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.

                                           15.

 ILUVDANNY

My yearly Christmas letters often ended with a “best of the year list”–best movie, best book, best quote, or a best (or worst) bumper sticker or vanity license plate message.  In ’94 my best bumper sticker pick, which was spotted at a Grateful Dead concert, was “I inhale for Clinton.”  The worst vanity license plate message was “I AM HURT.” (Who would want to advertise that?)  ‘94 was the year I finally saw the picture hiding in computer generated “Magic Art,” which I included in my list as a “most exciting moment.” It was also the year I asked the question, “How come “don’t believe the hype” has replaced “all you need is love” with so many people today?”

If I were writing a yearly letter this year it would probably be all about Jim and Dan.  I might say this:  Today while driving home from Christiansburg (I had to break down and do some shopping for gifts), I saw a vanity license plate that said “ILUVDANNY.”  I smiled and thought, “How amazing would it be if I saw one with Jimmy’s name on it too?”  A short time after that, I realized I was driving behind a GMC jeep with a spare tire mounted on the back that read “JIMMY” in large bold print.

The jeep wasn’t just riding by like the ILUVDANNY car was.  It was driving right in front of me and, being on Route 8, a two lane road, I had to follow it all the way into Floyd.  For twenty minutes I looked at the name JIMMY and cried. I couldn’t penetrate the mystery of all that a person’s name can carry.  All my memories of Jim somehow were tied up in his name spelled out on a tire.  It was as weird as if a plane had flown over head with a banner that spelled out “Jimmy.”   It was as mysterious as gazing into his face for the last time when his body lay in his casket.

Later while wrapping presents at home, I came across last year’s Christmas cards and found the ones from Jim and Dan.  Dan’s was an angel with golden wings, designed by a child with cancer.  “Bringing you love and joy,” it said, signed “Love, Daniel” in red ink.  Jim’s was a millennium card, a cut out silver star with “Love, Jim, Val and Bri” written inside.  Two men who sent out their own Christmas cards; how amazing is that?

Bobby sent a picture of his Christmas tree this year, online.  He wrote:  “This is our angel tree…if you look close, you can see our newest angels.  It has white and purple lights and is decorated with white feathers instead of tinsel and purple winged angels that our girls made.  At a closer look you can only see Dan…but Jim is there too.”

The Gift of Life

Dan had two liver doctors, a kidney doctor, a lung doctor, a stomach doctor, a pain management team, a physical therapist, and occasionally a surgeon at St. Lukes Hospital.  A hospice worker and, then later, a priest came to visit Dan, but no advocate.  I contacted the Greater Houston Liver Transplant Partnership (GHLTP) that Bernie’s brother, Frank, had started and spoke via email with Frank’s wife, Maureen.  “I wish we had known Dan was here.  We would have visited him,” she wrote.

In 1997, 1,131 people were removed from the liver transplant list due to death.  One person dies every two hours waiting for a transplant, the GHLTP web page reported. I learned that the GHLTP, a non-profit charitable organization, provides organ donation education and fundraising for patient and family needs during transplant hospitalization and aftercare.  They help with emergency medication purchases, transportation, housing, meal vouchers, and hospital parking fees. “We do have the most organs donated here in Houston than any other part of the country,” Maureen told me, but, she also added, “We cannot help medically.  It is sad when you see people die, but unfortunately there are times when the doctor’s hands are tied, not enough organs, not in time.”

Organ donation was sounding better all the time, especially after learning that it doesn’t interfere with an open casket wake, which I had come to believe was important (for me) for saying goodbye to deceased loved ones and for accepting the reality of death.  If I die in a hospital before the age of seventy (I believe they stop taking organs around that age), I would do it.  I was so fired up that I posed the question of organ donation on our VA/MA Love Link.  To my surprise, my sister Sherry had been a donor all along, and Tricia had signed up as one after Danny died. Not everyone answered, but maybe their thinking about it, maybe we’ll have some more dialogue when I fly home in a few weeks.

The man at Sherry’s clinic is still asking how her brother is.  He just got a liver transplant and has been feeling guilty about it.  Why him, when so many others don’t get one, was the question he was struggling with. Why?  Why did the people on one side of the street die and the people on the other side didn’t on September 11^th when the World Trade Center buildings were hit with planes?  Sherry still hasn’t told him that Danny has died, but she thinks he suspects the truth now.

Invisible Realities

Some people think “learning disabilities” should be re-named “learning diversities.”  I agree that dyslexics are often creative in ways that non-dyslexics aren’t (don’t have to be).  But when I’m lost, driving in a place I’m not familiar with, and someone is giving me directions that I can’t “hear” a word of, or when I mean to go into one room in my own house and find myself in another (having taken a wrong turn), or when I consistently turn the wrong stove knob on when I’m cooking (stove dyslexia my family calls it), I do feel slightly disabled.

If someone is blind or has a broken leg, people tend to give them a little extra assistance because their disability is obvious.  Being blind or having a broken leg doesn’t make one more stupid than others, in the same way that my inability to drive in a city without getting lost doesn’t mean I’m stupid.  Yet, any parent who has a child with learning disabilities can understand why their self-esteem suffers, why they sometimes feel stupid.  When a disability is invisible, the average person doesn’t believe it really exists.  “Why can’t you just try harder?” is a question every dyslexic has heard before.

Grief is invisible too and can feel like a disability when you have it.  You may not be able to function at the same level as others seem to.  You may not be able to concentrate.  You don’t look any different to others, but you know you are not the same person you were.

Some of the most meaningful interactions I have had lately have been with people I barely know, while some people I thought I knew well have been silent. Some have shared their own intimate stories of losing loved ones; others have given me a knowing touch, a hug or nod.  Even the smallest of gestures has meant a great deal to me because a gesture of condolence, however awkward or slight, creates a bridge, a way for relationship to go on.  Without it, one feels estranged, unseen, or left behind. As much as sadness is awkward to be around, avoidance is worse.

“Why are you still so sad?  Can’t you just get over it?” are questions (whether verbalized or not) which usually come from a place of concern that those who are grieving have heard.  Death and grief can’t be fixed (aren’t broken) and can’t be avoided or scheduled. I’m not bad because something bad has happened.  My sadness is not contagious and it isn’t how I’ll always feel.  I’m not looking for sympathy, special treatment, or to be rescued, but grief does need acknowledgment and those who are grieving do too.

Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

Do you remember wax coke bottles with colored sugar water inside, candy cigarettes, Howdy Doody, party lines, and phone operators?  These were some questions on a nostalgia list that had found its way to our VA/MA Love Link.

We all got nostalgic and started our own list of questions.  Do you remember the pile of old clothes on the porch that we would bury each other in before the rag man would come to buy them?  Those that could remember as far back as that could also remember when we first moved to Spring Street and had an old wood cook-stove that we gathered kindling for.  Do you remember Jimmy’s love of chocolate ring dings, Kathy not wanting to go to church because she thought our car looked too old, or when Sherry swore she saw the Virgin Mary on the hall railing post?

Most of us could remember when Hull had its own bowling alley and even its own theater on N Street.  Most could remember when Hull was known for its amusement park and the Surf Ballroom where we saw Sonny and Cher, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.  Hotels and Condos now stand where those nostalgic sites once were.

Some of our memories are of close calls, like when Dan broke his back diving off Pemberton Pier, or when Sherry had polio.  I remember when Bobby was in the hospital with bronchitis and was placed in an oxygen tent, but the nurses forgot to turn it on.  My mother came in his room just in time and, noticing that Bobby was struggling to breathe, she pulled him out of the tent, probably saving his life.

I went to the hospital with Joey after he caught on fire (in one of the fires the boys did start).  I remember the awful pain he was in and how the nurses set him in a bath of ice water.  It reminded me of when I was a baby and got third degree burns when the dish towel my mother was using to lift a pot of boiling water (meant for our baths) slipped and the pot came crashing down.  I don’t really remember this, but I still have the scars.

Once my mother crashed into the garage with her car, breaking the pane glass panels.  As a teenager, Jimmy was involved in a car accident in which one of the boys lost his arm.  Does all this make you wonder how we ever got this far?  What if we had lost any one of us in any of those “close calls?”  Tricia and Bobby were toddlers back then. Danny was fifteen when he broke his back.  It seems that no matter how bad things are, they could have been worse, and no matter how much we lose there is always, at the same time, much to be grateful for.

Author, Gay Gaer Luce, has said, “The first part of life is for learning.  The second for service, and the last is for oneself.  It is a time to discover inner richness and for self-development and spiritual growth.  It is also a time of transition and preparation for dying.  The closer we come to death, the closer we can come to reality and truth.”  Although, Jim and Dan didn’t have the luxury of this last stage of life, I believe that their deaths have led the way for others to.  I believe that their deaths will be my family’s greatest teacher of reality and truth, a truth I don’t think we would have been ready to receive if one of those earlier close calls had ended in tragedy.

Riding the Waves

Sometimes writing feels like picking out head lice with a fine-tooth comb.  Sometimes for hours I go over the same few lines trying to get them clean and right.

After writing the words “fine tooth comb,” I suddenly remembered the one my mother used on us. I remember the hours of her combing, the smell of the kerosene she would rinse our hair with, and the word we feared hearing in the playground at recess, “cooties.”  These memories led to others, like the smell of the perms that our Nana used to give us, or the short pixie haircut that Sherry got when she was twelve. All the kids laughed at how bad she looked, except Danny, who told her she was still pretty and that it would soon grow out.

My sister Tricia cut her finger with a knife yesterday.  She was trying to get the plastic wrap off a turnip that she wanted to add to the stew she was making.  After a trip to the emergency room and seven stitches, her memory was jogged.  “When I was five, I was fooling around near the bathtub and fell and cut my chin on it.  Jimmy was the one who took me to the hospital to get stitches!  Does anyone else remember that?” Tricia asked.

Another treasure of a memory unearthed.  We all confirmed the stitches on her chin, but it was she who remembered the loving care that Jim had given her.  Jim was seventeen years old when Tricia was born, and many of her memories of him are as a father figure, like when he taught her how to ride a bike in St. Anne’s parking lot.  “I was being teased at school because somebody saw I still used training wheels…  We went up and down the street with him holding on to me and the bike until, I guess he let go, because I was talking to him and he didn’t answer.  I turned around and he was all the way down the end of the street watching me! I got scared because he was no longer holding on, but I was DOING IT!  From that point on, I knew how to ride a 2 wheeler, and I loved him for teaching me,” she told us.

And sometimes writing is like catching a wave.  After days of nit picking your work pays off when a story rises up and practically writes itself.  Where did that come from, you wonder as you let go and ride it, excited to see where it will take you.

Tricia will have a scar on her finger for the rest of her life, a visible reminder to match the scar on her heart from losing her big brothers, she says. __________Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-13 HERE.