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.

                                           14.

 A Bar in Las Vegas

  Reading movie star magazines and shopping for clothes have been indulgent pastimes that I’ve done since I was a teenager.  These pastimes don’t quite fit my current homesteading-type image, but old habits do die hard, if at all.  Writing these stories has been the only thing that has kept me from shopping.  Sales come and go; catalogs get tossed into the re-cycling bin, much to my husband’s amazement.  Even the Christmas season hasn’t been able to draw me into a Mall.  It’s not new clothes, style, or home improvements I’m looking for.  I haven’t picked up a People Magazine in months.  Most of the stories in it pale in comparison to my own.  I have plenty of colorful personalities in my own family that I want to learn more about.

Jim and Dan were brothers of my generation, the brothers I remember the most while growing up.  I have three brothers left who I want to know better.  Bobby is online with us.  Joey, I saw recently, in October.  So I picked up the phone to call my brother John, who was living in Minneapolis, just to talk. John always had a good story to tell, and this is the one he told me:

“My boss was in Las Vegas sitting in an airport bar. At the bar, he met two women who worked for Sun Country Airlines.  After talking awhile, the women noticed he had an east coast accent and asked where he was from.  He told them he was originally from New Jersey but was living in Minneapolis now.  One of the women remembered a man from Minneapolis who she had recently sold an airplane ticket to.  “He was going to Boston and had just lost two brothers in only one month’s time,” she remembered.

My boss said, “You’re kidding!  That was John Redman, and I’m the one whose credit card he used to pay for the ticket!”

And these are just the stories we hear about!   It seems that Jim and Dan’s lives and deaths have rippled out further than we’ll ever know.

Pahk the Cah in Hahvad Yahd

  Dan and I both learned to pronounce our R’s, the way I, who dislike punctuation, have had to learn to use commas and periods, although I still lapse into dashes…and dots.  When in the South or when writing a book, one wants to be understood.

But this is not like writing a commentary for The Roanoke Times or a poem for The Wemoon Journal.  This is more than gathering facts and making a point, more than self expression.  This is a marriage of journal entries with memoirs, where death is a plural and all the verbs after Jim and Dan are in the past tense.  This is like being a journalist in a foreign country, covering a war.  The casualties are two, so far.  This is like writing a eulogy that won’t fit on one page, a poem in prose, a stream of consciousness account, a biographical tragedy, a long yearly letter that won’t fit in a Christmas card envelope.

In the South they drink iced tea and say “Ya’ll” and “reckon.”  I drink hot tea and say “you guys” and “wicked.”  Some Southerners think Yankees are rude.  I like to think of them/us as direct.  There are differences between Southerners and Northerners, but not as many as you’d think.  Everywhere people love their families.  Everywhere people grieve over death.  Oddly, Jim and Dan’s deaths have lessened my sense of separation from others. I feel more bonded with the rest of humanity, everyone who has dealt with death or will someday. Talk about all being in this together.  I had glimpsed the foreign country that we’ll all be going to.  I had widened my circle of who I was writing for.  I had joined a new club, the one I was in all along but didn’t know it, the one that includes virtually everyone.

A Red Dress

My friend, Mara, called to see how I was doing.  I was crying over George Harrison’s death at the time.  “I’ll call you right back,” I said…

“If I had just lost a husband, it would be hard to find a few other people, let alone nine, who had just lost theirs and could offer support,” I said after she told me she was seeing a grief counselor.  I had a built in support group!  Is that why I couldn’t go a day without talking to my family members on the phone or through e-mail?  Each of us has an individual way to grieve, yet I had nine others who really did know what I was going through.  Two brothers dead a month apart, who else could relate to that?

Mara had a little girl to take care of, and she hadn’t been back to the Pine Tavern to read her poetry since a woman there made a comment about her dress.  “Red? I thought your husband just died,” the woman had said.  Mara lost her boldness right there.

The Names of Angels

When my sons were born, I had to practice saying their names out loud to convince myself they were real. “Hello, Josh.”  “Hello, Dylan.”  “Do you like your new names?  Do they fit?”

Some people who sell magazines over the phone think that Dan lives here now.  I hear myself say, “Daniel is deceased,” practicing the words as I try to get use to that reality.  When I say Dan’s name, I get a sense of the eternal, maybe the way my mother felt when she gave it to him.

“I don’t really mind,” I tell my mother over the phone, “because any chore concerning Dan keeps him alive for me.”

My mother, who thought she wanted Dan’s truck out of the driveway, told me she missed it now that it was gone.  “I use to walk by and touch it and…”

“…feel Dan’s vibe?” I said, finishing her sentence.  I thought about the empty space in my mother’s driveway all day after we talked.  It was as though Danny just up and drove away.

I was having a hard time finding the right picture of Dan to set on my table in memory of him. I knew the one of Jim, the last one I took of him smiling with the watermelon, was right.  It made me smile, too, when I looked at it. But I kept changing Dan’s picture, looking for the right one. In one he looked too sick. In another he looked too heavy (another symptom of liver disease).

Finally the right picture arrived in the mail from my mother.  It was Dan at around age twenty-eight with longish hair and an Irish cap on.  Could his smile get any bigger?  “That’s it!” I exclaimed.  I put it on the table next to another one she sent of Dan and Chuckie at their 30^th class re-union. I liked that one too.  They looked like partners, something out of “Miami Vice,” both looking off into the same direction, both wearing bright Hawaiian shirts, two childhood friends drawn together again with some more destiny to share–and tragedy looming–although they both looked so innocent and unaware of that.

Several months after Dan and Chuckie’s re-union, Chuckie and his wife lost their beloved eleven year old daughter.  Six months after her death, Chuckie helped Danny get back to Houston and then to St. Luke’s hospital where Dan died.

You can’t turn back time, but a picture can freeze it.  Is that why I’m so drawn to that picture?  Danny looked so healthy and Chuckie’s daughter, Brittany, was still alive. I couldn’t cry for Brittany, or Chuckie, or their family when Danny was dying.  But I can now.  I keep a picture of her from her memorial program on the bulletin board next to my computer.  I never met her, but I have felt her angel-like presence working through her father.  I see her smiling face everyday now.  She feels like a part of my life.

A Flood of Old Memories

I had been working all morning with nothing to show for it.  The printer was down. The stories I had written didn’t seem real until they were printed onto paper, and I held them in my hand.  It was as if they didn’t exist if I couldn’t see them, in the same way it’s hard to understand the infinite with a finite mind, with a soul you can’t see or prove is really there.

I decided to clean the bathroom while Joe was working on the broken printer.  Cleaning would take my mind off my frustration, and I would immediately see the results of my labor.

While scrubbing the toilet, I noticed the plunger, which triggered a flood of old memories. It was bad enough that we grew up with one bathroom for eleven people, but we also had bad plumbing.  It wasn’t just that our toilet didn’t flush well, sometimes it would overflow and sometimes so profusely that it would leak from the bathroom floor to the living room ceiling, which was really the same thing.  God forbid, if this happened while you were the one in the bathroom.  I had nightmares about broken toilets for years and occasionally still do.

Sometimes, when we all get together, we relive our toilet trauma through the re-telling of stories.  We remember the time Jim dropped a comb in the toilet and, rather than put his hand into the bowl to retrieve it, he flushed it down – or the time John flushed down a potato after using part of it for his pop gun ammunition.  He didn’t want to get in trouble for wasting good food and thought the toilet would be the perfect place to get rid of the evidence.  We laugh now when we remember the time our cousin, Freddie, sat on our bathroom sink to wash the beach sand off his feet and caused it to break right off the wall.  We were glad none of us had done that.  Freddie got yelled at, but he also got to go home and that was the end of it.

In the back of the house was the source of the bad plumbing (although our antics didn’t help), a foul cesspool of darkness that would also sometimes overflow.  I will never forget how my boyfriend, Kevin, while running playfully around the house, fell into the cesspool.  I was surprised that he still liked me after that.

It’s funny how as you get older, even the bad memories seem good, or how when someone dies, the most ordinary of objects can be traced back to them. So many of my actions have been triggering childhood memories.  Most of my conversations either revolve around Jim and Dan or eventually get steered back to them. The space they inhabit in my heart and mind is larger and deeper than when they were alive.  It’s as if a part of Jim and Dan lives in me, just as a part of me has left with them?  Is that what death does?  Funny, isn’t it?_______Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-13 HERE.