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.

                                     10.

 Breaking the Code

  There was a full spectrum of views shared on our “VA/MA” email “Love Link” about our government’s response to 9/11, everything from:  “A war on terrorism can never be won, just like the war on drugs can’t. It will cost us trillions and our civil liberties are being eroded…” to: “World events are manipulated by those who have vested money and power interests in them…violence begets violence…” or: “If we didn’t fight Hitler in WWII, we’d all be speaking German now.”

My sister, Sherry, left her computer, after reading some e-mail messages, to have supper.  When she returned the messages on her screen were scrambled in a German-like code.  Her husband, a computer technician, had no clue what happened.  They both were bewildered. “Do you think the terrorists are getting into our computers, or maybe Jim and Dan are trying to reach us?” she asked me.

Many of us had been having dreams about Jim.  Tricia dreamt, more than once, of Jim’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying.  Sherry dreamt she and Jim were frantically looking for something.  I dreamt that we were telling stories and Jim was talking out of turn. “Are you talking now, Jim?” I asked.

“Yes, but nobody is listening,” he answered.  In another dream, Jim’s words were slurred.

Johnny’s dream of Danny telling us he was all right was for all of us.  We all felt Dan, who had told us himself just before he died that he was all right, had made a good transition into spirit, and the few dreams we had of him were not troubling.  The abruptness of Jim’s death and the dreams we were having gave us all an uneasy sense of concern about his passing.

“I don’t know,” I answered Sherry.  “That’s about as weird as the dream I had with the far away answering machine message in my head that kept on going after I had woke up.  I felt like that was Jimmy.”

“You know,” I continued, “I’m beginning to think that I’m getting help from “the other side” while writing these stories.  They’re coming from somewhere; I’m not sure it’s all from me.”  I told her.  “It’s as if Jim and Dan want me to tell their story, want me to say the things they no longer can and so have enlisted some help for me.”

Struggling to understand Jim and Dan’s deaths has been like breaking a code.  We read messages in everything because we realize there is more going on than what we can see or know.  Death is not an evil enemy, but it does have an intrigue we would like to uncover.  Sometimes I become lucid while dreaming and can change the course of my dream.  Can a lucidity between the physical and the non-physical be developed?  Is there a way to know that Jim and Dan exist as we want to believe they do?

 Putting on My Face for the World

  My hair went white in a bold streak on one side of my head when I was thirteen.  As if that weren’t bad enough, my left eyebrow and eyelashes on that side went white too.  I learned the art of make-up, to cover up what I thought was abnormal, by the time I was fourteen.

Grief is unpredictable.  It makes me feel abnormal.  I wish it could be covered up with make-up, but it can’t. I haven’t been a person who cries easily, but now I never know when grief will strike me.  When I cry, it sometimes feels as if I won’t be able to stop.

I couldn’t fully accept Father Joe’s pronouncement, “Jimmy was embraced by grace the moment of his death,” even though it felt true when he said it.  What about all the dreams we were having about Jim?  Are they just projections of our own doubt and discomfort?

I consulted a psychic, who came highly recommended by a friend, because I wanted to find out more about Jim and Dan (and especially Jim).  I wanted to know they were all right.  I have had several psychic readings in the past that proved to be helpful.  I thought of it as calling Jimmy and Danny up via an open line.  If they were busy or not accessible, I guess they just wouldn’t pick up.  What did I have to lose, I wondered?

It was a phone consultation, one that I had to wait a month to get, set at an appointed time.  Rocking back and forth on my bed, I held the phone to my ear and nervously listened to what she had to say.  After receiving some insights about myself, I asked the big question, “Are my brothers together?” I wanted to know.

“Yes.  Jim helped Dan get acclimated to being in spirit,” she answered.   I cried with relief as she went on.  “There were doors that wouldn’t open for them here that are opening now… Dan is thanking you…Jim is apologizing for being angry.”

She gave me some direct quotes that made me laugh and cry at the same time: “They’re funny together…They want your mother to know that they even go to church now,” and “They want you to know that they’re setting up shop.  All the plans are laid out.”  She was able to describe correctly some of the circumstances of their deaths, as for Dan: “Was he bedridden? Boy did he suffer… Was he despondent? He heard everything and knew everything…He hovered over his bed.”  And for Jim, “This was quick,” she said.

“Yes, we’ve been worried about Jim because of the quickness and the nature of his death,” I responded.

“Well he’s laughing about it now.  He couldn’t even finish his sentence.  It was that fast,” she told me.  I knew Jim would either be cursing or laughing his head off at the oddball death he had.

So why was I still so sad after hearing all this, and why were Jim and Dan so worried about me?  “…They want you to go out more and have fun. They see you in your house, depressed, and want you to get help.  They want your husband to worry about you more and not let you be so withdrawn,” she relayed (I knew this was Dan, as he was the protective one, always concerned about how the husbands were treating all his sisters).

“I can see how you would think I’m depressed, since I’ve been crying the whole time we’ve been talking, but I’m really not worried about myself,” I answered her.  Maybe the fact that I work at home have Jim and Dan thinking I should get out more.  But didn’t I just go to a Halloween party?  Don’t I go out to my Authentic Movement class?  Didn’t I just come back from a walk with Joe and our dog?  I like staying home.  I’m a homebody, I protested silently.

If I could believe the psychic, a level of sadness could be lifted.  But the removal of one level only reveals the next.  But now we’re getting somewhere; this next level of grief seems to be all about me.  I am sad.  I miss my brothers. My life as I knew it is over.  Why did this have to happen to me?

I can tell what kind of day I’m having by the state of my make-up.  Some days I don’t get it on till after noon.  Sometimes I have to stop in the middle of putting it on to cry, or to write.  Other days I have to reapply it several times because my sadness is the kind that even waterproof mascara can’t hold up to.  Maybe I could use some bereavement counseling.  Maybe Jim and Dan have a point.

Frozen in Time

Jim had his teeth cleaned a couple of days before he died.  He left a “things to do” list on his night stand table.  At Dan’s apartment, The Houston Chronicles piled up at the front door.  The messages on his answering machine piled up too.

When someone dies, it’s like their life stands still and their belongings are frozen in time.  All the details of everyday living that they worried about prove to be meaningless.  They’re excused from all obligations.  Their lives don’t wind down; they just stop.

The girl at the Pharmacy approached my mother cautiously, “Mrs. Redman, I thought you might like to have these,” she said.  They were developed photographs of Jim and Dan’s trip that Jim never had the chance to pick up (probably one of the chores on his “things to do list”).

“Only Jim,” I thought when I heard he had taken pictures of clouds from the airplane window on his flight home from Houston.

“There are a couple of the World Trade Center buildings before they came down, taken from the highway.  Can you believe it?!” my mother asked.

We were able to piece together their travels through the photographs, the video Jim took, and the few stories they told before they died.  In the video, we see Dan trudging around like someone much older than he was, snapping pictures in Washington D.C.  In the photographs, we see him at the Vietnam War Memorial.  The images match the story he told us when we were all together for Jim’s funeral.

At the Vietnam Wall, Jim and Dan were looking for the name, “James Sullivan,” a Hull Village military pilot who was shot down in Vietnam, the oldest of a family we all grew up with. Someone, who overheard them talking, pointed right to it.  “I fought with Jimmy Sullivan in Vietnam,” he said.  In Jim’s package of developed photographs there was one at the memorial of Jimmy Sullivan’s name.

Our Jimmy never got to see the St. Louis arch.  He and Dan had planned to go through Missouri after visiting me in Virginia, and on their way to Dan’s place in Houston, where Jim would eventually take a plane back home. But Jim scrapped the idea, feeling Dan was too sick.  By the end of their three days with me, Jim just wanted to get Danny home.   “Why do you want to see the St. Louis arch when there are things like The Grand Canyon around?” I had asked him. “I’d like to see how it’s made,” Jim replied. (Oh yeah, it’s metal, I remembered.)

Sometimes my brothers, and especially Jim, were a mystery to me.  During the Y2K scare of mass computer failure, Jim said to me, “I just went out to buy some things for Y2K.”

Thinking about the predicted breakdown of our systems, I asked “You mean can goods and supplies?”

“No! Souvenirs,” he answered.  He was excited to have lived to the year 2000.

The Road to Destiny

I’m so sensitive that just putting on sunglasses can sometimes make me feel altered, like I’m stoned on a foreign substance.  Riding home from Christiansburg today, blinded by the sun, I had to put them on.  The snowflake-like patterns on my windshield from the morning’s hard frost showed up more with sunglasses on and began to distract me.  The car swerved a little.  “Slow down,” my mind commanded, “My family can’t handle another death.”  When my boys were little, I used to think this way too. I had to take especially good care of myself because someone was counting on me too.

We all keep remembering the details of Jim and Dan.  It makes me wonder what we ever use to think about.  My mother just remembered Danny sitting on her porch, not long ago, telling her that he hadn’t thought he was going to make it past the age of thirty.  I told her that in several of his e-mails he had said “I wouldn’t be here today without the love of my family.”

She remembered how much Jim talked about death, as if it were a struggle for him being in the messy world of physical matter.  For as far back as I can remember, Jim made it known that he didn’t want to grow old.  Even the psychic said, “He knew he wasn’t going to live long.”  When Jim saw how sick Dan was, he really got worried, now he had to worry about old age and being sick on top of it.

The irony of Jim was his fatalistic outlook, mixed with his innocent wonder and interest in everything.  For all his complaining, he never gave up.  He never shrank from life.

Jim took the prescribed course of pharmaceutical drugs for Hepatitis C for more than a year, and he suffered miserably with the side effects.  On the brighter side, he had recently stopped taking them and was able to enjoy his last few months feeling pretty good.  Unlike Dan, the medicine held off the progression of the virus in Jim, even though he practically jumped off my couch when I massaged the liver point on his foot (the skeptic in Jim wasn’t prepared for that).  In thinking back to how Jim suffered, I realize that he did put up a good fight, as did Dan. Yet, at the same time, they both seemed aware of a destiny in store for them that meant a shortened life.

I had been reading about death before Jim and Dan died.  I had looked through my closet wondering what I would wear to a funeral. I had arranged my life, over the past few years, so that I could drop it all at a moment’s notice, knowing I wanted to be of service to family members in need.

I had no clue that Jim and Dan’s deaths would call me, just as they had no clue as to when they would die. But none of us are as clueless as we think we are, and there is a familiarity in meeting our destiny.

 The Pot of Gold

There’s a history of Dan’s trucks recorded in my photo albums.  I especially remember the old International, the one that looked like a Beach Boy’s woody, the one we called “The Tour Bus.”  We often all piled in it and went to Galveston Beach when we lived in Texas and my boys were just babies.  Dan eventually gave the International to John who smashed it up, so the history of photos tells us.

When Jim and Dan were in Virginia visiting me, Dan was proud to show off his new 2001 golden-beige Toyota Tundra to me.  “I never would want a brand new car or truck.  You need so much insurance and have to worry about every scratch,” I complained.

“Well that worry is out of the way,” Dan said, referring to the big scratch on the fender.  Then he said something about it being the last truck he would have, so why not get the truck of his dreams.

He had wanted Jim to have the Tundra if his liver transplant didn’t come through, and he took out a credit life insurance policy on it, just in case.

Dan was not married, so he made my mother the beneficiary of his assets.  The Tundra was the last detail in closing down Dan’s life.  It sat in my mother’s driveway for a couple of months while we waited for the claim to go through. Finally when it did, my mother called to tell me.

“It’s like the pot of gold at the end of Dan’s rainbow,” I said relieved.  “Dan’s taking good care of you and dad in your old age.” I added.

My mother and father aren’t about to start driving a big truck at the ages of seventy-six and seventy-seven.  The plan is to sell it.  “Put some money aside after the truck deal is settled,” I said to my mother, “maybe now Dad will finally take that trip to Ireland.”   I wasn’t surprised that Dan’s pot of gold was a generous give-away to those that he loved and that it came to us via a truck.

_____________Read chapters 1 – 8 HERE.