Loose Leaf Notes

Following the posting of THIS poem about my sister’s death in 2015, I received a few comments on this blog and on Facebook asking about my brothers Jim and Dan’s back to back deaths, which happened in 2001. I actually wrote a book about it that was used for years in a Radford University grief and loss class for counseling students, but the book has largely been out of print for nearly a decade now. I only have about six copies left of the nearly 1,000 that were printed. There is lots of writing on this blog about losing Jim and Dan and others in my family, which can be found on the Losing a Loved One side bar category, but after thinking about it, I decided to post the first chapter (and maybe more) of the book. It wasn’t written as part of the book, but serves to set up the story. It was originally written for our Floyd community newsletter, A Museletter, and was published in my hometown paper, The Hull Times, as a tribute. It became a jumping off point for the book, The Jim and Dan Stories, which is part an account of my brothers last weeks and their deaths a month apart (which played out like Hollywood script), part memoir of growing up together on the South Shore of Boston in a large Irish Catholic family of 11, and part a chronicle of the first six months of life-altering grief and coping with it.

But first the introduction. I plan to post the first chapter tomorrow.

  James Michael Redman-November 22, 1946 – July 25, 2001

  Daniel Mark Redman-October 7, 1951 – August 29, 2001

 Down in the Hole

  If I was stuck in a hole nearly buried alive and someone offered to pull me out to safety, I would probably say, “Wait! Not so fast.  There is still so much to learn here, and I’m still taking notes.”

Grief is like a hole that I’m not ready to come out of because I’m profoundly involved in its process.  I know it has its own ending, one that I can’t dictate (if not an ending then a coming up for air).  Something about a hole’s dark confinement gives me comfort. Maybe the way an animal goes off alone to heal, I go down–into a mine, an archaeological dig, the shadow of the valley of death.

We buried my older brother, Jim, who died suddenly at the age of fifty-four, in July 2001.  My younger brother, Dan, died a month later at the age of forty-nine.  Since their deaths, life has had a sharper focus.  There are things I can see that I couldn’t see before.  If I can describe what I see from inside this hole, will it help others when they are down in one?  What place is this? How will I survive it?  How deep does it go?  I want to know. I’ve never been here before.  Can I make something constructive out of the powerless feeling of loss?  Am I digging my way out, word by word?

I’m writing Jim and Dan’s story because after living this story no other seems worth telling, because what else can I do down here, because there’s no where else to go.  I’m writing Jim and Dan’s story because I’m proud of their story.  I want to shout from the rooftop how irreplaceable they are.

A friend stopped me recently while I was grocery shopping in town.  She wondered out loud how I could write so openly about something so private.  It was an innocent question that plunged me into doubt, as though she held out her leg and tripped me.  That was far from her intention, but I was susceptible to falling, never too far from grief’s dark hole.

The first five “Jim and Dan stories” were originally written with my community in mind, people who had been hearing my writer’s voice on everything from erotic poetry and home schooling, to my political views and struggles with Chronic Fatigue in the pages of “A Museletter,” a local newsletter I have co-edited for over 15 years.  There was no going on as if nothing had happened, and writing was like returning to work, back to what I normally do. Readers of the Museletter were bound to hear these stories or not hear from me for a very long time because Jim and Dan were all I was about.  It wasn’t as if I wanted to tell people I sat next to on airplanes that my brothers had died, but, then again, some of the Museletter subscribers are strangers to me.

The first five stories, written as a tribute to my brothers, were also published in the local newspaper in Hull, Massachusetts, where my siblings and I grew up.  Those first stories were all I intended to write, but I soon discovered they only cracked the door that wanted to be fully open.   Never was I so obsessed with writing.  I was initially confused by the format that dictated itself to me, the short slightly disjointed pieces, not so unlike the way I felt.  Each day’s writing was like a journal entry, field notes from the trenches of grief’s frontline.  I let myself trust my own stream of consciousness, trust that each separate story would become part of something whole, just as I hoped I would be again.  To write or not was not the question, but for who and why, I struggled to answer.  How can I so openly share something so personal?  How will the stories end?

I didn’t know when I began writing that to tell my brother’s story I also had to tell my own.  I knew it was a family story, but I was surprised to discover that Jim and Dan’s deaths revealed an identity crisis in me, one that was underscored by the distance between my childhood home in Massachusetts and my present one in Virginia.  Writing became a way to bridge those two places, and a way to piece together what was shattered in me.  It was like a broken mirror was being put back together, with each memory retrieved, so that I could see myself again.

My brother Jim was a lover of storms.  He was more at home with the elements than he was with people.  As the stories progressed his essence began to emerge as the mysterious changing qualities of the moon.  Dan was compassionate and generous. His bright light was personified by the sun.  A silver and gold thread began to shine through the dullness of my grief and weave itself through the stories.   The mythical presence of Jim and Dan, expressed through dreams, symbols, and the coincidences that my family and I shared, supported me in my grief and became the signposts out of it.

Still, I asked, was I imposing my personal drama on the readers of the Museletter? Is the subject of death a public taboo, too intimate to share with others?  By now fifteen stories had been printed, and I began to feel that the Museletter readers, looking for local news, were not the right audience for these stories.  But who was?  I didn’t want to write to hear myself talk.  I wanted to reach out and shake others while repeating the Buddhist passage: “Death is real.  It comes without warning. No one escapes it.  Soon my body will be a corpse!”

During this time of questioning, I was browsing in a bookstore when I came across a book by Natalie Goldberg, called “Thunder and Lightening, Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft.”  I opened it to the chapter–“But Who is Listening?” –where she, a Zen meditater, grappled with the question, who does she write for?  She came to this conclusion: “I was writing for everyone and everyone was me.”  She gave this good advice for writers: “Rest in the structure that holds us up, and keep one foot in each world.  Stay close to your own reality and stand also on the bridge that takes you out into something larger–our understanding that we’re all finally in this together.”

Death is a universal story, one that bonds me with the rest of humanity.  I want to get to know the rest of the world better and let the world know me.  I want my brother’s lives to be marked and for them to not be forgotten. I don’t want the grief of loss to be in vain.  I want it to wake me up and teach me something.   I want the record to show the loving strength of a family.   I want to say to everyone “We were here.”     – Colleen Redman / Read Chapter 1 HERE.