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.

                                             8.

 The Pen and the Poplar Tree

  Even a pen has a life span, I think to myself just as mine has run out of ink in the middle of writing a sentence.  The pen doesn’t come back the following season like the leaves on the poplar tree outside my bedroom window will come back in the spring.

The poplar tree is the first thing I see every morning.  I study the lines and curves of its limbs.  I mark time by how empty or full it is, as though it were nature’s calendar, just as the view from the window is like a weather broadcast I tune into each day.

I think about Jim and Dan the most in the morning.  As I re-integrate myself into this world, they are the first thing I remember.  On this morning, it was hard to get out of bed.  I noticed that the poplar tree is as empty in November as the world feels without Jim and Dan in it.

I found my way in to the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea.  I threw the pen into the trash and got a new one to write down my dream of Dan:  He was in a bed.  He hadn’t died.  We didn’t pull the life support systems.  But he was like an infant and was unable to talk or do anything for himself.  He wasn’t in pain, though.  I could go lay next to him, touch him, and tell him I loved him whenever I wanted to.  At one point, he got up, out of the bed.  I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me.  He walked to a body of water, maybe a lake, where my mother and a friend were sitting in lounge chairs at the water’s edge.  Dan walked by them, straight into the water.  And then he went under.  The dream ended there.  It seemed that, even in my dream, Dan wanted to go.  He didn’t want to live as an invalid, held like a prisoner to a bed.

Digging

  We used to think if we dug far enough we’d eventually get to China.  Is that something all the kids of our time grew up thinking, the way all the kids of my son’s generation seemed to know what “Nanny Nanny Boo Boo” meant?  I remember a scary song about dead people that we sang when we were kids …The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.  Was that a song that other kids knew or was it just for those who lived near a cemetery?

There were some advantages to living near a cemetery, like all the free flowers we brought home to our mother.  The cemetery workers dumped them across the street at the bottom of a hill, right next to the blackberry bushes.  Bringing home flowers didn’t last long, though, because we got the distinct impression that my mother wasn’t thrilled with cemetery flowers, so we stopped doing it.  But we still collected the green plastic water tubes that held the flowers, because once we collected a whole set of ten, we could wear them on our fingers for long fingernails and then play “witch” or maybe “Godzilla.”

One time, Joey brought a condom home that he found near the dump.  He thought it was a balloon.  He couldn’t understand why my dad was interested in it, or why it was taken away from him.  Another time, we found the hood to a car which we used to sled down the cemetery hill all winter long, the same hill where Jim and Dan are now buried, the same spot of land where two pumpkins now sit next to their graves, placed there on Halloween (Jim’s favorite holiday) by his kids, Valerie and Brian.

Not far from the cemetery dump is the place where I used to dig for old bottles, the kind from the old days before plastic, with seams along the glass, corks in the top, and words like “bitters,” “cure,” or “elixir” embossed on them.  Sometimes, I would strike it rich and find a cobalt blue one, or an intact vase, or a pot for baked beans.  When I left home and got my first apartment, I furnished it with lots of dug up treasure.

Today, I still dig one way or another.  All summer my fingernails are caked with garden dirt, not the dark brown soil I remember from my childhood but the rocky red clay of Virginia.  In the fall, I dig up potatoes, which makes me feel very Irish.

Recently, I did another kind of digging in the Washington D.C. Archives building, in the parish church in Youghal, Ireland, in the cemeteries of North Quincy, Malden, and Nova Scotia to learn more about my ancestral roots.  When I write, I dig too, looking for details, a vein of information, the source of a feeling, or something that has been lost.  I keep photo albums, scrap books, diaries, and dream journals because I like to keep track of what I find.

When we first worked the garden at our 10 ½ Spring Street home, we found lots of old horse shoes and rusty nails.  We were told that our place was once a horse farm.  I wonder when they dug the foundation for the   sewerage plant, did they find anything of us, an old ball of Jimmy’s that he used to hit against the house, rusty BBs from the BB guns?  Whatever happened to Jim’s baseball card collection?  Where did Danny’s baby shoes go?

A lot of my history got left in my bedroom closet and burned to the ground with the rest of our house.  If I dug there now, would I only find ashes?   I never wanted to get to China.  I liked it where I lived.  I wish I could dig my way back to my childhood or at least find some things that we left there.

A.K.A. Redman

  “How can we be Irish with a name like Redman?” I remember asking when I was a girl.  Our name almost sounded Jewish to me, like the Goldmans and Shumans at school.  Redman is not our true name–and the oral history of it goes like this:  My father’s mother was born in Ireland and so was his father’s mother.  But his father’s father, Oscar Lundquist/a.k.a. Charles Redman, was born in Sweden.  He wasn’t a gangster as his alias might imply, he was a ship’s yachtsman.  On the ship, from Sweden to America, a man named Charles Redman died.  My grandfather, Oscar, took over the man’s job and got his name in the bargain.  Our Irish names, Bergin, Dineen, and Murray, were all carried by the women.

When my brother Jim was in the Army, the only one of my siblings who was ever in the military, I was also doing something none of us had done before–getting ready to live with my boyfriend.  It was 1973 and openly “living together” was an untested new phenomena.  I was nervous to tell my parents my plans, but they both handled it well.  After asking me why I didn’t want to get married, my mother said, “You’re not on drugs.  You’re not hurting anyone…” which was as close as I would get to a blessing.

After four years, my boyfriend and I decided to get married because I wanted to have children.  I kept my maiden name (also a new phenomenon).  I didn’t have any burning reason to do that, except it was my name, and I didn’t understand why I should have to change it.  “How do you do that, keep your maiden name?” friends would ask me.  “You don’t do anything.  It’s when you change it that you have to do something” (but I didn’t know what that was), I answered.

By the time I got married a second time, the name Redman was second nature.  My current husband’s Irish heritage is also carried on the women’s side.  And he also is one of nine children!  He is of German descent on his father’s side, as I am on my mother’s side.   But his last name, Klein, is miss-spelled more than mine, and I like having a color in my name. I don’t think women should have to give up their names (their father’s names, actually).  But, I have to admit, it must be confusing for our postman considering that I, my sons, my husband, and the foster care resident who lives with us all have different last names. Now with Dan’s mail coming to our house, he probably thinks I have another new husband.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I would like to be able to summarize what I am learning about death, but the truth is I went from understanding death in theory to not understanding it at all in reality.  I understand death on paper, in books and in movie plots.  I understand it logically, but what about the rest of me?

I can be sitting in the dentist’s chair getting my teeth cleaned, writing out a check to pay a bill, standing in front of the fridge with the door wide open wondering what to have for supper, or  jumping on my trampoline when the thought of Jim or Dan comes into my mind, and I still ask, “What happened?”

When someone dies prematurely, it feels like a murder has taken place.  You want to find out who did it, not so much to blame as to know.  I know death is a part of life, but that makes it no less a mystery.  It doesn’t have a solvable conclusion like the Nancy Drew mystery books I read over summer vacation when I was a girl.  I thought I understood death.  I also thought I had compassionate understanding for others who had lost family members, but after the deaths of my two brothers, I realize that I didn’t have a clue.

All my life, I have dealt with a fear of public speaking.  The first time I noticed it was in the fifth grade (Miss Welch’s class, I think) when I gave an oral report on Thomas Jefferson.  My mind went blank.  My face turned red.  It didn’t come out they way I had planned.  But it happened even before that when I had to stand in front of the class to tell what I did over summer vacation.  “I went to Florida to visit my grandparents…my brother Jimmy went with me…I sprained my ankle…I got lost on the beach…I had to crawl to find help”.  It was a good story, but I rushed through it, anxious to get back to my seat, too many people looking at me!

As I got older, I knew that my fear of public speaking was a hindrance to becoming who I wanted to be, was something I wanted to overcome.  I learned to speak to groups, first in the safe haven of women’s circles, and then in cafés and coffee houses where I gave poetry readings to mixed groups.  My heart still pounded and my hands shook like they did when I was younger.  But I knew that I couldn’t let fear stand in the way of something I thought was important to say.

This summer, I graduated from the school of public speaking when I spoke to a whole church full of people about my brother Jimmy.  It was an honor I was glad I could meet, on a matter of the highest importance.  From that formal pulpit, I looked out into the congregation as I spoke.  I made eye contact with each one of my siblings, my mother and father, and Valerie and Brian, who were all sitting in the first two pews. Their expressions looked strained, as though they were trying to understand.  Dan looked expectant as he listened intently; maybe he was nervous for me, maybe he was hoping I would have a clue to make sense of Jim being gone.

Death is a strict teacher.  It doesn’t wait for you to understand.  It’s harder than algebra, more like quantum physics but harder than that, too.  I didn’t talk about death when I gave Jim’s eulogy.  I talked about what I knew, the living Jim, the life he lived, the person we all loved.  Remembering Jim brought a few laughs from the pews because of what we all understood, that each of us is “one of a kind,” but with Jim that was especially true.

Progress Notes

  In the world of foster care work, which is what I currently do for a living, there are quarterly reports and progress notes to be written.  Besides the direct support and care that I provide, there are records to keep and documentation to be taken.  This all fits in nicely with my long time practice of keeping diaries and journals.

And now they’re falling… like a steady rain… in a storm of color… in late October…I wrote in my journal last autumn when the poplar tree and the other trees in my yard were losing their leaves, and I was being uplifted by the bold excitement of it all.   A few weeks earlier I had written…The neighborhood dogs are sitting out October…like wallflowers in the corner…they’re overdressed in fur.   It was an Indian summer day.

There’s a lot of information hidden in my journals, information that I would surely have forgotten if I hadn’t written it down, like the fact that last October was warm. It was still so warm and dry in November that spontaneous fires had started, the smell of smoke hung in the air, and fat sluggish flies were gathering on our window panes.

Re-visiting last year through the pages of my journal is like taking a vacation from this year.  Even with the fires and fat flies, and the 2000 presidential election with its voting ballot fiascoes, my life seemed so simple and idyllic back then.  I was poem-making and apple-crisp-baking, setting some apples aside for Thanksgiving pies.  I was making milk thistle tincture, an herbal medicinal, for Danny and Jim because it’s good for the liver. I was picking the last of the marigolds and cosmos to set in a vase on my kitchen table.  By late November the wood stove was going and the dog’s bowl of water on the porch was frozen, the words in my journal reminded me.

As I read, I began to look for clues of what was to come.  And there were some.  Family members were signing up to go to Houston pending Danny’s liver transplant, which we thought would happen within the next two years.  I was watching the Bill Moyers special on death and dying on PBS, and I had just written my first eulogy, my own.  It was an exercise we did at our woman’s circle group, one that got me thinking about death just as the promise of winter was closing in.

Reading over my journals, I realize that I am a record keeper just like my brother Jim was, and that there are climates to keep track of that have nothing to do with weather. I keep my own progress notes through the pages of my journals.  I write my own “What I did on my Summer Vacation” without any teacher to tell me to.  I document my own history, day by day as it happens.

Here is an entry from this year’s record that tells something of the climate I am now living in.  It’s a poem written by Rabindranath Tagore, one that I found after Dan had died.  I would have liked to have recited it to him.  Peace, my heart, Let the time of the parting be sweet.   Let it not be a death but completeness.  Let the love melt into memory and pain into songs.  Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of wings over the nest.  Let the last touch of your hand be gentle like the flower of the night.  Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.  I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.______Read Chapters 1- 7 HERE