Loose Leaf Notes

The Jim and Dan Stories”, a book I wrote after my brothers died a month apart nearly 4 years ago. The book weaves the events of the last few weeks that led to my brother’s deaths with growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts during the 1950s and 60s. It’s also a chronicle of my experience writing the book while coping with heart-wrenching grief. But don’t expect the below excerpt to choke you up. There’s as much comic relief in the book of stories as there was in our lives growing up together. It’s in the spirit of recent themes, “When do you know its Summer?” and “What 5 Things Do You Miss About Your Childhood,” that I share it:
I had been working all morning with nothing to show for it. The printer was down. The stories I had written didn’t seem real until they were printed onto paper, and I held them in my hand. It was as if they didn’t exist if I couldn’t see them, in the same way it’s hard to understand the infinite with a finite mind, with a soul you can’t see or prove is really there.
I decided to clean the bathroom while my husband, Joe, was working on the broken printer. Cleaning would take my mind off my frustration, and I would immediately see the results of my labor.
While scrubbing the toilet, I noticed the plunger, which triggered a flood of old memories. It was bad enough that we grew up with one bathroom for eleven people, but we also had bad plumbing. It wasn’t just that our toilet didn’t flush well, sometimes it would overflow and sometimes so profusely that it would leak from the bathroom floor to the living room ceiling, which was really the same thing. God forbid, if this happened while you were the one in the bathroom. I had nightmares about broken toilets for years and occasionally still do.
Sometimes, when we all get together, we relive our toilet trauma through the re-telling of stories. We remember the time Jim dropped a comb in the toilet and, rather than put his hand into the bowl to retrieve it, he flushed it down – or the time John flushed down a potato after using part of it for his pop gun ammunition. He didn’t want to get in trouble for wasting good food and thought the toilet would be the perfect place to get rid of the evidence. We laugh now when we remember the time our cousin, Freddie, sat on our bathroom sink to wash the beach sand off his feet and caused it to break right off the wall. We were glad none of us had done that. Freddie got yelled at, but he also got to go home and that was the end of it.
In the back of the house (see photo) was the source of the bad plumbing (although our antics didn’t help), a foul cesspool of darkness that would also sometimes overflow. I will never forget how my boyfriend, Kevin, while running playfully around the house, fell into the cesspool. I was surprised that he still liked me after that.
It’s funny how as you get older, even the bad memories seem good, or how when someone dies, the most ordinary of objects can be traced back to them. So many of my actions have been triggering childhood memories. Most of my conversations either revolve around Jim and Dan or eventually get steered back to them. The space they inhabit in my heart and mind is larger and deeper than when they were alive. It’s as if a part of Jim and Dan lives in me, just as a part of me has left with them? Is that what death does? Funny, isn’t it?