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

                                                    12.

 Light Returning

“Are you working on something creative now?” the psychic had asked me.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Good.  Many people don’t live out their creativity; you are.  You have good focus but also some residual persecution issues, and so you may have some trouble with follow-through,” she said.  She wasn’t telling me anything new.

“It’s very important that you get your work out there now in order for it to grow in you.  You must be persistent,” she continued.  I guess I would have to stop waiting to be discovered at the local café or through my words in the Museletter.  Maybe I should learn more about marketing and publishing.  Maybe I should risk the dreaded rejection slip.

The closer I get to the end of these stories the more nervous I get about what to do next, because I realize that writing has been a way to keep myself busy, so as not to sink deeper into my grief.  Ironically, it has been a way to avoid overwhelming grief while processing it.  Is that what art does?

My plan has been to stop writing by the Winter Solstice, a time when the light returns as the days grow longer.  Could lightness return to me?  Could I grow more whole as the days grow longer?  Could I begin to expand out, rather than withdraw in?  Are there cycles to grief like the moon has cycles?

The stories are catching up to the present, are more about me now than Jim and Dan. Maybe their completion should be a trip back home.  I was beginning to have a strong urge to see the Boston Commons lit up for Christmas and to hug every member of my family again.

The Diary

  The only physical thing I have left from my childhood, other than photographs, is a pink ponytail diary with the lock broken off.  Everything else was left in my closet and burned to the ground with the rest of our house.  I was ten years old with neat unbroken handwriting when the entries, mostly written in pencil, began.  I remember being afraid to commit my thoughts to pen.  A pencil felt much safer because of the eraser.

Once, when I was teaching a children’s creative writing class at the Blue Mountain School (a parent-run cooperative in Floyd), I brought in my diary and read passages out loud to the students.  I must have been trying to emphasize the importance of keeping a journal because creative it was not.  There were no signs of a published writer in the entries.  In fact, it was so bad that the children laughed uncontrollably, but I was thrilled to have an early record of my own written word, however untalented it might be.

The diary started in January, which tells me it was probably a Christmas present.  I did a lot of ice skating, along with taking care of the babies (Johnny and Joey), going to Mercurio’s Village store, church, drill team practice, and school, the childhood record reveals.  There were several accounts of fights and make-ups with my best friend Laura and many melodramatic entries about my boyfriend at the time, Richard. Bad words were crossed out and secret codes were not revealed. A couple of pages had been torn out.

On January 20, 1960, I wrote a historic account of when we got flooded.  This was not the time that the Coast Guard (who happened to be our neighbors) had to row us out in boats, but it was the time when we went to the Memorial School where soup was served, cots were set up, and my family was interviewed for a story in the Patriot Ledger newspaper. A photographer took our picture, a family of nine then (before Bobby and Tricia), in hats, scarves, and mittens.  We girls wore kerchiefs tied around our heads which added to the refugee look the paper was going for.  Jimmy, the big brother, was tying Danny’s scarf, a pose I suspect that the photographer suggested. “In front James, 14, adjusts the scarf of Daniel, 9, as Cheryl (Sherry), between the two, looks on,” the caption read.

“Dear Diary Today is Friday,” I wrote.  “We got flooded and had to get vacuumed.”  (I guess the word “evacuated” hadn’t shown up on a school spelling or vocabulary list yet.)  Then there were several lines about how cold my feet were, how Jimmy and my mother went back to the house in hip boots for blankets, and how my father followed to check on them while the rest of us waited in the car.

I recently picked up this diary again to look for Jim and Dan within in it.  I found them on page 3… “My brother and stupid sister went bowling.  Me and Danny will go next week.”  Now I was hooked.  Did we go the next week?  Three months later in an entry from March I wrote about going bowling with my mother and father.  Danny wasn’t there, or wasn’t mentioned.  Did he not want to go?  Was he bad that day?

There were a few entries that mentioned Jim, like this one:  “A real handsome boy came down to play with Jimmy.”  Or this one, “I had to go and lose my temper at Jimmy in the car.  He called Richard a nut.  I threw my pocketbook at him and yelled, “I hate to say what you are!”

My sister Kathy was mentioned more often.  She was called “stupid” or “big wheel” during this period, because she was a teenager and I was not. But when she let me go with her and her girlfriends to the Loring Theater, where they usually had a Jerry Lewis or Elvis Presley movie showing, she was cool. “Me and Sherry played house all day.  Boy was it fun.  We changed everything around,” was an entry that revealed how far I really was from being a teenager as hard as I was trying to be one.

I loved seeing Jimmy and Danny’s names written in pencil in my ten year old cursive penmanship.  I was disappointed that there wasn’t more written about them, but my mind was on boyfriends not brothers back then. The Richard thing didn’t last but Jim and Dan did, not for as long as I would have wished for, but for as long as they could.

 The Ghost of Christmas Past

  My dad went first to make sure Santa had come and to turn on the Christmas tree lights.  We lined up at the top of the stairs like kids in school waiting for recess, waiting to hear my father’s “Okay,” before we made our stampede down to Christmas morning.

When we were older we noticed there weren’t any baby pictures of Joey.  “We didn’t have any money then,” my mother explained.  We didn’t have hot water until I was fourteen and, because the elastic in my knee socks was worn, my socks were always falling down.  Our house was so cold that if I shut my bedroom door, the cup of water I used to curl my hair with froze.  We always had good suppers but never sodas or desserts.  We weren’t exactly poor, well, maybe we were sometimes.

Yet, the presents were always piled high.  The taller the pile the more excitement mounted, as we scurried to find the pile with our own name on it.  My mother and father sat on the sidelines like coaches, as the game of ripping our presents open began.  Then they went back to bed while we set about to play.  Later in the day, we would go from house to house in the neighborhood, visiting our friends to see what presents they had gotten.

I never got the bike or that doll house I wanted, but what we got we were happy with, well, maybe not with the oranges and toothbrushes in our stockings.

There was Midnight Mass in Latin when we were old enough to go, red ribbon candy, and candle shaped lights that would bubble on the tree.   For me, there was a white fur muff and a “Name that Tune” game, or a wooden sled that I named “Betsy,” and a pink poodle skirt made of quilted satin.  There were always hats, mittens, and doll clothes hand-sewn or knitted by our Nana.

Christmas wasn’t complete without watching “A Christmas Carol” all together as a family on our black and white television set. Sitting on a little wooden rocker with my flannel nightgown tucked underneath me, I watched Jacob Marley, the Christmas ghost, who was wrapped like a mummy and dragging chains, point to Scrooge and bellow, “But Mankind is your business!”   This was the deeper teaching of the meaning of Christmas spirit to balance out all the toys and the glitter.

I don’t feel like sending out Christmas cards this year and surely not my yearly update letter.  It was just last year when I got this email from Jimmy after he had read my year 2000 review:  “The yearly story was some good reading.  I’m very proud to have a sister like you. You are so special.”  (Compliments like that from Jim were rare.)

This Christmas I’ll be thinking a lot about Valerie and Brian.  I’ll be missing a special Christmas card from Dan, the one that I get most every year with the drawings from kids with terminal cancer that he bought to support cancer research.  I guess Danny was listening to the Ghost of Jacob Marley when he was a boy.  I think he knew that the magic of Christmas is in the spirit of giving, and that through giving, we truly receive.

Jimmy Shows Up

  Sherry finally had the big dream of Jim like the one Johnny had of Dan; the one for all of us.  It was just before Christmas.  She wrote: “We were all at a cook-out of some sort, and I was on the porch, and I could see over the fence to next door, and there was JIMMY!!  I told everyone that Jimmy was across the way (in the dream we all knew he had passed away).  All of us at separate times went over to see and talk to him. There was a really special way to get over to the other side–you had to go through this beautiful ocean.  Jimmy was there living a totally different life.  He had a suit on or very expensive looking dressy clothes.  He looked great!  But the more I think about this, the more I realize that I never really saw his face, although we knew it was Jimmy.  He was married to a Spanish woman who loved him dearly.  He had children and a house that was gorgeous!  He seemed so happy!  But when I went with Dad to see Jimmy, they held each other while Jimmy cried in Daddy’s arms. “I’m sorry I had to leave so quick”…is what he said to daddy!  He wished he could have stayed with us longer.  She concluded her email message with, “It was a remarkable dream, and I felt so good when I woke up!”

Well the feeling must have been contagious because suddenly I was feeling relieved and uplifted.  Jimmy always loved nice clothes, and he really did want a happy relationship with a woman, I thought. “Doors that wouldn’t open for them here are opening now,” I remembered the physic saying.

“Print out your email and give it to daddy, so he can read it whenever he needs to,” I wrote her back.

We had been discussing creativity the day the dream arrived on our VA/MA Love Link–Colleen writes, Kathy sews and hooks amazing rugs, Chrissie, her daughter, is the computer whiz office worker. And now Sherry created and received the best dream ever.  What a work of art! We were all in awe.

Happy Anniversary

  My mother and father got married in January, 1946. They, Robert and Barbara, were known as Beebe and Babsy back then.  In January, 1996 we rented a hall and threw them a surprise 50^th wedding anniversary party.  I was a big part of the surprise.  I flew in from Virginia and stayed at Sherry’s house, keeping my whereabouts a secret from my parents until the night of celebration.

Another surprise we weren’t counting on that night was a power black-out caused by a storm.  It kept us from heating up our electric curlers and had us worried that the party might be called off.  After an hour or so, the lights came back on, so we headed to the rented VFW hall where the party was to take place.  Once there, we discovered a man out in front of the hall was having a heart attack.  Sherry’s boyfriend at the time, a fireman, pulled the fire alarm.  The man got rescued, and we tried to calm down as we began to greet the guests.

It was the most well attended family gathering that was not a funeral that I can remember.  Cousins from Virginia and Rhode Island, childhood friends from The Village, and relatives from all over the South Shore, some I hadn’t seen since I was a girl, all came to surprise my parents.  There was a video collage of my family’s history, music from the 40’s, and jitter-bug dancing.  The night was as golden as the gold-colored streamers and the centerpiece decorations on the tables.

Jimmy video-taped this happy occasion, and Danny wasn’t there.  He was in Houston, too sick to attend.   An early sign of what was to come? This was before he was even aware that he had Hepatitis C.

The highlight of the night’s event was the unveiling of a large framed portrait of my mother and father’s nine children, with two matching smaller portraits–one of their grandchildren and one of the whole clan. This was also a surprise.

It’s hard enough to get us all together in one place and harder still to keep a secret from my mother (who may have suspected the anniversary party and maybe even our secret photography shoot).  We tried to be discreet when we met for the photographer’s sitting the previous summer at Stony Beach where we all grew up. Gathering together for the pose, all five brothers stood in the back while the four sisters sat in the front.  Jim and Dan stood at either side.  Jimmy had his arm around Sherry while Dan had his around Trish.  Even then they seemed to have a plan in mind, like big brother bookends my Dad would later say. We were dressed in various shades of light blues and golds.  (Was that planned?  Those are the school colors of the high school we all went to.)  The ocean was behind us, and Boston Lighthouse was in the distance.  Danny looked like the protector.  Jimmy, who won the prize for being the least changed at his 30^th class re-union, looked like a big kid.

This was the picture we pinned up on Dan’s hospital bulletin board, along with one of our mother and father beaming, still looking like Beebe and Babsy, taken at their 50^th wedding anniversary party. These were the pictures Dan died with on his chest.  And these are Kathy’s words to me describing that:  “If I were writing the stories, I would tell of the last hour when I took the picture of our family off the bulletin board and placed it on Dan’s chest, and how I knew it mattered to him.  And then a bit later I knew he was asking for the other one, the one of ma and dad.  I got it and, if you remember, I gently placed it along side the picture of his siblings, and I felt him say, “Okay…I can go now.” And he did. ____________Read The Jim and Dan Stories chapters 1-11 HERE.