Loose Leaf Notes

The last few weeks of my brother’s lives played out like the conclusion of a dramatic Hollywood script, a plot with a twist.  The road trip they took, two weeks before the first death, became the beginning of a larger journey, the one in which they would both leave this world. 

I have decided to share my book, The Jim and Dan Stories, chapter by chapter, to have it available online, since it is no longer available in print. The book, which was used in a Radford University grief and loss class for counseling students, is part an account of my brothers last weeks and their 2001 deaths a month apart, 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 coping with the first six months of life-altering grief. I plan to post a chapter (20 of them) every Wednesday until the book is done. I added a new side bar category “Jim and Dan Stories” on the blog (to the right) for easy access.

4.

The Whole is more than the Sum of its Parts

  The thought of ending these stories feels like closing the book on my brothers.  Sometimes, when I’m reading a very good book, I draw out the last few chapters for weeks just to make the characters last longer.  Our life as nine Redmans, which started with Jim fifty-four years ago, has been that good.

One of the saddest parts of losing a loved one is watching your other loved ones suffer.  I can hardly bear to think of my mother going into Dan’s old room and knowing he’ll never be there again.  I know it must be painful for her to ride by Jim’s house knowing he is not inside.  She has told me that Jim and Dan are the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up and the last thing she thinks about before going to sleep (on the nights when she’s able to sleep).

I can’t get this image of my dad out of my mind: He, a World War II veteran, was being handed the American Flag that was draped over Jim’s coffin. Shaken, he saluted the soldier, who presented him with the flag, while trying to hold back his sobs.  And I’ll never forget the way he looked, sitting alone on the porch.  I watched from my mother’s kitchen window, as he shook his head back and forth in disbelief.

Funerals take almost as much planning as weddings and are just as important, but they have to be done on the spur of the moment and in the midst of devastating grief.  The last thing you want to have to worry about, when honoring your loved one’s life, is cutting corners because of money.  I’m proud of my brothers who worked hard at their jobs, day in and day out.  Because of their strong working class ethics, they left their families with enough insurance and savings to take care of their affairs and bury them.

When you are nine people, you have a lot of resources to draw from, and those of us married now have our spouses to add to that pool.  I’m proud of my family for the way we each took the roles we felt called to during our two month, uninterrupted, long ordeal of hospitals and funerals.  Each of us was where we were supposed to be and each was representing the whole of the family.  As much as we fought as kids, we were now able to respect each other and allow each to bring their own unique strengths to the family whole.

My mother is a mastermind at catching the details that might otherwise go unnoticed.  She is the physical center we all spin out from.  My dad has learned over the years how to withdraw when it gets hectic, which it always does when we are all in the same house. He, being the youngest of eleven who has watched each one of his siblings pass away, has earned the right to.  My dad is the heart center that ties us all together. We got through Jim and Dan’s deaths by acting as a team with my mother and father at the head of it.

We’re a little less loud and a little less talented, as a whole, without Jimmy and Danny, but our love for, and memory of them lives like a hero’s legend inside us now.  With love we bear our loss. In their memory our ability to love is deepened.  Hopefully, we will return to our daily lives knowing the strength of our love, and, in Jim and Dan’s memory, we’ll have more love to give to the world.  If we can get through the loss of two brothers within a month’s time, I think we can do almost anything.

 Taking Inventory

  Death makes you take inventory.  I see how we scramble to uncover every bit of evidence that Jim and Dan were here. Every physical reminder, every memory, every conversation, every handwritten letter or e-mail message they sent has taken on new meaning and new value.  I see more clearly how we are creating memories with every second we live and how those memories build on each other and become the whole of what our lives will be in the end.   I want to create good memories and leave lots of loving reminders of who I am for the loved ones I will someday leave behind.

People who have had a “near death experience” tell us (and Dan gave us some evidence of this) that when they were dying they experienced a life review, seeing and feeling every action and reaction they created, all their joys and hurts in explicit detail again.  When someone dies, their loved ones also experience a review.  Over and over I review Dan’s death.  Over and over, I review everything I can remember about Jim and Dan’s lives. I see their good points brighter and their faults with such loving acceptance now.

The past is all I have of Jim and Dan now, so I treasure it.  Sometimes I play games in my head, like this one for Jim called I Didn’t/But I Did:                                                                                                           

 I didn’t ever look at his weather pictures closely enough.

But I did tell him I loved him that last time I saw him.

I didn’t go to visit him at the Blue Hill Observatory where he gave tours.

But I did visit the shop where he worked to see what he did there and to see the machine that killed him (trying to understand how it could have).

I made fun of his pictures because almost all of them had no people in them.

I often take pictures without people in them now, and I have made whole scrapbooks just of his weather pictures, so I can look at them over and over.

I didn’t take him up to The Saddle or Rocky Knob to see the spectacular Blue Ridge Parkway views when he was visiting me in Virginia.

But I did feed him well, and I know that because he told me so when he called me later to thank me.

I didn’t ever ask him how he felt about death, God, or the afterlife.

But I did give him a foot rub the last night of his visit with me.

I hadn’t answered his last e-mail yet.

But I did write a good eulogy for him.

Overall, I felt close to Jim and Dan when they died, and I’m grateful that I have relatively few regrets about the things I didn’t do or say while they were alive.  But, as the veil is thin now between the seen and the unseen, it is also thin between the child and the adult in me.  I’ve been sleeping with a light on lately, because I’ve been afraid of the dark, the way I was as a child.  No matter how much grace my brother’s deaths have given me, I, and my family, have also been traumatized by them.  I can never know for sure where my brothers really are now.  Sometimes the unknown scares me.

 xoxodano

For years everyone told me that I would love a computer.  Being machine dyslexic, I resisted, the same way I resisted getting an answering machine.  I finally got an answering machine because someone gave me one, and now I don’t know how I lived without it.  Someone eventually gave me a computer too.  I can’t say I love it, like I don’t love my car.  I don’t want to know how cars or computers work.   I don’t need the latest models.  I like that my car gets me places.  My computer does the same.

For the last couple of years, I was able to get to know my brothers better as adults through e-mails.  Jim wrote long e-mails, sometimes starting with “Hello Collie Dog” (a childhood nickname that Jimmy started and I hated as a child), sometimes going off on a rant.  Jim often noticed what was wrong with something more than what was right, because he wanted it to be right.  Dan’s e-mails were short and sweet and often ended with “later babe.” He signed his messages xoxodano, the same way I sign mine xoxocolleen.

I have a recorded account of my days in the hospital, when every hand squeeze that Dan had the strength to give was big news, through the online “Sister Group,” started by my sisters, which also included some brothers and Redman family fans.  They shared some good “Dan stories,” bringing a bit of humor to balance my nightly typed accounts of his latest medical procedures and his declining abilities.

I saw Dan at the elevator, dressed in a suit and hugging me “goodbye,” when I closed my eyes as I sat in a chair beside his hospital bed.  It was getting near the end. I called Kathy and said, “Come now,” which she did.  Then my mother flew in a couple of days later and stayed for three days, long enough to say her last good-byes. (We were never sure if Dan was even aware that my mother was there.)  Everyone else did it over the telephone.  We held the phone to Dan’s ear as he listened. Jeanne came for what would be Dan’s last two days and, being a hospice nurse, her presence was invaluable.  My former in-laws, who live in Texas, were lovingly there for me in the hospital waiting room when I got the news for the first time that Dan would not likely survive.  They helped out by transporting everyone to and from the airport.

On Dan’s last day, I stayed home for the first time in twelve days because he was supposed to have a tracheotomy (for more comfortable breathing tube access), and I thought he would be mostly unconscious.  I got a call from my sister saying that the procedure wasn’t going to happen and that the doctors had done all they could.  The cab driver who drove me to the hospital took me on a long route that cost more money than the amount that was stated over the phone.  Feeling guilty, after I told him my brother was “taking a turn for the worst,” he gave some of it back to me.  When I arrived, Dan was in the middle of what we surmised was a “life review.”  He appeared lucid to an internal process, as though he were having a conversation.  He was full of expression (confusion and distaste, consideration and then enlightenment) and appeared to see things, sometimes reaching out to touch what we could not see.  That night, I typed the words we had all dreaded, “For those of you who don’t already know, we lost our precious Dan today.” The Sister Group ended.

My niece, Chrissie, who also lives in Virginia, recently started a new online family group, the VA/MA Love Link, to talk about the terrorist attacks on the U.S. and their aftermath.  Every now and then we get off the subject and find that we are still the Sister Group.  We find ourselves talking about Jim and Dan and the aftermath of them.

 Ironing out the Wrinkles

There are certain clothes I don’t like wearing because they remind me of the hospital or the funerals. Some remind me of when Jim and Dan were visiting, which are also hard to wear.  Whenever I iron a piece of clothing, I am reminded of Jim, how fussy he was about his clothes when we were teenagers.  Jim was a sharp dresser and a good dancer.  He worked at the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant in our area when he was in high school and so, had the money to pay me to iron his clothes.  I usually ironed them before we headed out to dance at The Surf Ballroom, but I could never do it well enough for Jim’s standards.

Or, I think of my two weeks at Dan’s apartment in Houston when I scoured the place for an iron because I was running out of clothes to wear and had some linen shirts that were badly wilting.  I saw the ironing board and even saw the iron in a photograph of Dan’s, so I knew he had one.  I was determined, and each night I would hunt for it in closets, under boxes, behind shelves.  Everyone in the “Sister Group” followed the latest developments of my search for Dan’s iron.

My relationships with Jim and Dan are not over, but they have changed dramatically from physical relationships to spiritual ones.  After their deaths, I was aware of an increase of internal activity, so much so that my external life would sometimes overwhelm me.  People’s voices (all but my immediate family who I felt “at one with”) seemed louder, their personalities exaggerated, their pulls on me for attention an irritation.  I was occupied! I was busy with my inner life, distracted by my grief and the new relationships of spirit that were forming with my brothers, which oddly took more time than the physical ones I had been used to.  I was trying to make a transition, one that could never be smooth. I was searching to make meaning out of my brother’s deaths, and I knew that what I sought would be a lot harder to find than Dan’s iron (which I did eventually find).

My brother Jim would sometimes become exasperated living with a teenager–his son Brian–who leaves milk out on the counter or throws his dirty socks wherever.  I heard Jim say, more than once, to Brian, “What are you going to do when I’m not around?” Brian is now faced with that reality.  When Jim was on his trip with Dan, he talked about it being a trial run for Brian to see how he would do on his own.  Brian, who is nineteen years old, is getting a crash course.

Sometimes I put loud music on and dance by myself until I’m in a semi-trance.  The last time I did this, I felt Jim and Dan’s presence fill the room.   When I picked up the phone to call Brian after dancing, I felt the spirit of Jim moving through me.  Brian is drawing a weather scene for his dad’s headstone, he told me.  He gave me his sister Valerie’s phone number at college. One of the ways I can continue my relationship with Jim is to continue my relationships with his children.  They are the tangible and priceless inheritance that Jim left us all.

Your Account is Overdue

I get Dan’s mail now (mostly overdue bills) because of a wonderful woman at the Houston Post Office who hugged Kathy and I the day after Dan died and said, “People you don’t even know will come to your rescue.”  She let us skip the red tape and made sure Dan’s mail would be forwarded to me.

I like seeing Dan’s name and address printed on envelopes.  I like imagining what his life in Houston was like.  My mother imagines Dan’s apartment empty now.  Kathy imagines it full, just like when we were there.  Some of us see Dan in our minds when he was healthy, and some of us see him sick.  I see him sick, probably because I gazed into his sick face for so many hours during those last days.  He was never more beautiful to me.

Danny had the best hair in the family, thick and wavy.  He had beautiful full lips that we teased him about when we were kids–probably because we were jealous–and a beauty mark on his right cheek.  The liver disease made him look tanned.  The loss of weight around his face made his features more defined and his good looks more obvious, sort of like when a handsome bearded man shaves his beard off after years of having it.

Jimmy wrote in one of his last e-mails, “titled “Dan the Man,” about he and Dan coming to Virginia, “Be prepared.  He looks so drawn.  His face is wasting away, but he has a fat stomach.”  He was right.  Dan’s looks shocked us all, but once I got used to them, I swore I could see his spirit more clearly behind his features. “Dan you’re in there!” I thought.  He was “in there” till the end, which is one reason I am inclined to believe in an afterlife.  Dan had a perfectly good spirit in a body that was giving out.  There was nothing wrong with his spirit, it wasn’t dying.  It must go somewhere, I thought.

Today I made copies of Dan’s death certificate at our small local library and hoped that no one I knew would come up to say hello and see  what I was doing.  I didn’t want to explain.  I didn’t want them to feel awkward.  There’s a lot of paperwork involved with death, and I am often sad.  Still, I can manage a smile when I think about Jim and Dan who both had credit card debt.  Wouldn’t they love to know that all their debts are forgiven?

________Colleen Redman / Read chapter 5 HERE. Read more chapters HERE.