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.

               9.

Turkeys and Pterodactyls

Most of my Virginian friends know I change my name a lot, depending on what mood I’m trying to conjure or what poem I’m signing in the Museletter. Redmania, Redmana, Redmend, Redmoon, C. Red, Redmanymorewherethatcamefrom are just a few of my aliases.  I don’t think any of them know that I’m also known as LoLo (from Joey) or Colly Wolly Wolf (I told you my dad has a sense of humor).

I don’t think my brothers would care much for Virginia because there aren’t any major sports teams here.  When I asked Bob about some of his Jim and Dan memories, he said, “The Patriots, The Bruins, The Celtics, and The Red Sox.”  Then he added, “The Astros and The Oilers.”

I tried to get Dan to move here. I even found a metal shop where I hoped he could get a job.   I think we all tried to get him closer to home, but he had made a life for himself in Houston and it worked for him.

After Jim and Dan died, I questioned why I lived in Virginia.  I knew there were good reasons, but maybe they had all played out. Wasn’t I really just a Hull girl, a Yankee who misses the ocean?  On the other hand, it’s taken me fifteen years to like country music, and now I’m a fan.  And where else can you go out in a bathing suit and boots in January to pose for a picture in the snow? Boston is too cold, there are too many people, and who could afford to buy a house there?

I love my family and would like to be closer, but it’s the land and the fact that my brothers are buried in Hull that is pulling me back.  It’s also the land that keeps me in Virginia, and so I feel torn between two places.

It’s when I am walking or hiking that my life in Virginia begins to make sense again. I feel like a vehicle with the top down, with the scenery passing at a comfortable pace and my worries left in the distance.  I like the way you don’t have to know anything on a trail.  You can let the trail lead you and trust that it will. You do have to watch for turns though, or you’ll get off track.  Sort of like life, isn’t it?

On this day, Joe and I walked a stone path lined with emerald green moss, against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The Appalachian Mountain Range, one of the oldest in the world, is a gently rolling scene of overlapping mountains for as far as the eye can see.  It looks prehistoric, and I always expect to see pterodactyls. Today I saw turkeys instead.

I should have known years ago when I started to wear Sherry’s “Virginia is for Lovers” pin, the one she got when she was on vacation here–or maybe playing frontier games as a kid with my Annie Oakley rifle was an earlier clue that living in a log cabin in the countryside of Virginia was in my destiny.

I walk a lot these days when I’m not on the computer writing Jim and Dan stories or sending e-mails home.  I’m torn between two places, like I’m torn between the “before and after” of Jim and Dan. When I walk, I am walking away from something, while also walking towards it.  This journey of grief has no easy path. Sometimes I feel lost.

The Master Gland and Blueprint Plans

“The Cierd, or metal worker, in ancient Ireland was ever a highly-honored craftsman who, because of the beauty and excellence of his work, ranked among the nobles,” wrote Seamas MacManus in “The Story of the Irish Race.”  My father, Jim, and Dan (and even Bob, for a while) all worked in metal shops.  But it was Dan who loved his job.  As a metal fabricator, he created things out of metal from start to finish.  Evidence of his creativity filled his apartment, as well as the homes of his siblings…. metal boxes, coffee tables, paper weights and key chains. There was one invention I had wanted him to patent and maybe he would have if we could have figured out what to call it.  It holds my books and papers upright as I type, or holds photographs I want to display.

I smile every time I take my vitamins because of the metal tiered vitamin holder I got out of Dan’s apartment.  I figured it was meant for me, since I probably take more herbs and vitamins than the rest of my family, although most of us do.  Danny took them too.  He was open-minded and receptive to the health advice that several of us would research and present to him.  We suspect that when he got on the liver transplant list and his doctors told him to stop taking all supportive supplements, not knowing which would be good or bad for his liver, it was downhill for Dan from there.

With Jimmy’s accident, there was nothing we could have done, but with Dan there were questions.  How? So fast?  What did we miss?  What could we have done differently?  Were we in denial that Dan could actually die? Was he sicker than he let on?

So far, we’ve heard of two people who had liver transplants and are more miserable than ever, and two who had successful transplants and now feel well. Musician, David Crosby, had one.  So did Evil Kneival.  While I was at St. Luke’s, a friend of Dan’s who also had Hepatitis C called on the phone to see how he was doing. “Not too good,” was my answer.  He told me he was buying a liver for himself.

“You don’t hear much about it, but it can be done,” he said.  I’m sure we all would have second mortgaged our homes if we knew that was an option.

You would think I would be anxious to sign myself up as an organ donor, but I haven’t.  Something about the importance of that vacant body I mentioned earlier, maybe?  Also, I don’t know how I feel about the lengths we are going to, keeping humans alive on such an overpopulated planet.  And where do they get these bought livers from, I wondered?

There’s a reason why the word liver has the word live right in it. Sometimes called the “master gland” because of its importance in keeping our bodies running smoothly, it’s the only human organ that can regenerate itself when part of it is damaged.  More than 50% of a person’s liver can be removed and then grow back.  My sister, Kathy, was ready to give Dan part of her liver, but Dan needed a whole new liver to survive.

Sherry sees patients with Hepatitis C daily, some in as bad shape as Danny was.  “How’s your brother doing?” one of them asked her recently.

“Not too good” was all she could say.  She couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth, she later told me.  She couldn’t say the words “My brother died,” and she didn’t want the man to lose all hope.

“I used to really like my job,” she told me, “but now I’m not so sure.”

The Redman Anthem

“I WANT THIS PLACE LOOKING LIKE A MILLION BUCKS BY THE TIME YOUR MOTHER GETS HOME!” was a family anthem, coined by my father, heard often when we were growing up.  He would usually end it for good effect with “OR HEADS ARE GONNA ROLL!”

Our life as Redmans was that good, but it wasn’t a fairy tale.  My mother and father both worked, and there was a certain time of day, after she left and just before he came home, when bedlam would set in.  Johnny, who was a fighter, would throw Tonka trucks and tantrums, rebelling against Kathy who was taking her role as surrogate mother too seriously.  Joey ran away a few times a week.  He’d disappear up the drive-way only to return a little while later.  There was teasing without mercy down through the pecking order.  Then my dad would come home after working all day and try to create some order.  He was slightly outnumbered.

My dad was a WWII artillery soldier in Patton’s army who saw a lot of combat.  After the war, he probably suffered from what is now known as “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,” not so much from combat but from what he saw at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany during the Holocaust.   He was among the troops that liberated that camp when the war was over.  He helped to clean up what was unspeakable there, mass graves full of human bones, bodies piled up by the crematoria, lamp shades that were made out of human skin.  After witnessing that and the survivors who looked like living skeletons, I don’t think he was ever the same again.

We didn’t know it then, but when we were growing up, my dad was struggling with alcoholism, which helps explain how fast he could change from the normally jovial character he was, to a stressed out one. After numerous admissions into Veteran’s Hospitals for detox, and with the help of Alcoholic Anonymous, my dad finally found his sobriety, which is why he’s still here blessing us all with his fun-loving rascal nature.

Here’s another Redman anthem from our childhood (recited in sibling birth order):  God bless Mommy, Daddy, Jimmy, Kathy, Colleen, Danny, Sherry, Johnny, Joey, Bobby, and Tricia. As mad as we could be at each other, after a day of bedlam, we would kneel by our beds with hands folded and say this prayer.  When we got older, we said it in our beds because kneeling was for little kids.  I said this prayer well into my 20’s, and I’m sorry that I ever stopped.  It was always said quickly, in one long breath, as though it were all one word, as though it were all one thing that could never be divided.

The Long Ride Home

I replay the image of Dan’s last breath over and over in my mind.  I know he consciously chose to be free of his failed body when it got to the point that the interventions were adding insult to injury, yet it also seems that we let him die, sort of like watching someone drown and resisting the impulse to pull them out to safety.  Dan was in a safe place, and we kept repeating that to him.  “You’re free now,” I said to him when the life supports came off.

I don’t feel guilty about allowing Dan to die. In fact, I feel honored and privileged.  But my mind continues to search for loopholes, clues, and details, still tries to reconcile what happened with what might have been different.

Riding home from Massachusetts to Virginia after the last funeral, I lay down in the back of our van and let Joe or my sons do the driving.  I lay very still, too tired to move, and imagined my body in the back of a hearse on the way to be buried.  Or, I pictured myself lying like Dan did in the hospital bed, weighted down with tubes and wires, too tired or too medicated to move.  My body was also trying to fathom what had happened.

I tried to remember growing up; how did we all fit in one car before seat belts and vans, nine kids and my mother and father?  No wonder my siblings complained about my rocking.  We were packed like sardines in the back seat, with babies being passed around looking for a lap and someone was usually carsick.

I remember our long rides to and from Brockton where we spent Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house.  Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go…we sang on the way there.  On the way home it was usually quiet, which was very unusual and something I liked.  The hum of the engine and the motion of the car carrying us home was like being in a bubble or the womb again. Knowing we were all together and that my mother and father were up front in control made me feel peaceful and safe.

It was during these night rides home from Brockton that I discovered the moon, which I remember as full.  How did it follow us all the way home?  Why didn’t it stay in one place?  I thought the moon was just for me and that it would always be there, but when I looked for it later, on another night, it was nowhere to be found.  The moon was a mystery that I also couldn’t quite fathom, one that I’m still trying to understand.

Meet the Redmans!

“Meet the Redmans” was proclaimed by John at a Labor Day cook-out and is best said with a loud Boston accent. It became a buzz phrase in my family that was repeated the same way “God bless, Mommy, Daddy, Jimmy, Kathy, Colleen, Danny, Sherry, Johnny, Joey, Bobby, and Tricia” was.

My sisters and I went out dancing one night when I was in town for Labor Day.  We met some guys who didn’t believe we were all sisters.  I told them we could prove it and then signaled to my sisters…one…two…three…now! “God bless Mommy, Daddy, Jimmy, Kathy, Colleen, Danny, Sherry, Johnny, Joey, Bobby, and Tricia,” we all chanted.

Jimmy, who videotaped our family cook-outs, got us on film telling that story, or should I say performing it like Ziegfield Folly girls; we added some leg-kicking antics. He also filmed us singing “Daniel My Brother,” by Elton John, to Danny. Your eyes have died…do you see more than I? Daniel you’re a star…on the face of the sky…Lord, I miss Daniel…Oh, I miss him so much.  That song makes more sense to us now and is one we sang again at Dan’s funeral service.

I started the Labor Day cook-outs back in the late 70’s when I lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts.  I have pictures of Danny cooking at the grille and all the brothers with long hair.  When I moved to Texas, Kathy’s family kept up the tradition. For over twenty years, we gathered every Labor Day and had our family re-union.  This was the first year we weren’t going to have it.  Kathy wanted to retire, and Joey had started a similar family event on the 4th of July for a change.  Ironically, we were all together for Labor Day, regardless of what we had planned.  It was the weekend we buried Dan.

Nantasket beach was deserted the morning I went there and wrote this poem in my journal called “After Labor Day” …The kids have all gone back to school…my brothers have gone back to heaven…We’re all learning…everything is changing…and nothing will ever…be the same.

____________Read Chapters 1- 8 HERE