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.

                                                13.

 I Brake for Stories

The kleenex box has become a permanent fixture in the computer room at my house.  So have I.  So much so that my son, Dylan, has begun to call me a computer nerd, which is funny considering that I’m one of the most low tech people I know.  I don’t even like cars with electric windows.

Sometimes I feel like an old computer with not enough memory to get the job done.  How much memory can one person hold?  By the time you hit fifty, your mind must be crammed pretty full.  Is that why as you get older life feels more stressful, as though time is condensing and you’re pushing up against it?  I remember having more fun when I was younger and even sometimes feeling bored.

“I’m not getting any rest,” I told Joe.  “When I lay down, my mind starts writing the stories, so I have to get up for a pen.  Even when I meditate, I keep a pen beside me because I yield for stories, you know.”

“That would make a great bumper sticker for your car,” he answered.  “I yield for stories” or “I brake for poems.”

So how much memory can one person hold?  I’ve noticed that older people love to tell stories and usually the same one more than once.  Or maybe it’s just the people in my family, on my father’s Irish side.  It’s as though, as you get older the stories have to come out to make new space, or before they’re lost.  “We heard that story before, Mom,” one of my sons’s said to me recently while we were out having lunch.

“Well, get used to it,” I answered.  “And you should listen carefully because I’m going to add a little something new each time I tell it,” I added.

I had been taping my Dad’s war stories, the ones I thought I had heard a million times. “What exactly was The Battle of the Bulge?” and “How many men are in a regiment?” I asked and then really listened.  I haven’t had a chance to hear how the tapes came out because Jimmy and Danny died and the project went on hold.

I can only tell what I have seen, felt, or remembered. These stories are for all of us, but my siblings have lots of their own.  And so did Danny.  I’m especially craving those because he lived apart from us for so long.  Is that why I have such fond memories of being in his apartment, driving his truck, meeting his co-workers, and being surrounded by his things in those two weeks before he died?  What books did he read?  What was in his fridge? Where did he shop? Who were his neighbors?  We learned a lot about Dan, but I want to know more.

I understood when my mother told me recently that she’s been thinking about Houston and even wanting to go back.  She would like to walk by Dan’s apartment.  I would like to visit the shop were he worked or the bar called “Slick Willies” where he used to hang out.  I’ve heard through a friend of his that they’ve put up a tribute picture of Dan somewhere in that bar.  I’d like to see the giant live oak trees that Danny loved, again, or maybe the Galveston sea wall that Jim wrote about in one of his last weather observation reports.

So many of Danny’s stories are gone with him.  His life was cut short before he had a chance to be “an older person who likes to tell stories.”  He lived in Houston for 22 years.  That was nearly half of his life!  Who loved him there?  Who’s missing him now?  Maybe if we go back, we learn can some more of his story.

March for Hepatitis C

  The nurses at St. Luke’s couldn’t pick Danny out from the rest of his brothers in the photograph that hung on his bulletin board. Even the nurse from Wollaston, Massachusetts, who was trying to sneak Dan’s cat in, guessed that Danny was Jim. The photo got passed around the ICU and nobody guessed which one was Danny–the stocky one with his arm around Trish on the opposite end of Jim.  Had he lost that much weight?  Was he wasted to the point of being so unrecognizable?

Many years ago, my father, Bobby, and I participated in a 25 mile March against Drug Abuse in Boston. Jimmy and my boyfriend at the time were in a drug rehabilitation program called “Project Turnabout.”  I think Danny went later, but he didn’t stay long.  He was never one for group therapy.  Hard knocks and Texas were his programs for rehabilitation.

Where are the Hepatitis C marches?  Where are the ribbons we can wear? (There are ribbons, but I’ve never seen anyone wear one).  Hepatitis C is the most common blood borne pathogen today.  At least 2 in every 100 people have it and don’t even know, the hep-c-alert.org states on their web page. It’s not transmitted as easily as AIDS, and it isn’t as popular a cause. In the U.S., the official number of people infected with HIV/AIDS is 700,000, whereas, 5 million people have Hepatitis C. worldwide,  and for every one person who dies from AIDS, four people die from Hepatitis C.  The threat of AIDS is common knowledge, but how many people could have guessed what a shocking threat Hepatitis C poses?

The War on Drugs has caused the prison business to boom, imprisoning many people’s brothers and sisters, non-violent offenders, kids who made mistakes, or sick people with addictions, along with some real criminals, I hope.  I’m suspicious of the business of prisons, just as I am of healthcare becoming corporations.  Do the pharmaceutical companies really want us to be well or do they want to keep selling their products?  There’s a conflict of interest when those who claim to want to help are making money at our expense.

At the hospital, I rubbed Dan’s feet because I remembered how much he liked it.  He didn’t ask me to, but he didn’t ask me to stop either.  It was hard to know how much touching Dan could handle. The nurse came in and asked me to put gloves on before massaging Dan because he bled so easily now.  She was afraid he might transmit Hepatitis C to me.  I lost my interest in massaging him after that (or did it when she wasn’t there). I couldn’t bear to put on gloves to touch my own brother.

 Hunting Season

The keening cows have quieted down, but now rifle shots could be heard going off in the distance.  It was hunting season in Floyd. “We better be careful where we go,” I said to Joe as we were heading out for our walk, “because we don’t have blaze orange on.” By the time we passed the mailboxes on Morning Dew Road, he had begun to tell me this story:

He was in The Farmers Supply, our local hardware store, to buy materials to weatherize a neighbor’s rented house.  Bernie, the clerk who we both knew, took Joe aside.  “I’m very sorry to hear about your wife’s brothers.  I lost a brother from cancer this year myself,” Bernie said.  After Joe had explained how Danny died, Bernie was shocked. “I have another brother who recently had a liver transplant!” “He felt so grateful for his new liver that he has started his own business, one that advocates for others who need liver transplants to help them get one,” Bernie said and then added, “He lives and runs his company in Houston.”

Now it was Joe’s turn to be shocked, “Danny was in Houston!” he said.  Bernie told Joe that Houston was one of the best places to be for a liver transplant.

“What?!” I blurted out when Joe gave me this news. Who advocated for, Dan? None of us had a clue how we could have helped Dan to get a liver.  He did what his doctors told him and put his hope in them.  He stayed in Houston because his job and his doctors were there, even though his family wanted him home. “Houston?! The best place for liver transplants?!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

I took the business card that Joe had handed me and put it in my pocket. “Greater Houston Liver Transplant Partnership,” it said. I was happy to know it existed and sad for Bernie that one of his brother’s had died.  We walked in silence after that, holding each other’s hand.  An occasional distant rifle shot pierced the heavy quiet.  It seemed to underscore the vulnerability I felt and remind me of the frailty of life.

All Things Must Pass

  It’s not always going to be this grey…All things must pass…All things must pass away…  George Harrison died this morning (November 30, 2001) at the age of 58 after a long battle with cancer, the TV newscasters reported.  Another causality in a season of death.  Another nail in the coffin of our youth.  Another opening up of the wound from losing Jim and Dan.  Watching George be memorialized is to remember what we just went through.  Looking at old clips of the Beatles is like looking through our own family album.  I see the innocence of Jim and Dan in the Beatle’s young faces.  I see our past selves in their 60’s clothes and long hair.  I see Jimmy who brought the first Beatle album home, “It’s the Beatles.”  I hear the music coming from our bedrooms.  I see the Beatles posters on my walls. I remember my heart beating faster while watching them on the Ed Sullivan show.  I know all the words to their songs.

I first heard of George’s death on the VA/MA Love Link.  Bobby wrote: “At work, at 3 a.m. this morning, I heard on the radio that George Harrison had died.  I started to cry.  I’ve been crying off and on for four hours and I need to tell people what’s coming up for me. I lived with Danny in 1980 when John Lennon was killed. I saw him cry…he was broken up.  So this morning I remember this and then I think…Dan is dead. It’s like all bunched into one big thing that’s tearing me up.  They’ve been playing Beatles and Harrison songs all morning.  It keeps bringing me back to…Dan is dead.”  Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning…But it’s not always going to be this grey…All things must pass…All things must pass away.

Death doesn’t discriminate.  Neither does love.  Both happen to the famous and the non-famous, and everyone who is loved is famous to those who love them. We cry when a Beatle dies because we all grew up together, because we see ourselves in them, because they remind us of our own immortality, and because Jim and Dan loved the Beatles. We know they would be crying too.

Losing It

  I’ve lost some weight during this time of grief, sort of a metaphor for losing a part of myself, I think, or maybe for lightening the load of what is too heavy, I hope.  It’s not a lot of weight, just those five extra pounds that make wearing my jeans uncomfortable, those five extra pounds I was trying for years to lose without success, and now it had just disappeared.

I’ve lost some other things too, besides five pounds and my brothers.  I’ve lost some of my fear of death.  I understand now why husbands and wives often die one right after the other. When someone close to you dies, there can be a lure to join them.  Maybe you witnessed their death and were drawn by the peaceful awe of it.  Or maybe you want to escape the pain of loss, the faded flatness life has taken on. What songs would I want played at my funeral?  Who would I want at my deathbed?   You start to think seriously about being cremated or being in the ground and other morbid thoughts.

Or maybe you lose some of your inhibitions and start to live like there’s no tomorrow.  You plan trips, write books, speak out, take risks.  And all of the above can exist together. Emotions can run from high to low.

Do I really want to fly to Massachusetts during the holidays, during this time of hijacked planes and increased airport security?  I love life and don’t want to die, but losing Jim and Dan has given me a small taste of fearlessness and a sense of place in the world of spirit.  I thought of a quote, attributed to Sophocles, that I read in Helen Nearing’s book, “Light on Aging and Dying,”  “Why should I grieve or vex for being sent to them I ever loved best?”

I know that when your time is up, it just is.  I don’t want to live in fear of dying.  But I was concerned about my lack of stamina due to my problem with chronic fatigue, a disorder that I contracted twenty-five years earlier, one that has taught me to accept physical limitation, to plan carefully and to pace myself.  Could I really pull this off?   How much energy would it take? I looked at my calendar and was encouraged to see that just after Christmas the moon would be full.  I knew that the full moon had an energizing influence on me.  I checked with the airlines and found a direct flight at a very good price.   I let go of my worry, remembering how I had recently dropped everything to be with Dan, and decided to go for it.  -Colleen Redman / Read The Jim and Dan Stories chapters 1-12 HERE.