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.

                                                     18.

The Last Christmas Present

It was my last day in Floyd, the day before my flight to Boston.  I decided to spend it with Joe. We were in Joe’s green Toyota truck driving to Christiansburg when he looked at me and said, “I have one more present for you.  It’s the most important one.  I can’t believe I forgot to give it to you.”

My eyes grew wide as I looked him over, wondering where he could be hiding it.  “Is it wrapped?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.  “I’ll give it to you after we eat lunch.”

We went to Sears to look at refrigerators because ours is so old and rusted that we can’t remember if it was white or beige.  I bought a calendar, and Joe read the newspaper while we waited for my film to be developed.   Then we headed over to The China Buffet where I filled my plate with lo mien noodles, green beans, and chicken wings.  We drank oolong tea and talked.

Driving home, I said, remembering, “Hey, what about my present!?”

Joe reached into his pocket and then handed me something…a brand new…Virginia driver’s license.

“What? Nice picture, but…”  Then I saw a red heart in the left hand corner above the words “organ donor,” and I gasped.

Now we were at a red light.  My eyes were filled with tears. “I’m so proud of you, Joe,” I said, once I could get the words out.  “It is the best present.  Thank you.”  I held his license all the way into Floyd feeling the generosity of his gift.

“I’ll make you a copy,” Joe said.

Walking on Furniture

The roots of my interest in writing go back further than reading my first poems to Sherry and has something to do with the songs of the 40’s and the nursery rhymes that our father taught us.  It has something to do with my childhood play in the tall grass by the blackberry bushes.  Talking to myself then, out in nature, was when my writing mind was born, through the monologues, lectures, and soap box speeches I gave when no one was there. I was especially eloquent when the swampy land surrounding the bushes filled in with water and froze in the winter, and I had my ice skates on.  Talking while gliding felt especially important.  I don’t know what I could have known then.  I don’t remember what I said.  But I recognize the way writing happens for me now is similar to what happened back then.

Before Game Boys and Play Stations, kids had to be inventive.  When color TV came into our living rooms, some mothers in the neighborhood said, “Don’t sit so close to the TV set…” and then something about radiation.  Today, children use computers at younger and younger ages even though to sit in front of one is like sitting in front of TV.  We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the day whenever we wanted to, any more than we could have a shower every day.  Bath night was once a week in our house (I don’t think we even had a shower back then).

It seems that I remember whole days when we would walk on furniture because we had decided that the floor was water, and if we fell in we would surely drown or maybe be eaten by sharks.  Jim had cars made of clay with wax paper on their bottoms, which would make them zoom across the kitchen table when he gave them a push.  Dan, who only ate cucumber sandwiches back then, played outside with his best friend, Robert.  We had elaborate ways to tease each other, like when Kathy typed a formal-looking document and tried to convince me with it that I was adopted, or when I scared Sherry with an invented devil that I named “Beggorah” and left notes from him under her pillow.  We made paste from flour and water, and beauty potions at the bathroom sink.  We wore sweaters on our heads for long hair and bath towels for skirts, playing “teenagers,” or we looked at the Sears catalog for hours making imaginary orders.

When I first learned in catechism class that people had souls, I knew mine was my mind.  It was a special place of originality that no one could control or take away from me.  I don’t really know where the soul resides, but I feel that mine speaks to me through my mind.  It might say, “Don’t put that there, it will cause an accident.”   It might say, “I love this…but not that…Go outside now and get some sun.”  Or, it might say, “Go get some paper and write this all down.”  And so, that’s what I do.  I’m learning to do what my soul tells me to. Is that the purpose of life?

Stirring and Simmering the Soup

Today I woke up thinking how writing is like making soup and that this one needs a little more Joey.  I hadn’t heard from my brother Joey, the happy-go-lucky optimist who likes to keep things upbeat, since he and Nancy stopped by in October on their way home to Massachusetts from Texas.  I emailed him my question, “What memories of Jim and Dan stand out for you?”  I wanted to stir up his memory to get a fuller flavor of Jim and Dan’s lives.  I also wanted to bring him into the e-mail conversation.  I knew that staying busy was Joe’s way of not thinking about Jim and Dan being gone.  I knew that sooner or later he would have to stop and think about them.

After the first five Redmans, the rest came in pairs with gaps between them, Johnny and Joey, and then, Bobby and Tricia.  Each pair in their time was collectively labeled “The Babies.”  I wrote in my diary when I was ten many times, “I had to take care of the babies,” and once I wrote, “Good News. Mommy’s getting a baby.” It was Bobby.

By the time Bobby came we were already seven kids and greatly outnumbered our parents, so we got to name the last two of us.  We named Bobby after our father.  It was now or never for a Robert Leo Redman Junior, we thought.  Then, after three boys in a row, we were blessed with Patricia, who we call Tricia, Trish, or maybe Trish McGish.  My Dad calls her “The Princess,” but she might have been Patrick as Bobby might have been Roberta Lee.

“Vatican Roulette” is what my father called “the rhythm method,” a Catholic’s only choice for birth control. Yet, every baby was welcomed and even my mother’s miscarriage between Joey and Bobby was sad for us all.  We were a melting pot of unique personalities united by family traits and loyalties with something of each other at each separate core.

Joey’s answer finally came back: “When I was 8, I couldn’t say “bed,” and I remember Jimmy trying to teach me to.  “What do you sleep in?” he kept asking me.  “Bay,” I would answer.  He would ask again.  “What do you sleep in?”  Over and over we worked on it until finally when he asked, I could say “bed.”  Another story of a fatherly Jim, I thought.

He went on to describe how Dan taught him to drive a standard shift but forgot to teach him how to keep from rolling backwards on a hill.  He had to figure that out for himself the hard way, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the Fore River Bridge with my Dad’s truck, riding the break and gas at the same time.

Joey has been the most affected by our family trait of dyslexia, first with delayed speech and then a speech impediment.  He, who went on to become the president of his own company, passed his drivers license test by having it read aloud to him, and even the above answers to my question he dictated to his wife who typed and sent them to me.  Joey was the only one of my parent’s children that they were initially worried about bringing into the world because they were broke and struggling so when my mother discovered she was pregnant with him.  “I can’t imagine what we would do without him now,” my mother said after she told me that.  Joey has been irreplaceable to my parents, especially during Jim and Danny’s deaths, with his legal savvy, practical knowledge, his bright disposition, and his willingness to help.

Another story of Joey’s perseverance I thought after reading about the Fore River Bridge and the standard shift.  I shut off the computer, putting the stories on the back burner.  It was time to start packing for my trip home to Boston.

Closing the Gap

Thinking may be the best way to travel, but sometimes we also need planes. I don’t usually visit my family in the winter, but this year was different.  I don’t want the stories to just end; I want them to come full circle, back to where they began.  I want to close the gap between the north and south, the country and the city, the child and the adult in me.  I want to heal the split between the pagan and Christian, between birth and death, and the before and after of Jim and Dan.  I want to make a bridge that spans the distance between my front door and my mother’s…seven hundred miles, over the mountains and to the ocean.  I want to hear Boston accents and foghorns again.

The Window Seat

My all-purpose waterproof lace-up granny boots that I can wear with skirts as well as pants are not the right shoes for today’s airport travel.  Besides having my ID checked three times before boarding, I had to take off my shoes and let the security guards run them through the x-ray machine because a terrorist had been caught with a bomb in his shoes just a few weeks earlier.  It was like taking off and putting on ice skates with long laces.  At least my hands weren’t cold like they use to be when we ice-skated at night on the Hull Village Green as kids.  At least I didn’t have to dodge my way in between boys playing hockey.

Once on the plane, I felt so uneasy that I checked my hands.  Were they shaking?  Was my thyroid going hyper-active again?  Feeling uneasy reminded of this past summer, coming from or going to one of the funerals, when a waiter in an airport restaurant pegged me for a nervous infrequent flyer.  I may have been distracted, thinking about my brother’s death, or maybe he mistook my sorrow for worry.  It was the girl sitting at the table next to me drinking beer who was really afraid of flying.  She was young and blonde and that’s all he noticed.  He was trying to pick her up.

I’m not afraid of flying, but being up in a plane with a bird’s eye view of all that we human’s have created always makes me feel slightly uneasy, like the time I watched a wolf pacing in his cage at the zoo, or when Walmart came to Christiansburg, Virginia, and started the urban sprawl that hasn’t stopped yet where an arboretum once stood.

Here I was, flying to Massachusetts, yet again, and wondering, did Jim remember the troll-like creature that sat on the airplane wing in that old Twilight Zone episode (the one that scared us as kids) on his ride home from Houston when he looked out his window, like I was doing now?  When did Chuckie know it was near the end for Dan?  What was that last plane ride like for them?  How did Dan manage to get back to Houston with all the pain he was in?

From my window seat, I watched the spinning propeller that was attached to the airplane’s wing. When it’s moving fast you can’t really see it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Is that what it’s like to be in another dimension?  Is that what’s it’s like to be dead, here but not seen?  Can I get any closer to Jim and Dan by going to Hull, by being around those who loved them too?  Will I feel better once I see for myself that everyone else is all right?

I leaned back into my seat and tried to relax.  Now we were flying over Boston.  From my window I could see the darkening city, lit up with lights like another dimension, come into view.  Like a hovering angel, I looked down below and worried about Nelson and Sherry.  It was 6:00 p.m. and they were picking me up, in the slow reality of cars in traffic, in the world of merging lanes, expressways, and exits. What is one step at a time down there looked like infinity from where I was.  Now the plane touched down like a fallen angel.  We were mortal again.  We were moving slow. ____________Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-16 HERE.