certainly other forms of it in the 1950’s too.  This is life and this is what we overcome every day.

It is said that “a flower that is not the prettiest in the garden may yet have the loveliest fragrance.” So it is with life. Some days are quite ‘pretty’, others not, yet they still have the loveliest fragrance there is and that is our life, whether it is a great day or a typical ordinary day, it is “still a day of losses set against some triumphs and that is like life itself.” That was written by May Sarton and it is so very true.

Count your triumphs and throw agitation to the wind and know that it is still a great day in your journey of life. I have a new necklace and it is called a journey necklace and it has birth stones in it for each member of my family. The colors are bright and so is life.