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.

                                                      16.

 Nature Taking its Course

   It’s one mile to our neighbor’s farm where the Winter Solstice Celebration is held.  There’s a spiral labyrinth there made of evergreen boughs that we walk with a lighted candle each year.  Bundled up to protect us from the cold, one by one each person arrives at the center, where they say a few prayerful words before walking back the same way they came, leaving their candle somewhere along the spiraled path.  What starts out in the dark, ends up brightly lit, a hopeful reminder of the days growing longer, of the in and out breath of the year.

I stayed home this Winter Solstice.  I was still reluctant to be with large groups of people.  Joe went, and when he came home, I told him, excitedly, “Something new has happened.”

“What?” he asked.

“I’ve written a four line poem that’s not about Jim or Dan.”

“What’s it about?” Joe asked.

“It’s about the moon,” I answered, “but that’s not what’s significant.”

“Is the fact that it’s four lines significant?” He asked.

“No, that’s only significant in that it’s a small step. The significance is that I wrote a poem for the first time in months, and it’s not about Jim or Dan. It’s light and just for fun,” I said, encouraged.

While Joe was walking the Solstice spiral, a stray cat was crying at our front door.  I knew that Dylan’s dog, Jasmine, would be home soon and would chase it away or something worse.  I thought about a Bible story I remembered from my childhood.   Jesus said it, I think. “If you turn away the beggar at your door, you also turn away me.”  Then I thought about Danny’s cat, Winslow.  What would Danny do with a crying cat on a cold night?  I brought the cat, which was white and butterscotch colored, a bowl of ground venison and a drink of water.  After devouring the food, the cat continued to cry, until Jasmine did come home and chased it away.  Nature taking its course, I thought.

Still, I peered through my window looking for that cat and that’s when the moon’s delightful richness struck me…From a scoop of luscious moon, at the Milky Way counter, the stars have spilled over, in an icy cold night, I wrote.  The poem got me thinking about Lime Rickey’s and Frappes and the L Street soda fountain we grew up with.  But I’m not going to write about that.

The Paper Route and Other Vocations

  Dan was nostalgic, as most of us Redmans are.  When he was home for his 30^th class re-union, he drove his rented car up and down the streets of The Village, re-tracing the paper route he walked as a child.  You can tell a great deal about a person’s life purpose by what they liked as a child and, in our family, by how they felt about the paper route.

Dan loved delivering newspapers (The Patriot Ledger) door to door.  He was conscientious and loved making money.  He took pride in having an important role to contribute.  Rain or shine, people were counting on him. The paper route was probably where he learned to be a big tipper, remembering how much tips meant to him then.

Jim started the paper route, and he was conscientious, too.  He did it for several years before passing it on to Dan.  I think Jim got too busy for the paper routes with hitting rocks, making hurricanes, measuring rainfall, or putting together his model kits of Godzilla, King Kong, and Frankenstein. Model kits were to our brothers what paper dolls were to us girls, our favorite things to play with that, sadly, aren’t even sold in most stores today.  Unlike Jim, who liked the spooky stuff, Dan liked car and truck models, an early sign of his life long love of vehicles, I suppose.

Even I did the paper route one summer when Danny went to Florida. (We all took turns going to Hialeah during summer vacations to visit our grandparents).  I hated the paper route.  It was too high profile for me.  I hated being seen knocking on doors to collect money.  I hated all the walking, and I was embarrassed when some customers answered their doors saying, “A paper girl! Isn’t that cute.”

After Dan, the paper route was passed to Johnny.  John squeezed it in between boating and fishing before passing it to Joey who built it up into a thriving business of which he was the president of.

John says, “Holy Mackerel, I hated it! I was 10 – 12 years old.  It was really tough work, over those hills, through the ice and snow, and I’d get in trouble if I got home late…”

Bob says, “Sometimes I’d help Joey do it.  He always wanted me to practice for when it would be mine.  But I guess we moved to A Street before that could happen. I delivered the Globe for a while.  Dad used to help me on Sundays.  You know how big the Globes are on Sunday…”

There are often signs of one’s life’s purpose that show up early but don’t get acted on or make full sense until one is older, like the time I was in the un-employment office looking for a job when I was twenty-one years old.  “What do you want to do?” they asked me.

“I want to work with the blind or the mentally retarded,” I answered, as though I had been practicing to say that all my life.  They placed me in a day care job which, it turned out, I loved, and in which I was able to work my way up from an aide to a teacher (back in the days when experience mattered as much as a degree).  It wasn’t until recently, twenty five years later, that I began working for an agency that provides foster care for people with mental retardation and other disabilities.  The man who lives with us now is blind and has mental retardation.

Sometimes I wonder why my parents named me “Colleen,” Irish Gaelic for “girl.”  Did they unconsciously know that I would grow up to be the only in our family who would travel to Ireland in search of our ancestral roots?  Or did the name itself somehow cause that interest to grow in me?

I once received a gift from Danny, Christmas of 1979, which hangs in my house to this day.  It’s a framed photograph of a tire swing tied to a tree, not so unlike the one that used to exist in our 10 ½ Spring Street yard. Below the tire swing, these words were written, lyrics to a song by The Fantastics: “Try to remember when life was so tender that dreams were kept beneath your pillow.  Try to remember when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow.”

Dan’s nostalgia for our past is probably what drew him to give me that gift, but now that the past has caught up with the future, I think it was also an unconscious way for Dan to say, “Don’t forget me.  Remember me tenderly.”   That’s what I’m doing, Dan.  Remembering what was tender.  Thank you for reminding me to do that.

A Fire Set Beneath You

The carpenter who’s going to be working with Joe to build a greenhouse off of our kitchen has Hepatitis C.  In the past few months, cases of Hepatitis C and liver transplant stories have been cropping up everywhere in my life, sort of like when you buy a new car and suddenly you notice the same model everywhere when you never noticed it before.

Stories are like that, too, and the slightest detail in a seemingly average day can be an important piece of a story, if you remember to write it down.

Writing doesn’t happen when I sit down with an empty piece of paper or at a blank computer screen to do it.  It happens all day in my head, usually while I’m doing something else.  And it won’t happen if I don’t take down those notes.  If you don’t record your phone messages or write them down, chances are, you’ll forget them, especially if you’re getting a lot.

Writing does happen when I sit down with an empty piece of paper or at a blank computer screen and mix what happens there, on the spur of the moment, with the notes that I’ve already taken. If one exists without the other, writing doesn’t usually happen for me.  The secret to writing a book?  I think it’s this: Take good notes and write often enough that it starts to accumulate. But there is also an alignment that has to take place, when you match ability and willingness to do the work with the way that has opened to do it.  It helps to have a fire set beneath you.  My brother’s deaths have been the fuel to these stories.  My love for them has, too.

While I was meeting the carpenter with Hepatitis C, my brother Joey’s daughter, Rachel, was emailing this story to us via the Va/Ma Love Link: “I went on a sales call with my manager and we were getting off the highway going towards China Town.  We were in a long line of cars waiting for the light to change when I saw this guy walking up and down the lane.  He was holding a sign that read “As ashamed as I am to be doing this, I have liver disease and can not work.  Please help,” and he was holding out his hand for change. I started to cry because he looked like Uncle Danny did towards the end when his face was drawn and his stomach was bloated. It made me remember the first time I saw him like that, and how I hadn’t realized the severity of his disease, and how much I hurt for him.  My manager felt bad, it was just so sad.  I kinda want to go back and give the man some money or a note to make him feel better.  I can’t get it off my mind.”

The Bermuda Triangle

  Johnny was just getting the hang of this e-mail thing.  “Is anyone out there?” he wrote.  It was quiet on the VA/MA Love Link front, and Johnny and I were bored.  Everyone else was busy, getting ready for Christmas, I guessed.

“Maybe you should get on the Internet and try ego-surfing for your own name,” I jokingly suggested (because I got teased for doing that).

“What’s that?” John typed back.

“You put your name in a search engine and see what “John Redmans” it finds,” I answered…then something about a browser and how to find it… “I’m not the best one to be explaining this,” I admitted.

John wrote back, “I’m just happy to be talking with y’all (he spent several years in Maryland which is where the ya’ll came from).   It’s going to take some time to learn this.  Every time I try to do something new, I get thrown to Bermuda or East Overshoe, and I’m not the most patient man in the world, ya know?”

I wrote him back, “John, didn’t anyone tell you that they found the Bermuda Triangle?  It’s inside the computer.   Sherry calls it “Never Never Land.”  We’ve all been there, and we all come back eventually.  Good luck, John–and P.S.–Don’t forget to write.”

White Shoes and Mini Skirts

Lately the computer has been my confessional, my altar where words are like candles that I’m lighting in honor of Jimmy and Dan.  “Bless me father, for I have sinned, it’s been three days since I’ve written.” We used to make up sins to say in confession, like “I lied three times and swore at my brother,” because kids are not bad and even if they were, they wouldn’t remember.

When I was a girl it was an unwritten rule that we couldn’t wear white shoes after Labor Day and that the proper length of skirts was just below the knee.  In school, we had to kneel to demonstrate length if our skirts were looking suspicious.  But by the time I graduated from High School everything from mini skirts to maxis was okay.  I wore platform shoes to make me look taller and wouldn’t have been caught dead in polyester–or in a church for that matter.

I can feel the priests of my past cringing at the thought of a computer altar or the pagan undertones of a solstice spiral, a ritual of holy intention conducted outside under the stars.

The original meaning of the word “pagan” is Latin for “a country or village dweller.”  I love the rural country life, and I grew on the outer edge of “The Village.”  Considering that and the fact that I’m an Irish American, I think I have every right to my folk-life leanings.

The remoteness of Ireland kept it for ages free from the rule of the Romans, the civilizing conquerors (an oxymoron?), the hierarchy of the Vatican.  When St. Patrick came to Ireland to Christianize it, the Irish were able to beautifully blend their Celtic folk roots with orthodox Catholicism.

Like the Irish, I like to blend traditions.  I like to take an active role in creating rituals for my own life passages.  When Joe and I got married at The Saddle overlook on The Blue Ridge Parkway; it was a hand fastening ceremony, an ancient Celtic tradition.  The fiery sun was setting as the blue full moon was rising, both in sky at the same time and opposite each other, like a bride and groom, we thought.  “Once in a blue moon comes a love like this,” we told each other.  I recited a poem I had written, and Joe presented me with an apple, symbolizing the fruit of our love, a love grown with intention and good care.

Before Jim and Dan died and before my friend Mara’s husband Cory did, our community had experienced five deaths in just a few years.  These deaths were abrupt and unexpected–accidents, suicides, and one illness.  I’ve seen the inside of all three funeral parlors in Floyd.  I’ve seen folk ceremonies, along with traditional ones, and some that were mixes of both. I’ve learned that it’s not the form, but it is the intention that makes honoring life passages holy. Each and every funeral I’ve been to in the last few years has been a powerful witnessing of the love that had been created by those departed when they were alive, a love that continues beyond their death.

My life estranged from the church has taught me that religious institutions don’t have a monopoly on what is spiritual.  I have come to see the teaching of Jesus—love your neighbor and your enemy as yourself/what you sow you also reap–as revolutionary truths, but it took leaving the church to for me to understand that.  Although I spent years avoiding the church, I was thankful for it during my brother’s deaths.  I was thankful for the caring form that was in place and for my ability to go back to my roots and be supported there.  Love transcends all rules and traditions.  From love, we can embrace it all.  __________Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-15 HERE.