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.

                                         20.

 Red Line to the Moon

  On the red line to Park Street from the subway train window, I saw the December full moon.  I was sitting next to two year old Patrick who was on the look-out for Christmas lights. “I see something!” he would periodically exclaim. I followed the moon while walking with my family to the Boston Commons and then to Fanueil Hall.  Under this full moon we found The Enchanted Village, a magical world of moving mannequin children who, dressed in late 20’s clothing, were placed in Christmas settings.  I had seen the Enchanted Village in the downtown department store windows of Jordan Marsh when I was five years old.  It was a vague memory that I questioned the reality of.  What a wonderful surprise to find out it was true, to find the Enchanted Village (now in a pre-fab heated building) again.  And how well it fit the theme of my trip, a re-visitation of my childhood roots.

We had almost walked passed it when I broke off from the group to take a closer look.  “I think it’s a wax museum,” I had said, by then everyone was curious.  The man at the door who was collecting our dollars wouldn’t let us pass until we told him something we had gotten for Christmas.

“A journal,” I told him trying to think fast. “Will that get me in?”

“It depends on what you write in it,” he answered with a grin.

I don’t remember seeing the moon again until the day I was riding in Sherry’s car to catch the ferry that would bring me to the water shuttle and then to Logan airport on the day I headed home.  It was up in the sky in the middle of the day looking like a ghostly visitation.  It was a ¾ moon by then.  I pointed it out.  “See what I mean about the mysterious moon.  I can never predict when it’s going to show up,” I said to Sherry, who was driving.

I looked for the moon from the ferry boat window, from the airport terminal, and from my window seat in the back of the plane, but I never found it again that day.  That was all right, though, because there was so much else to look at.

The ocean sculpts the land into hooks that look like Cape Cod.  One of those hooks is Hull.  The plane I was on, departing from Boston, flew right over Hull, low enough so that I got treated to a tour of places that I loved.  I saw 10 ½ Spring Street where our house used to be, the tower at the forts, the windmill at Pemberton, the outline of Allerton and Strawberry Hill.  I recognized the landscapes, parts of Hingham and Quincy, the mural painted gas tanks in Neponset. The city of Boston looked like a floating island of skyscrapers from my window seat in the sky.

I had no such recognition when we flew over Roanoke.  It was just after dusk but even if it wasn’t, I don’t know the landscape of Roanoke and its surrounding areas the way I know the South Shore of Boston. Everyone below had their porch lights on, but I still couldn’t find the mountains.

I was leaving the north where they had no snow and arriving in the south where they had several inches of it.  Things were still mixed up.  I was still sad that I had a whole other life that my friends in Virginia weren’t a part of and that my family wasn’t a part of my life here with them.  But I was happy to be back and as the days went on, in the paradise of my own yard, I remembered why I live in the country where my closest neighbor’s house isn’t part of my view, where the pace of life is slower, and the drinking water is better.

After a few days of transition, I called all my friends to tell them I was home and to tell them I was thinking of them.  After doing that, I took a deep breath and felt ready to begin the New Year.

The Lottery

  Most people in Massachusetts play the lottery and my family is no different.  Someone handed me a ticket to scratch after Sunday dinner (a roasted leg of lamb) when I was at my mothers, but I don’t use ATM machines, cell phones, or play the lottery.  “How do you do this?” I asked.  Scratching it felt like running my fingernails down a blackboard, not worth the few bucks I could have won, which I didn’t.

Back home in Virginia, a week later, I received a Love Link e-mail from Kathy, who had just gone to Atlantic City with some girlfriends from work.  She wrote, “Last year when I went on this same trip, I won $1,000 but not this year.  Oh well, we had fun and did eat well.”

I was cleaning my kitchen like a madwoman, spurred on by my new refrigerator, but I took a break to answer her. “I won big time!  I wrote. “I made the trip to Boston and back home safely, my energy held up, nothing bad happened, and I saw the people I love!”  I felt rich.

On the trip that Jim and Dan took together they had stopped in Atlantic City.  Danny, like several others in our family, loved to gamble.  Jim did too, but earlier in his life he developed an addiction to it, and, being the constructive person he was, he kicked the habit. He went more for Dan’s sake, he told me, and he even won a little money to help pay for his trip, which was good because Jim, who was usually on a tight budget, counted every cent of what things cost.

I thought about how Dan chose to spend his last few weeks doing what he loved best, visiting his family, traveling with his brother, stopping at several gambling casinos on their way back to Texas, and going to baseball games.  I thought about Dan in the hospital.  He never turned a visitor away.  He was so ill that I hung up a sign, “Limit visits to five minutes,” it read.  Every time I asked Dan if he was up for a visitor, he always nodded, weakly, yes.  And they all stayed for more than five minutes even when Dan was unconscious.  I got to see how rich Dan was in friendships and how even in the hospital, up until the end, he was true to himself, doing what he loved as much as he possibly could.

Epiphany, January 6, 2002

  In this physical world, we have to mine for treasure.  Gold and silver and precious gems are not usually found laying around on the surface of the earth.  It’s the same with us, we have to excavate our own treasure, down through the door of our childhood, through the pain of what hurts, into the grief of our losses.  Life nudges us to go deeper because to live only on the surface is superficial.  There’s so much more.

It was January 6, Epiphany, the day the three Kings brought gifts to Jesus, when Joe said to me, after we had been talking about Jim and Dan, “I have a song I want to play for you.  It’s from a Paul Winter CD and is called, “The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Silver Apples of the Moon.”  While getting it from the CD stack, he noticed Neil Young’s CD, “Silver and Gold” and played that one, too.  Then I played a song from a CD collection that Nelson put together, called “Angels in Waiting.”   It was about a woman who had lost her two brothers.  It was playing on the country radio stations when I got home from the last funeral, the first time I heard it.  I couldn’t believe it.  Did it come through the ethers and out of her pen? Did she write it just for us?  I told Nelson about it and he added it the collection of songs from Jim and Dan’s funerals.

Later that day  when I checked my emails I saw this response from Kathy, “I’m glad your trip made you feel rich because you are!  And I am, too!”  It was also later on that same day when I made this comment to Joe after meditating, “You know, my mediations lately are less about mediating and more about experiencing a sensation, a place of growing richness just under the surface that I’m staring to get glimpses of.”

There was something else I was getting a glimpse of, the ending of these stories, which I had been completely immersed in for nearly six months now.   I took a walk to celebrate that and the thought of getting my life back.

Ice Cream and the Zen of Grief

  Sometimes when I watch a movie, I get caught up in the story as though it were real.  Other times, when I watch a movie, I watch the actors and think, how do they do it?  Act with everyone on the set watching them?  Cry on cue?  Kiss someone they hardly know?

It’s the same way with books. Sometimes I read to enjoy the story, while others times I read to see how the author does it?  Sentence by sentence, how does one build a story?

Sometimes I grieve with abandonment and sometimes I watch myself grieve, like looking at myself in the mirror, partly because I’m vain, but mostly because I’m trying to figure it out, who the heck am I?

My eyes filled with tears on several occasions during my recent trip home to Boston, but I only cried once, when I lay on Danny’s bed, the night I slept at my mother’s.  Back in Virginia, I wrote to Sherry,  “It was a good week. I guess my being there took our minds off Jim and Dan.  We hardly cried at all.”  But I had only been home two days, and we both were crying hard once again.  Me, because I was writing about Jim and Dan’s bunk beds and she because of this:  “I’m a nurse. I should have been able to help Danny more,” she confessed.

“We couldn’t face the thought that Danny could die.  We were all in some denial, including Dan.  But I think we all did the best we could, and I think Dan knew that,” I answered her.

When I was staying with Sherry, I confessed to her my regret.  Danny had just got on a liquid diet after days of being tube fed.  I fed him clear broth, and Jell-O, and then some runny ice cream.  It wasn’t real ice cream; it was a corn syrup concoction with gooey red sauce and artificial additives.  What kind of food is that to feed someone who’s sick?  I was thinking spirulina and protein shakes.  He motioned for more, but I went on to the cranberry juice, leaving two more bites in the container.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned, I lied about the ice cream to my brother.  I still regret holding those two bites back.  It turned out to be Danny’s last supper.

The Final Draft

In this bubble of time that I’m in, my friends and family are, thankfully, just being themselves, but they also know if they hang around me they might end up in a story.  The truth is this:  All of life is one big story and they’re already in it.  And in the end all of us will ask, “How did I come across?”

Consider this:  Everything we do is creating a record whether on paper or not.  Are we happy with the story we’re making?  Will we like how it ends?  Will we go back and make the corrections to get the story we really want?

I’ve been riding the roller coaster of the writing life, diving like Dan did off Pemberton Pier, not the dive that broke his back, the one before that, which was perfect.  I’ve been scanning the widening horizon, like Jim looking out from the observatory tower, flying over the roots of my childhood, in and out of two worlds.  I’ve been pulling myself up from the hole I’ve been in, bringing up buried treasure with me.   I’ve been gambling my days, like playing the lottery, placing my bets on these stories.

There will be no “The End” to these stories because we’re all busy living the rest of them.  There will be no “Happily Ever After,” either, because life is a bittersweet balance that we have to choose to be happy about. Every ending is also a new beginning.  It all starts here, right now.______________Colleen Redman / Read chapters 1-18 HERE. Epilogue coming soon.