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.

                                           Epilogue 

 The Mystery of the Comma and the Moon

  The Poplar tree outside my bedroom window is just as empty in January as it was in November.  But something is changing.  As the days slowly grow longer and the sun shines brighter, it seems that my acute symptoms of grief are beginning to subside.  I cry less hard, but I choke up more often.  This is probably a good thing because it’s easier to hide the fact that you’re choking up than is to hide when you’re falling apart, and it’s easier to go out into the world when you know you probably won’t fall apart at any unsuspecting moment.

Accepting my brother’s deaths has in some ways gotten easier and in other ways it’s gotten harder.  After Jim and Dan died, I craved to see them, so I watched home videos that they were in.  I still want to see them, but I can’t bear to watch those same videos now.  Passing time allows for healing, but it also allows for the sadness of loss to deeply settle in.  I suspect that grief is chronic, something you don’t ever get over, but hopefully, you learn to cope with it and maybe even learn something about life and yourself.

“Not only is the light returning, but the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl!” I wrote in my journal in late January.  I’m not normally a football fan, in fact I’m downright adverse to football, but living with a part of Jim and Dan inside me has made me a different person.  In the same way that Jim’s spirit lives within my mother and has caused her to take pictures of sunsets and cloud formations (something she didn’t do before),  it has caused me to root for the Patriots to win the Super Bowl.  Jim and Dan were life long enthusiastic fans of the Patriots, New England’s NFL team.

“Are you done yet?” Joe asked about my writing.

“The house is built, but I still have a lot of trim work to do,” was my answer, which meant that I had to learn the rules of commas, and commas tend to bewilder me in the same way that the moon does. To have good grammar, you not only have to know where commas should go, but you have to know where they shouldn’t.   I understand about 80% of the moon’s orbit and have about the same percentage of understanding for commas.  That leaves 20% of confounded confusion that, in the past, I have chalked up to mystery.

I wanted to write some updates, too, about how my family is doing:

. Patrick had his birthday and turned three years old. Jimmy was sorely missed at the party.  It was a Construction Workman theme.

. Dominic, Kathy’s first grandson, who was born just after Jim died and while Dan was in the hospital, is  six months old now and is doing great.

. Joey took my parents for their 56th wedding anniversary on a weekend get-away to the Foxwood Casino in Connecticut.   They all had fun, but I don’t think they won much money because if they had I would have heard about it by now.

. The buzz on the Va/Ma Love Link is all about the rug hooking class that Kathy is planning to teach. She had a class a few years ago, and some people never finished their rugs.  I guess it’s a good time for finishing things now.

. Sherry wrote in an email, “I’ve taken up needlepoint again, but my eyes are not what they used to be. Getting older is not for wimps!”  “Life is not for wimps!” I wrote back.

. John had the flu, and then he went ice fishing, so we didn’t hear from him for a while.  We all got worried that maybe he gave up on learning how to use Dan’s computer, or maybe something worse.  I  e-mailed him, excited to tell him about the escape button I found in the left hand corner of my computer key-board, but I think he thought I was joking.

The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl!  It was like the whole of Boston had won the lottery!   Everyone in my family was thrilled, because it was more than a game to us.   We were all aware of how much it would have meant to Jim and Dan to see their team as champions.  The Patriots had gone to the Super Bowl twice before.  In the 90’s Dan saw them play in New Orleans, but they had never won it before this.  My dad and Nelson watched the game on TV together, while my mother and Sherry went to the movies to see “A Beautiful Mind” arriving back home to Sherry’s house in Marshfield before the end of the game.  I skipped the pre-game fanfare and for most of the game, I let Joe keep me posted on the score.  I saw a little bit of the beginning and a little of the end, which is a lot of football watching for me.

When it was over, I called Nelson and my dad on the phone to share in their celebration.  Nelson joked that he almost had a heart attack in the last two minutes of the game, because the winning field goal caused so much tension; in the blink of an eye they could have lost it.

My favorite part of the game, that I was glad I did see, was when the Patriots came out of the tunnel for the player’s introduction.  They came out, not one by one as is the tradition but all together as a team. As a team they overcame their obstacles.  As a team they won the Super Bowl.

In the wake of the September 11^th attacks and the collapse of Enron, in the midst of bombing in Afghanistan, The Patriots triumph was a positive symbol in the myth of our time.  As the underdog team, their win let the world know that the everyday person can prevail.  With their patriotic name and their red white and blue team colors, their win was like a win for the country, a country recovering from loss.  For us it was a win for Jim and Dan and a reflection of our own family’s teamwork.  Or was it a win because of Jim and Dan?  Were they pulling some strings, we couldn’t help but wonder?  “Now let’s see what they can do about the Red Sox,” John wrote in an email when he finally came back onboard. “Too bad we can’t act out our national differences on a field in a game,” I added.

It’s February now and the tops of my daffodils and grape hyacinths are already up.  Spring is anxious this year, anxious with life’s urgency to continue itself.  Seeing how the tops of my flower bulbs have pushed their way up through the earth, reminded me of something.

While sitting with Dan, when he was near death, I had a glimpse of a moment… a spontaneous thought that arose, not from logic, of wanting to give my life for his.  The thought didn’t last long because right after it, came the knowing that Dan’s life path was not mine.  Over these months I have thought about that moment.  I knew that when my children were young I would have thrown myself in front of a train if it meant saving their lives.  But that was mother’s instinct, this was something different. It made me ask, does the life force in me that wants to live, also extend to others?  Is that what causes heroes to risk their lives to save strangers?  Are we really so separate, or are we all one on some quantum physics spiritual level?  Is that why my instinct was to give my life for Dan’s?

What would we do without mystery?  Would we want to live in a world of only logic, where life is predictably laid out?  What would we do without adversity?  Would we want to live in a world that was like the heaven I imagined as a child, full of candy and paper dolls, nothing to do but play and enjoy?  (Even when I imagined it I knew it could be boring.)  I’m not going to stop writing because I don’t know where every comma goes.  Jimmy didn’t know what the weather would do next and that’s what he liked about it– and the more adverse the weather, the better Jim liked it.   From mystery we come and to mystery we return.  It’s a mystery what life has in store for us, but whatever it is, it will probably be something that we have to work for.

After writing that, I went to bed.  I was having trouble falling asleep when this image popped into my mind.  I was standing on the top of a hill, looking out onto an expansive view.  It was like a scene from “The Sound of Music” and I was small against the hugeness of it all.  On the hill, the wind was blowing as I watched myself begin to call out Jim’s name.  I drew out the sound of it and called out as loud as I could, the way I use to when we were kids and I was calling him home for supper, because sometimes Jim was no where to be found.  Maybe he was in The Village delivering newspapers; maybe he was at the bay hitting rocks.  JIMMY, WHERE ARE YOU?  IS DAN THERE WITH YOU?  I turned over and tried to sleep, but the image was still in my mind, and I was still calling out Jim’s name across the greatest divide.  Would he hear me?  JIMMY, WHEN CAN I SEE YOU AGAIN?  I MISS YOU. I looked at the clock; it was 1:20 a.m.  That was the same time Jim went to the bathroom at work and talked to his co-worker on his way back to the milling machine, the last time he spoke to anyone…JIMMY, CAN YOU COME VISIT ME WHILE I’M SLEEPING?  I WANT TO SEE YOU…WHERE IS DAN?… I WANT TO SEE HIM TOO…

I fell asleep soon after that.  It was a light sleep, something I wanted to get out of the way so that I could function the next day.  When I woke up the next morning it was cold, but the sun was shining.   I instantly remembered calling out to Jim the night before.  Did he come?  My mind was groggy.   I had to think.  I did dream, but what? And then it came back to me.  I DREAMT I WAS SLEDDING DOWN A HILL WITH PATRICK!  There were obstacles in the dream that I had to overcome, like what I would wear, it was getting late.  I borrowed some boots and warm clothes from Tricia.  I looked out the window and saw the hill we would slide down.  I saw that the sky was darkening.  “Come on Patrick!  It’s getting late!” I said excitedly.

Was my dream a message from Jim, from the mystery, my own psyche?   As I replayed the image of holding Patrick tightly to me as we flew down the hill –something I knew Jim had done with me when we were little kids–the meaning of the dream became clear to me.  Although I cried later, feeling the finality that Jim was not going to come, I laughed out loud to myself now as I received the dream’s message, which was this:  Move on.  Have some fun.  Let go.  Go for it.  Hold precious the life around you.  Don’t let loss stop you from living.  Let it remind you to live all the more. 

Read chapters 1-20 HERE.