The Jim and Dan Stories Revisted: Chapter 6
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 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 to chapters which will amount to the whole book eventually.
6.
Knocking Under the Hood
My car has a new hood that almost matches the color of the old one, a new windshield, and, something else I didn’t expect, a new sound under the hood. It makes me wonder, will I live long enough to experience everything that can go wrong with a car, or are the potential problems endless? I learned early about clutches, transmissions, brakes, radiators, and alternators. Then there were the smaller problems, most of them sounding like clothing accessories, like boots, shoes, belts, caps and pins. Every now and then I get a car diagnosis with a word so new to me it sounds made up.
Years ago, I rode in a carpool to and from a New York Indian Reservation to attend a teaching event. One of the other riders was a full-blooded Mohawk woman. After getting two flat tires, she told us that our car problems were physical manifestations, or metaphors, for our own internal states. My car, back home, had been idling high. Sure enough, not long after that I developed a hyper-active thyroid.
The phone rang. I heard my husband pick it up and then say, “It’s for you. It’s Sherry.” These days I answer the phone asking, “Is everything all right?” instead of saying, “Hello.”
I got the news about Jimmy’s death over the phone. So now, whenever a family member calls, I tense up and think, “What else has gone wrong?” Sherry and I haven’t missed a day connecting through email since our brothers died, as if we think the other could disappear just as quickly as Jim and Dan did. A phone call felt more formal, but she assured me everything was fine. A musical fund-raiser for the families of those who died in the 9/11 attacks was on TV, and she wanted me to watch.
The morning of Jim’s death, I woke up to my answering machine picking up and then Tricia’s shaky voice, “Colleen, call Ma’s house as soon as you get up.” What was Tricia doing at Ma’s house? I called back immediately, worried that Dan had died, at least that would have made some sense.
“We lost Jim,” is what Kathy told me, crying. She might as well have told me that the moon had fallen from the sky.
“What do you mean!? What do you mean!?” was all I could say before I was crying too.
Jimmy, who usually got off work at midnight, had worked overtime by two hours, which turned out be the last two hours of his life. It was reported that he last spoke to a co-worker at 1:20 a.m. and was found dead just before 2 a.m. At 1:31 a.m., that same morning, my sister, Kathy, shot up from a sound sleep to her feet with a crushing feeling in her chest and a panicked sense of death. We figured that was when the machine crushed Jimmy. We all wanted to know how long he lived after the machine had pinned him. “Probably just long enough to say, “Oh Shit!” was Joey’s guess.
The time between when Jimmy last spoke to his co-worker and when he was found dead is a half-hour that will haunt us forever. We fill in our own possible scenarios and hope that he didn’t suffer.
Nicknames and Other Tributes
If one of my family members were writing my eulogy, I think one thing they would have to mention is this: “Colleen rocked!” Not in a musical sense but in a back and forth slamming against the couch way or in the back seat of the car, much to my sibling’s aggravation. Then there would be the white streak in my hair and all my various family nicknames.
We are a family of nicknames. Most of them come through our father’s sense of humor and some through our brother, Joey, who as a boy had delayed speech (yes, dyslexia runs in our family) but was smart enough to make up his own language.
In Dan’s eulogy, John said, “We had a lot of nicknames for Dan. When my little brother Bobby and I lived with Dan, he did all the cooking, so we called him Chef Boy-R-Dan. He was a gentle person too and we called him Gunga Dan. Because he worked with steel all his life, he got the name Steely Dan.” Then there was Houdani, Dano, Deeko, D-babe, and Dan the Man.
Jim was called G-babe (from Joey), Jimmy, Jimbones, and Jimbo. He was named after James Michael Curley, the Boston mayor when Jim was born, who my dad liked because he was Irish, but mostly he just liked the name.
Jim, who died on The Feast of St. James, has at least two web page tributes that we know of. One is on a weather web page that Jim contributed to. It features a collection of his weather photographs and reads, “Sadly, Jim Redman passed away on July 25, 2001. His photographs are a testament to his love for the weather and everything about nature. He will not be forgotten. God Bless.”
Jim was a single father for ten years. On another online tribute, posted by our cousin’s wife, the caption under a picture of Jim with his kids reads: “Jim’s kids came first. He adored his son, Brian. He never missed a basketball game that his daughter, Valerie (a star player in high school who won a college scholarship for her basketball skills), was playing in.” The Blue Hill Observatory, where Jim volunteered, is planning a dedication ceremony to honor him. They’re raising money to erect a flag with a tribute to Jim inscribed on a plaque set in its base.
All this for a guy who didn’t think he accomplished much in life, a guy who, when I asked him, “Jim do you think you’d try for a liver transplant if you need it?” answered, “No, give it to someone who enjoys life!” A guy who, when asked by Kathy with a video camera, “Who are you?” answered with a laugh, “A loser.” A guy whose key chain read, “Not a happy camper.”
Headlines Hit Home
My dad knew Jim’s death was real when he read about it on the front page of The Patriot Ledger. Worker killed at a Canton Firm. It was also in The Boston Herald and The Boston Globe: Canton Worker Found Dead Behind Milling Machine…. Hull Man’s Death Ruled an Accident. The stories went on for weeks, but it was that first one that really hit my dad.
The night Jim died, Brian was awakened from sleep by a visit from the police. They arrived not long after his dad was due home, and he thought it was his dad. There’s a hole in the wall in Jim’s kitchen where Brian punched it when he heard what had happened.
Typing these stories at the computer this morning, I notice that my pants are on backwards. What does this say about me? I also notice that six pairs of reading glasses have converged in a collection, spread out on my desk. I can never get used to wearing glasses because for 48 years I didn’t. I get them at The Dollar Store, so I can have a pair in each room. But sometimes they aren’t there when I want them because they’re all piled up in one place. I don’t know how anyone can keep track of one or two pairs of glasses.
My husband often meditates in the room right below me. He says, “I love to hear your rhythm. First it’s quiet, and then the chair squeaks loudly as you approach the keyboard, and then a frantic downpour of typing can be heard before the whole sequence repeats itself.”
Periodically, I read out loud to hear how the stories sound after they’re pulled up from memory and from the depths inside me and made concrete by the written word. Jim and Dan’s deaths hit us in stages, in all different ways, at all different times. Sometimes I think writing these stories is like when my dad read the headlines in The Patriot Ledger or when Brian hit the wall. Maybe pounding on the computer keyboard gets some of the sadness out of my system. Maybe seeing the stories in print and reading them out loud to myself is a way to make what feels unreal, a little more real.
Looking for Jim
I punched Jim’s name in a search engine to see if there were any more tributes to him or weather photos of his online. It was news to me that there’s a famous champion motorcycle racer named Jim Redman and that he was all over the Web. There’s a Jim Redman Parkway in Florida, so I figured that was where this motorcyclist was from. There was an English professor named Jim Redman and a Jim Redman from Alaska who had won something.
I had to narrow my search, so I punched in “Jim Redman” and “weather” and I got 66 pages! Many were still about the motorcycle race–how the weather was on certain days that he competed. Oddly, I found a Redman Construction Company in Illinois that was headed by a Jim Redman–odd because that’s the name of my brother Joey’s construction company.
Even odder, was an email message from Jim Redman under the heading “measuring rainfall.” I was sure it was our Jim Redman who loved to measure rainfall, but it wasn’t. Then I found Jim on the Skywarn Cyber Newsletter! On 6/27/00 he reported from Hull: “Dime sized hail for 10-15 minutes. A few trees down. A peak gust wind of 67 MPH.”
This was so exciting; I went on to punch in Dan’s name. There are lots of Dan Redmans–a roller blader, a member of a boy’s track team…a trustee…. something about pizza, music, and Microsoft. Not our Dan.
I couldn’t stop. I punched in my own name and found I was all over the web and didn’t even know it! First, there was a Colleen Redman from Alaska. Maybe she was married to the Jim Redman from Alaska or maybe she was his sister! Then there were about 8 entries on “our” Colleen Redman. Two were for “A Museletter,” the local community newsletter I do. Several were poems I had published that people were posting (even in German). One was for an index of articles, one being mine, published in “Mothering Magazine,” and another was for a peace activist’s newsletter I co-edited ten years ago.
I never knew I was so famous. Having my address and phone number on the Internet made me feel slightly exposed. I was glad that I have never posed nude (fearing a nude photo of me could turn up online), but then I remembered I had (for an artist, not a camera).
Now I was tired and needed a break, but first I ran downstairs to tell Joe, who was outside planting garlic, about finding “our” Jim online.
All Souls Day
The October brilliance gave way to the bare-boned gray of November. It was All Souls Day, a day that Catholics remember the dead. I watched the clock all day, waiting for the e-mail messages to start coming in, reporting on the Candlelight Mass of Remembrance at St. Anne’s Church in Hull, where Jim and Dan would be honored.
When we were kids there was no question, we had to go to church and catechism classes too. The best part of going to church was my First Holy Communion, when I first received the host, which represents the body of Christ. I felt like a bride all dressed in white, complete with the mysterious veil. After my First Holy Communion, I was old enough to help the younger ones study their catechism lessons. But one day, my dad overheard me teaching them their first prayers…Hail Mary, Full of grapes, The Lord is with thee… This sounded right to me, especially considering that it was soon followed by the line…blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. At seven years old, the word “womb” was over my head, but I surely knew what fruit was.
When we got old enough, which meant when Jimmy could drive, we only pretended to go to church. We went out for breakfast and then to Nantasket beach so that Jimmy and Danny could girl-watch. I don’t think we were the only ones doing that because there used to be three Catholic churches in Hull, and now there is only one, which happens to be in my mother’s backyard.
Even my mother stopped going to church, but recently she started going again. I found this out when I was at her house in June, shortly before Jim’s death. My mother and I had planned a trip to Nova Scotia to visit her father’s homeland and his last living sister, whom my mother had never met. The day before the trip, I was standing in my mother’s red gingham kitchen with the apple and strawberry nick-knacks when she came through the door. “Where ya been, Ma?” I asked her.
“Church. I went back this past Easter to pray for Dan to get his new liver,” she answered.
By the time I was back in Massachusetts for Jim’s funeral, a month later, she had the whole parish praying for Dan. “The more prayers, the better,” she told me. I started to carry Dan’s picture in my wallet after that and would pull it out when I was in receptive company and ask others to pray for Dan.
I got three full reports about the candlelight service, one from each of my sisters. When Jim and Dan’s names were called, my mother and father went up to the altar to light two candles, one for each son. There was one parishioner who had lost a loved one in the September 11th attacks, but my parents were the only ones in the parish who had two deaths that year to remember. My sister Kathy described my dad on his way back to his pew, shaking his head back and forth in disbelief. Just like the day I watched him on the porch. He still can’t believe it.
______Colleen Redman / More chapters HERE.
