Grief

This is just a brief addendum to my previous post. It is the grateful acknowledgement of another pain I have not had to endure.

You will have to look closely at the photo above to see that those blue balloons are attached to party hats. I took this picture in the cemetery next door. That particular section is reserved for babies and toddlers who have passed over.

On a gloomy, rainy day, I drove into the cemetery to take Sgt. Thomas Tibbs for a walk, but the balloons grabbed my attention, and I pulled over long enough to snap the shot. Then I got out and went to investigate.

Beneath each balloon was a festive party hat, and beneath each hat was a small, sealed envelope, protected from the rain in a clear plastic bag. All the baby graves had a similar envelope, save the grave up front, the one that is frequently decorated with toys. The same one that was piled high with fresh snow one day last winter. (No, it doesn't snow here. At least, not at this elevation. But we're an hour's drive from the mountains. Someone had gone up and brought down enough snow to make a mound three feet tall and nearly as wide.)

The envelopes were addressed to the parents of the deceased: "To the parents of Isaiah" ... "To the parents of Sarah Lynn" ....

I couldn't help it. My curiosity got the best of me. I slipped open one of the ziplock bags, hoping to see what was inside the envelope. But they were all sealed.

You are left to your imagination, as I was.

But the parent 'hosting' the party for departed young souls was clearly reaching out--in grief, in kindness, in empathy--to all the other parents who were experiencing the same loss.

Weird? Amazing? Compassionate? Loving? Yes.

Thank you, Universe, that in this life, I have never shared that experience. All of my children, all of my grandchildren, are well and healthy.

May it be so until I draw my last breath... and join the others for the party.

Tardy

It has been well over a month since I told my cousin I would post something new to the blog, "probably today." I know you've been waiting, checking periodically. So has that one guy, who disagrees with most everything I say and believe but still reads the blog religiously. Go figure.

Anyway, I meant to write that day after we talked, dear Cousin-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless-At-His-Own-Request (just so you know that, yes, I mean you). But that day became busy. And then... a friend died suddenly, a friend I went to high school with who was younger than I am. I will write about Dennis in an upcoming post.

And then another friend died who was also someone who read my blog regularly--from the time I began writing it years ago. I will also write about Barb in an upcoming post. Everyone should know who Barb was in the world... and to me.

And Sgt. Thomas Tibbs, an introvert's best friend and hiking partner, has been sick. We negotiate this dark path periodically; he stops eating, becomes lethargic, and I enter a sort of fugue state, unable to fully engage with the world or my work until he finally perks up again, decides to get happy, eats all his food, wags his tail, and makes me cry with joy that he will be around "just a little longer," as I beg him to be. These episodes seem to be brought on by severe stress. For several consecutive days last week, the neighbors were having a patio cover ripped out and rebuilt. It was loud. It was scary. There were strange voices right outside our windows. Poor Thom. But he's baaaack as of last night! Eating his food, rolling over for belly rubs, rudely sniffing at Purrl's bottom (which she will tolerate but New Cat Jenny will not).

New Cat Jenny, as I write this, lies curled in a kitchen chair below the window through which the hummingbird feeder is visible. This is our routine: We wake early, everyone is fed (including the birds outside, for crying out loud), Thomas and I walk (if he's feeling up to it), I eat breakfast, then I park myself here at the kitchen table with the laptop. Jenny curls into 'her' chair, gives herself a thorough bathing, then goes to sleep for an hour or two while I write.

And yes, surprisingly, I've been writing, trying to average a thousand words a day on the second book in my middle-grade urban fantasy series. In recent days, the writing has been tough--only because I've had to give a ten-year-old boy a concussion, send him to the hospital, and have his beloved dog seized and placed in quarantine by animal control. I know. It hurts just hearing the summary, doesn't it? And you haven't even met Nathan yet. But every story--even if it's for middle-school kids--has to have conflict. No worries; bad boys got us into these troubles. A good boy will get us out.

When I finish writing for the day, if I haven't already walked Thomas and the weather is nice but not too hot and he's feeling good about life and not to terribly frightened, we take a long hike out in the countryside, where I take deep breaths, smell the wildflowers, enjoy the sun on my face, and remember good friends.

Cheers to them! And to you, my dear reader, for caring enough to appreciate the words and pictures humbly offered here. Let's chat again soon!

Grief

Grief takes you. It grabs you by the heart, reaching in with long, cold fingers that wrap around your heart and hold, daring you to move or breathe or look away just for a moment. It takes your undivided attention.

And you live like that. Waiting. Waiting for the feeling to pass, the clutch to release even the tiniest bit so you can shift your stance, avert your eyes… see beauty in the world once again.

I have been so, so, so lucky in my life. I was still a teenager when my first child was born, and the others all came along before I’d even reached the age of 30. We’ve had some scares… a few car accidents, a broken arm, always the trips to the E.R. with the youngest boy for stitches. That one surgery on his eye. But I’ve never had to drop to my knees and beg the Universe to please take me instead of my child. I’ve only barely flirted with the horror of what it’s like when a child doesn’t show up, doesn’t arrive home safely.

At the moment I am writing this, all four of my children are well and safe, to the best of my knowledge. Lucky, lucky me.

Because how do you ever get out of bed if you lose a child? I don’t know. I couldn’t.

Before I ever graduated high school, my best friend, who was a year older, was happily on her way to college classes one beautiful spring morning when she was hit by a drunk driver, sustained massive head injuries and died a few days later. That moment. That phone call. Hearing that she was undergoing surgery on her brain, but they didn’t expect her to survive… that’s when I first felt that cold hand of grief on my heart. And it took me. It dragged me around my room, not allowing me to lie down or sit or get comfortable in any way or even kneel. And it taunted me. “You’re losing Becky. She’s dying. She’s leaving. You wanted to be the one to leave, but she talked you out of it, and now you’re staying here and she’s leaving without you.”

Each word was a punch to the gut. And they just kept repeating until my stomach ached and I couldn’t breathe and I was absolutely overwhelmed with the feeling of complete and utter helplessness. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even sit beside her and hold her hand.

Did I pray? I tried. Back then, I thought I had to work at being a spiritual person. I became proficient at parroting. We would spout off with this rhetoric about God’s will and things happening for a reason, words that roll off the tongue so easily until your best friend has been senselessly run down by a man who’s had several prior DUIs and has once again gotten behind the wheel of a car after spending the night drinking. How is that “God’s will”?

I didn’t know how to reconcile it.

To whom do you go for comfort when the person who has always been the one to comfort you has died?

Grief is relentless and merciless.

Eulogy for Danny Fiocchi

I grew up in California, and my cousin Danny grew up in Illinois, so we hardly knew each other. He came out for a visit when we were little kids, but neither of us remember much about that time. I loved his mom, my Aunt Betty. She was my father's sister, and when Dad was dying, she came out to spend some time with us, with him, to say her last tearful good-byes and try to put a good face on losing him. She was kind, caring and nurturing—everything my own mother was not, and I always wished that fate had allowed me to grow up as her daughter.

It was Aunt Betty I wrote to when I was in my mid-forties and wanted some insight into my father. Since I'd been a young child when he died, I knew little about his character apart from the sketchy criticisms Mom would make if I asked her. I wanted to hear about him from someone else's perspective, so I wrote Aunt Betty and asked her what kind of a man my father was.

Many months later I received a large envelope in the mail which contained a letter, photographs, copies of newspaper clippings and an audio CD of Aunt Betty and my dad's brother, Maurice, being interviewed by my cousin Mick about my dad. The information they sent was an introduction to the father I'd never known, and after sifting through all of it for hours, I wept that I had not had the chance to know him better. Turns out he was a pretty good man, all things considered.

Thus began a renewed friendship with my cousins, especially Danny, that grew as the years went on. Via mail, email and, eventually, Facebook, we introduced our families to each other, our children and our grandchildren. But Danny resisted the cyber world, so a couple of times a year, he would call me or I would call him, and now I wish I had a recording of every one of those calls. Somehow, we talked as old friends, even though we'd missed sharing a majority of our lives. And somehow he knew—whether consciously or not—that his time on this earth would be limited. We never chatted about mundane things, though occasionally he would ask about the weather on the mountain where I lived, and I would sometimes wonder how much snow they were getting in comparison. Mostly, we talked about the growth and development of our own psyches. We longed to be good parents and beloved grandparents, but we both were all too conscious of our own flaws. So I encouraged him, reminding him often that his role in the family was to keep everyone connected (a role he took quite seriously), and he would remind me that my role was to write, as that was the gift I'd been given.

And we talked about our mortality. He told me long ago that he was ready to go because we both found the world to be a harsh place. "But I got too many people who depend on me," he would say, and when his grandchildren were born, he found a renewed vibrancy and determination to be around to guide them around the pitfalls of life.

For the past few years, every time I would return from my annual trip to Missouri, he would call and let me know he knew I'd been "close enough to drive to Illinois." In the summer of 2014, I promised him I would not return to Missouri again without coming to see him, which I did this past summer. By then he had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life some short months later. But what a reunion. I had not been in the physical presence of my cousins for fifty years. But we embraced as good friends, and we spent our time together laughing and teasing, just as I remember our times together when we were kids. And despite his rapidly progressing illness, Danny was his usual jovial, loving self.

To say that this man was one-of-a-kind would be an understatement. I have never known anyone like him, and my bond with him began in our first phone conversation as adults, when he told me he loved me unconditionally, without really knowing anything about me as a person. I knew he was sincere, and his love and encouragement have kept me moving forward, kept me putting fingers to the keyboard (yes, cousin, I know you're still checking up on me) for the past fifteen years. Because of him, I will push past the writer's block and the dysphoria and the discouragement, and I will continue to write. Because I want to make Danny Fiocchi proud of me. I want to honor his unconditional love for me.

YOLO

Dan with Black Bart/photo courtesy of Carl Botefuhr

In 1966, my brother Dan stole a police car. He was nineteen at the time. He wasn't a thug or a criminal, and he wasn't fleeing a crime scene. When the officers parked at the curb of a residence where a party was getting a bit loud, my brother, a guest at that party, spotted them through the window and quickly retreated out the back door, high-tailing it over the back fence and walking around the block to see what would happen to his friends still inside the house. Dan had intended to stroll by nonchalantly, hands in pockets, but when he noticed that the cops had left the keys in their squad car and the engine running, he couldn't resist. Keeping his hands in his pockets (to avoid leaving fingerprints), he opened the door, slipped into the driver's seat, and drove away. Two blocks later he drove the car into a field, surrounded it with tumbleweeds, and walked away, keeping the keys. He was never caught.

This story was legend in our family and was often repeated on holidays such as Thanksgiving when we all got together. Years later I would share it with my high school students—with the strict admonition that they never, ever try anything so foolhardy.

When I mentioned to Dan once that I shared his story with my students, he chuckled and asked, "Do you also tell them about how I stole a big yellow school bus?" On a walk with his girlfriend and her young son one fine day, they happened upon a bus yard, where row upon row of bright yellow buses sat waiting for the next school day. The boy mentioned that he'd always wanted to ride in one. Since the large chain link gate to the yard was rolled pen, Dan saw no harm in taking the boy inside and climbing into the nearest bus (his girlfriend all the while repeating, "Dan, I don't think this is a good idea"). Lo and behold, Dan found a set of keys above the visor, and to the child's great wonder and thrill, fired up the big bus and drove it right out of the yard as a maintenance man ran along behind shouting at them to "Bring back that bus!" As Dan looped around the big city block and headed back toward the yard, he formulated a complicated plan for escape. "You run that way," he told his girlfriend, "and I'll run the opposite way. He can't follow in both directions." It worked. Again, he was never caught.

My zany, devil-may-care brother had countless adventures in his life. As an adolescent, he was a chubby, nerdy kid with glasses who spent far too much time lying on his bed, eating and reading science fiction novels. But in high school he had to walk two miles to school and two miles home, so he quickly lost the excess weight. Then contact lenses replaced his thick glasses, and suddenly my brother resembled James Dean. With his exceptionally high I.Q., he was smart, confident, attractive and far too ready and willing to embrace what kids would refer to now as the YOLO lifestyle: You only live once.

And what a life he lived. My brother taught me many things: Dogs are family members. Repressed anger can kill you (or at least make you very ill). Bullies are, more often than not, very frightened people, which is why they take pleasure in frightening others. And funerals are for those left behind.

We fought a lot when we were kids, then reconciled as young adults, then fought a lot in middle age (as I found myself still saying, "You're not the boss of me!"), then reconciled again. In Dan's last weeks of life, we spoke often on the phone. We said "I love you" a lot.

Today marks five years since he passed. I still tell him often that I love him, and I still miss him trying to tell me what to do.