The Jim and Dan Stories Revisited: Chapter 17
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.
17.
A Penny for Your Thoughts
“Make a wish,” Joe said as he handed me a penny. We had walked to the beaver pond and sat on the bench where I read the latest stories to him. It always surprises me how different it is to read them out loud to a witness than it is to read them to myself. I’m always surprised by which lines can touch a tender nerve and cause me to cry as I struggle to get the words out. Joe cries too.
Joe’s father died from congestive heart failure several years ago, and my brother’s deaths have re-stimulated his grief. Losing his father has also deepened his compassion for others, like me now, who have lost someone close.
I was in Massachusetts for a Labor Day cook-out when it happened. Joe’s Dad, Josef, had been ill for some time with so many complications. His health was deteriorating fast by the time Joe arrived in D.C. to pick him up for a weekend retreat in our mountain cabin. The first night at our house, Josef, who slept in the same bed with Joe, was in a lot of pain and prayed for Jesus to take him. The next day was spent fulfilling Josef’s wishes and doing what he loved best. He ate forbidden junk food and watched his favorite WWII movie, Patton, rented from the video store. That night he told Joe that he had no pain and that he was finally relieved and felt fulfilled. He died in his sleep, lying next to Joe who woke up to the silence and realized he was gone.
I threw my penny in the beaver pond and wished that Jim and Dan were all right and that they would visit me in a dream sometime. I looked over to Joe, who struggles with depression this time of year, and noticed he was holding a quarter. “What are you trying to do, up the ante for a really big wish? I asked.
“I need more help than you,” he said and laughed.
I laughed too. “Go for it,” I said, “I hope you get everything you wish for.”
Certain Things
Certain things stand out in my mind and I don’t know why or where to place them, like Jimmy planting bushes for the first time in his yard just months before he died. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he told me. Or I think about Danny sitting at his computer, as sick as he was, printing out all of Jim’s emails, before flying home for Jim’s funeral, to share them with us. “…glad to be home to watch the kid and the weather,” Jim had written to Danny after their trip together, a week before he was killed.
Certain things comfort me, like hearing from Sherry how the Hull community has rallied to support my parents with visits from church members, baked goods from friends and even from strangers who have knocked on their door knowing the losses they have suffered.
Certain things make me smile. Like, how come every time I spread strawberry jam and cream cheese on crackers, I think of Dan because I ate them once in Texas with him? Does that make sense? When I clean my kitchen table after eating, I’m reminded of our childhood and the plywood table top my Dad built. He had to improvise because regular kitchen tables weren’t big enough for all of us. I remember the white-painted partition next to that table where we stuffed food, between it and the wall, because once our plates were empty, we could go out to play “Johnny on the Spot” flashlight tag. My parents didn’t know we did this until we had to move, and fifteen years of petrified food was found there.
Certain things I’ll never know, and some things I can’t forget. The morning after Jim’s funeral, Danny couldn’t sleep. He went to his brother’s grave site and lay on the earth, above where Jim was buried, until the sun came up. Was he checking out the site? Getting use to the place? What was it like for Danny, seeing his brother’s funeral and burial and knowing, on some level, he was seeing what his own would be like?
Jim was first in birth order and in death. He shared the same bedroom with Danny for nearly twenty years of their lives. How did that bond them? How did the five-year age difference affect them? What was their relationship like, the part between them that we may not have known?
When Dan lay down on the earth that morning, did it remind him of the bunk bed he slept in just over Jim? When he thought about lying down in a shared grave with his brother, did he think about all the nights they laid down to go to sleep in the bedroom they shared together? Certain things I’ll never get over. Certain things like that.
Deliverance
Today I kicked a rock ahead of me from the mailbox to my front porch, just like I used to when I was a girl walking home from The Village. I never could make it all the way home with just one rock, although that was the goal of the game. Inevitably, the rock would get lost, and I had to start over with a new one.
Life seems predictable. Our schedules and habits go on, same as the days before, then in one day, everything changes. I’ve lived through man’s first walk on the moon, the invention of panty hose, electric curlers, early televisions, and computers. I don’t know if we’ve really progressed, and if we have, at what price I wonder. Seems like we’ve traded Polio and the Plague for AIDS and Cancer, Hepatitis C and Chronic Fatigue. The ozone hole gets bigger every day and the cars—the SUV’s and gas guzzling vans that people like–do too. My kitchen starts to get dirty the minute after I clean it up. Is divine order also chaos? Do we ever get ahead? Where are we going? What’s the goal? Are there just too many of us?
If death is like birth in reverse, do the labor pains of grief grow farther apart as birth’s labor pains grow closer together? I am crying less often as the months go on. But what is the end result of grief? Are our souls stretched wider to hold and bear more like the womb and the birth canal are? If birth is the deliverance of the body and death is the deliverance of the soul, what is being delivered to those left behind grieving the loss of a loved one? What else will we be asked to hold, and what will we hold onto?
The mailman delivers our mail. We don’t know what he’ll be bringing. On this day Danny got more mail than me. I sat on the porch steps to read it…sticker labels with his new, supposed, address on them (mine), a notice for jury duty, along with the regular bills he’s not here to pay. How did I arrive at this place, getting mail for my dead brother, his wallet in my drawer, his shoes in my closet? We expect certain bills on the first of the month, the catalogs and Christmas cards in December, like we expect our life to lead us in the same direction as the steps we’ve taken and the choices we’ve made. But sometimes what comes is a total surprise. Sometimes life delivers a blow.
Silent Night
The simpler we can make our lives, the more satisfying the simple things are. Ironically, the less we have, the more we get from life’s most simple pleasures because we have the time to appreciate them.
This year was the first time in twenty-five years that I didn’t send out Christmas cards although Joe sent out some from an abbreviated version of my list. This was also the first year I didn’t go anywhere on Christmas Day; no potluck dinner with friends, no carol singing, no turkey and fixings, no games in the evening. There was a morning with our sons, gifts unwrapped and a feeling of abundance. There was a walk down a dirt road and a chat with the neighbor. There was a present for a man with no living relatives, who lives in the nursing home that we got someone else to deliver. There was the John and Yoko song, which never goes out of style, playing on the stereo. And so this Christmas…and what have you done?…Another year over…and a new one begun…War is over…if you want it…War is over now. And there were cookies and Kahluah on Christmas Eve and friends who came over for our annual Christmas Eve open house.
There were also tears, just under the surface, for Jim and Dan all day. There were a few moments when Joe and I held hands for a blessing, over our bubble and squeak dinner, when I couldn’t get any words out. At our Christmas Eve gathering, the night before, a friend had said to me, “It’s good that you can talk about your brothers.”
“To know me is to hear about my brothers,” I said, showing her pictures of them and filling her in because she, a Floydian, lives in California now and didn’t know they had died.
The truth is this: sometimes I can’t talk about Jim and Dan, and sometimes they’re all I can talk about. Sometimes I cry with the fullness I feel for them, and sometimes I cry with the emptiness.
The commercialization of Christmas, which seems to grow bigger each year, can be overwhelming. So can the search to re-create the exciting Christmases of our childhood. “Silent Night” has been my favorite Christmas carol since I was a little girl. That’s what I want for Christmas, Santa! More silence in the world! That’s why I didn’t want to go out.
In his book, “Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom,” John O’Donohue says, “Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world.” He also says this: “There is so little patience for the silence from which words emerge or for the silence that is between words and within them. When we forget or neglect this silence, we empty our world of its secret and subtle presences. We can no longer converse with the dead or the absent.”
What Magic is Woven?
My parent’s were able to get two cars, one for each of them, in trade for Danny’s truck. Two brand new cars sit in their drive-way as big as life. One is gold and the other is silver. The physical manifestations of Jim and Dan in spirit? Two vehicles, or magical chariots, to carry my parents safely and comfortably through the rest of their old age? The gold dust of sun? The silver dust of moon and stars? What magic is being woven?
When Jim died, I said to Kathy, “It’s like the fabric of our family has been weakened. I’m afraid of what will happen next, now that we have been torn, made vulnerable?” And then Dan went too. In these stories, there is a thread of gold that represents Danny, and a thread of silver, representing Jim. I feel these threads are weaving together, in and out of our lives, through the coincidences we’ve all been having, and through the glimpses we’ve been given of love’s healing power. Are the precious threads of Jim and Dan at work repairing the fabric of our family? Are they knitting us closer together? Are the essences of Jim and Dan shinning through into our physical lives? What treasure is this? What magic? _______Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-16 HERE.
