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 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.

                                                       7.

 New Pastures

This is the time of year when the farmers separate their cows for new pasture or for slaughter.  You can hear them mooing incessantly all over the county, keening for their mates and their calves.  It’s been going on for weeks now.

Before Jim and Dan died, I was in a process of mourning the loss of my little boys who had, over the past few years, transformed into young men.  It was a loss with a safety net, for they are still here, but a loss just the same.  I looked teary-eyed for them in all my photo albums. I looked for them in dreams as little boys again.  I would always be their mother, but the every day mothering was over.

I hear terms like “the empty nest syndrome” or unflattering descriptions of the supposedly clinging, hysterical mothers who don’t want to let go.  I don’t have that problem.  I’m happy with my life, and the grief I feel for the loss of my little boys is equal to the pride I feel in knowing what wonderful, independent young men they have become.  Still, there is grief, and the little boys whose whole world once revolved around me, who loved me with such innocent sweetness, are gone. I’ll never be loved quite like that again.

I’ve made it known that “Being Josh and Dylan’s mother” has been the highlight of my life, which could almost sound like I have no where to go but down. I know that it isn’t true for I also usually add, “And marrying Joe (which I did when my boys were teenagers) has been the reward of my life.”

My sons tower over me now.  At Dan’s funeral reception I got in between them, like a little paperback between two impressive bookends, while someone snapped a picture of us.  I said to my sister Tricia, the mother of young Matthew and Patrick, “Look closely, Trish.  This is where you’re going with all this.”

Josh and Dylan stayed close by me during Dan’s funeral, often checking to see how I was doing.  I used to be the one that comforted them, and now they were comforting me.

Yes, Josh and Dylan are young men now, out on their own.  Isn’t that the idea, the natural conclusion to childhood as death is to life?  But they didn’t leave their childhoods early, as Jim and Dan left their lives.

The haunting sound of the crying cows, separated prematurely from their families, is like a soundtrack to my sadness.  I look for Jim and Dan now in all my photo albums.  I wait to see them in my dreams.

Two Fires

The funeral parlor limousine driver was the father of another big Catholic family we grew up with in Hull Village.  We used to see him and his family at church, back in the days when our family could fill up a pew, and before our church, St. Mary’s of the Bay, became a private residence with plastic lawn chairs out front.

My mother and I helped dress Danny the morning of Jim’s funeral, as the limousine waited out front.  Dan had missed Jim’s wake the day before because he was too sick to attend.  Sitting next to me in the back seat of the limo on the way the cemetery to bury Jim, Dan said to the driver, “You were like the father of The Village, always trying to keep us in line.”  Then he apologized for any trouble he may have caused and added, “We were only trying to grow up.”

When we were kids, we could see the cemetery from the house we grew up in.  We went sledding on its hill in winter, before it was so crowded with headstones, and played in the forts at Fort Revere, just behind it.  My sisters and I sunbathed in our bikinis on the roof of our 10 ½ Spring Street house until we noticed one day that the cemetery workers, all of whom were men, were watching us with binoculars.  It seemed like my brothers were always lighting fires or shooting off their BB guns back then.

Once we had a fire that the boys didn’t start when the clothes rack that sat on the register heater ignited.  We were all sleeping when my Dad, on the third floor, shot up in bed knowing something was wrong.  After running downstairs, he discovered that the french doors to the old front room and their curtains were ablaze.  My Dad didn’t want to call the fire department, thinking they might take too long to get to our house, or maybe they would axe the place up.  After getting us all outside, because the house was filling up with smoke, he somehow put it out.

In the next big fire the house didn’t survive, and this one was done intentionally by our local government.  The town took our house through “eminent domain” to build a sewerage plant in its place. I had just moved out, at the age of twenty, after living there for fifteen years. I didn’t have the heart to watch the house burn down.  It was hard enough later when I saw the pictures that someone had taken of it in flames.

Sometimes when I’m in Hull, I walk the sewerage plant grounds, past the blackberry patch and ice pond swamp, through the tall grass and Queen Anne’s Lace where I played Annie Oakley and Davy Crockett. I look at the bay where we swam as kids, the Nike Site Bridge where Johnny fished, the corner where we waited for the school bus.  I can see the Fort Revere water tower that Jimmy helped me climb up into, the place in our yard where Danny built his first little house, and the Duck Lane monuments where I marched in the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) drill team for the Memorial Day parade.  I feel like a time traveler or The Lady in Black, the legendary Hull ghost who scared us as kids when we walked home after dark from the Village, past the cemetery we thought she haunted.

Setting the Bone and the Record Straight

Jim and Dan’s destinies lined up almost as though there was some planning involved.  Maybe there was a divine plan; that would explain something about how their lives and deaths paralleled and intertwined.  But they’re not the only siblings in my family who have gone through life-changing passages in pairs.  Sherry, and then Bobby, were both the same age (between seventeen and eighteen) when they each were hit by cars.  Both were pedestrians, both broke the femur bone in their legs, both required long hospital stays (in Bob’s case more than one), and both have metal pins or other hardware in their legs today.  To add to these coincidences, both Sherry and Bobby were heading down the wrong path in life when these events slammed them to a halt, and both went on to live with older siblings after their accidents

Sherry was still on crutches when she came to live with me in my first apartment in Quincy.  It was the early 70’s, a time when the flower child innocence of the 60’s was just beginning to sour. But we were still innocent and because we worked in a factory together, we call this period in our lives our “Laverne and Shirley Days”– after the popular sitcom with Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams whose characters also worked in a factory.

After his accident, Bobby, who was eight years younger than Sherry, went to Texas to live with Dan.  They called Bobby “Red” at the metal shop where Dan worked, the shop where Dan had gotten him a job and where Dan was known as Dano.  I was in Texas then, and Bobby, Dan, and I often got together.  When John arrived, also needing some big brother refuge, we were starting to tip the balance between the Massachusetts Redmans and the Texas ones.

Bobby didn’t get to have his last “Keno experience” with Dan.  Dan was too tired to drive to Plymouth to visit Bob, as he had planned, when he was in Hull to pick up Jim for their trip.  So Bob took matters into his own hands.  At Jim’s funeral he made sure to take Dan aside.  “I’m the man I am today because of what you taught me,” he told his big brother.

Dan, with the typical Redman deflection technique, said, “Yeah, I taught you what not to do.”

“No,” Bob persisted, “You showed me many things that I have incorporated into my personality.  You are a part of me, Dan.”

He reached out to Dan and gave him a big hug, saying “Thank you,” to which Dan conceded and replied, “Your welcome, Bob.”

My mother, and sisters, and I are still in awe at how meticulously Dan folded his socks and lined them up in rows in his sock drawer, something we discovered when we stayed in his apartment just before he died.  Bobby overheard us talking and laughing about Dan’s neatly folded, lined-up socks and said, “I fold mine that way, too. That’s the way he taught me to.”

 The Golden Son

Death is a natural part of life, but it isn’t natural for parents to bury their children.  Everyone knew that my mother had a special fondness for Dan.  I could tell early on by the way she would call him to wake up for school in a sweet voice and then call me with a “serious business” voice.  Maybe it was because Dan was so much like my father, or because, after being in Florida for a whole year as a kid, she knew he needed some extra love.  Probably it was because she knew he had been up late the night before working in same restaurant she did. Danny wasn’t exactly the golden son in the typical sense, but he did have a heart of gold.  Maybe my mother just always knew that.

I never minded my mother’s special attention to Dan.  She wasn’t the only one that felt that way.  What I did mind was that I had to make my brother’s beds.  As a girl, it was sometimes my chore, but I hated it because the boys always pulled all the blankets and sheets out from under the mattresses.  It was like making a bed from scratch.

Dan liked to tell the story of my dad waking him up for school.  Contrary to the way my mother did it, when my father woke up Dan it was a battle of the wills.  My father ended up pulling all the blankets off and out from under Dan. Then, even the mattress came off!  There was Dan, holding on to the bed springs, stubborn to the end.

Dan was known for being my mother’s hardest baby to wean.  He was the one who liked to climb into bed with my parents the longest too.  The night before Jim’s funeral, Dan climbed into bed, one last time, with our father.  It was 4 a.m. and Dan, who had been sick as a dog all day, got up to use the bathroom.  Coming back from the bathroom, he ended up in our father’s bed.  My dad said Dan stroked him lovingly and tried to tell him something, but my poor bewildered dad didn’t have his hearing aid on, and so he couldn’t hear a word that Dan said.  In the morning Dan didn’t remember a thing.  We never found out what he said.

At Dan’s wake his open casket was framed in rosary of red bud roses.  It was a fairy tale image, suitable for a golden son, placed there anonymously by someone else who had a special fondness for Dan.

 Instant Karma

Dan told me once that his karma, the law of cause and effect, was instant.  Not only did his trouble-making behavior get him in trouble, he sometimes got accused of things he didn’t do.  Some of his friends did worse things than he did and never seemed to get caught, he complained.  I tried to convince him that was a good thing and a chance for him to change his ways.  I told him about when my son, Josh, at sixteen years old, said to me, “I wish I didn’t care so much what you thought.” My son, Dylan, also at sixteen, said, “Sometimes I wish you were a mean mother, so I could do whatever I wanted to.”  My sons had a foundation, based in the loving relationship they had with me, that kept them in line even when they wanted to go wayward. Danny had a loving foundation too, as well as a conscience that made him feel guilty when he was doing something wrong.  Getting caught after doing something wrong was a natural consequence, a wake-up call from his spirit trying to keep him in line, I had told him.

He was afraid to go to his class re-unions because of his past narrow escapes from the law that still hung over his head. Bravely, he went to his 30^th, –the year before he died–and had a great time.  He later told me, as though he were surprised, “Everyone was so happy to see me!   He added, “…even the classmates who have ties to Hull cops.”  Someone at the re-union asked him why he moved to Texas.  “I wanted to stay alive,” he answered, which meant getting out of the South Shore drug culture.  I think that class re-union was one of the highlights of Dan’s life. Several of his classmates that he re-connected with there came around my parent’s house to visit Dan when he was in town for Jim’s funeral, which meant a lot to him.

Dan hated that some people treated him like a “bum,” an alcoholic drug addict because he had Hepatitis C, which is a virus that causes liver disease and is contracted, for the most part, through drug use (using shared needles) or hospital blood transfusions. I’ve heard that Hepatitis C is a bigger epidemic than AIDS.  So how come the public doesn’t know much about it?  Could it have something to do with the stereotyped stigma it has, like the way AIDS was stigmatized as a gay disease (they’re just getting what they deserve) before people fought to have it taken seriously?

My brother Dan paid harshly for the mistakes of his youth.  I don’t want him to be stereotyped for those mistakes. I want him to be remembered for the efforts it took to correct them.

________________Colleen Redman / More chapters HERE.