Ticking off the Days

I didn’t post last week. I avoided writing until Tuesday afternoon and then was completely uninspired.

Yesterday, I realized why: I’m approaching the fourth anniversary of March 19, 2014, the day my life changed forever, March 19, 2014. The day David phoned me from the hospital in Seoul, Korea, and told me he had leukemia. Seventeen months later he was dead.

I hadn’t consciously thought of the date, but something inside me has been ticking off the days.

I’ve fallen back into the trap of expecting the grief to ‘be over’. Although I say to close friends, ‘you never get over this’, I’ve yet to completely accept that. Or I fear I’ll turn into a whiner. But that’s not the underlying danger: forgetting is. Deliberate forgetting to avoid the pain of remembering and the natural forgetting as memories fade over time.

I don’t have clear, extensive memories of what our children were really like as they grew up, just brief vignettes and memorable incidents. I regret not keeping a ‘mother’s journal’.

My friend, Susanne and I took our weekly walk yesterday, on the bike path. Today there’s about a foot of snow on the ground and it’s still falling. I’ve been inside the house, watching the snow fall and hoping no more large limbs fall from our moribund trees. We have wonderful tall maples and evergreens on our acre lot, but many of them aren’t healthy. Last week, during a heavy snowfall, a major maple tree limb fell into our circular driveway, missing Jim’s car by inches. Before we’ve had a chance to hire someone to remove it, we’re in the middle of another nor-easter. Last night I spent a half an hour dragging the moderate-sized limbs to our big compost heap so our snowplow driver can clear most of the driveway.

Unfinished Business

Two weeks ago, Jim’s mom and I spent the day at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. In the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, originally the luxurious Hotel Utah, (built in 1911), we saw 'The Craftsman', a film about Danny Sorensen. A little older than me, Danny has loved flying all his life, is an accomplished show pilot, and has hand-built two planes. The opening shot of the nose of Danny’s bright red plane, “Unfinished Business,” brought sudden and unexpected tears: David has sixty years of unfinished business.

And then, one of Danny's and Alynn's daughters developed a brain tumor at age four.

I admire the faith, courage, and wisdom of the Sorensens. And the aeronautical cinematography is stunning on the big screen. (I love airshows!)

In my Compassionate Friends group (a support group for parents and siblings who have lost a child or sibling to death), one mother described how her deceased son energizes her to live life more fully and do significant, hard things: "for Nick". His unfinished business has become her inspiration.

What’s your inspiration this week?

Genealogy Heaven

Early last Tuesday morning, I joined about 40 other passengers to board a Southwest plane to Milwaukee. We each got an entire row to spread out in. Almost as good as first class!

In order to save the $400 premium for travelling on President’s Day weekend, I chose 11 hours of travel time to get from Boston to Salt Lake City, via Milwaukee and Los Angeles (yeah, California). Have Kindle, will travel! I remained on the same airplane all day and had a unique experience in Milwaukee. After refilling my water bottle in the terminal, the gate agent waved me through to re-board the plane before the waiting new passengers. I walked down the jetway alone and directly into my chosen seat: no line, no waiting. What a feeling of power and privilege, to board before anyone else, without showing a boarding pass. (I’m easily amused.)

That afternoon I rented a car and drove to see Savannah and dear little Eliza, who are visiting Utah from L.A. (I practically flew over their apartment building, but they weren’t there.) The eagles were gathering (Luke 17:37) for a double baby blessing for Eliza and her month-younger cousin, Leo.

Over the next two days, I spent over eight hours at the huge Family History Library (FHL) on Temple Square.

I had no idea what to expect: over the last nine years, millions of records have been digitized and are available, free of charge, from home through FamilySearch.org. What could the FHL have to offer?

What I found bowled me over: several floors, each with a huge corps of experienced volunteer genealogists, eager to guide me to the next level of research.

A seasoned genealogist helped me find an image of my great-grandfather’s handwritten baptismal record, dated October 27, 1860, from Poznan, Prussia, now part of Poland. There are records going back to 1558.

Another volunteer, experienced in Lithuanian and Polish research, introduced me to research tools for Polish locales. Amandus Gustav Bruesch and his parents, Gottlieb and Justine, spoke German, but his birthplace, Poznan, is now a Polish province, 100 miles from the current German border. I’ve daydreamed about visiting the Bruesch homeland: turns out I’ll have to travel to the middle of Poland.

With family activities, I won’t be able to return to the FHL this trip, but I’ll be back. Imagine an entire building of seasoned genealogists, united in their desire is to share their expertise.

Georgette Dione Boucher, 1921 - 2018

Around 3 a.m. on Thursday, January 25, Georgette Dione Boucher died at age 96. I never met ‘Georgie’, but my friend, Diane, was her next-door neighbor and took care of her for many years. Diane loves to say that she was on her trike the first time she met Georgie, when the Bouchers moved in. It was a close-knit neighborhood, where Georgie and Diane’s parents and the other adults kept an eye out for all the children as they played outside with a freedom that's a rarity today.

Georgie never had children and her husband died many years ago. Diane took care of her like a daughter. All of Georgie’s needs: the headaches of house and yard maintenance, the complications of home health care, the intricacies of financial planning and organization, fell on Diane, who willingly served her. Diane did more for Georgie than many daughters ever need do for their own mothers.

After Georgie died, I met Diane at the Keefe Funeral Home to help her make arrangements. Unfortunately, I know about funeral arrangements. I planned the Funeral Mass and my friend, Amy, and I interviewed Diane and one of Georgie’s Canadian nieces for the obituary. I organized a women’s a cappella quintet to sing the closing hymn at the Mass at St. Agnes Church in Arlington Center

For five days I worked on the myriad of details that seem to pop up between the death and the funeral. I was grateful for the chance to help my friend, but it was exhausting. I looked forward to January 31, when the funeral would be over and I could relax.

What I didn’t anticipate was the emotional reaction when it was all over. The funeral was on Wednesday, January 31. On Friday, I saw my friend, Jen, at a craft store. Jen asked me how it went. As I told her about my week, I was amazed, incredulous that the funeral had only been 50 hours previous. It felt like a month ago. More accurately, it felt like it had taken a month out of my life.

I’d gladly volunteer for the job in an instant; I'm grateful I had the expertise and time to help my friend.

The emotional exhaustion was due to the personal subtext: my mother's, my father's, and David’s deaths, funerals and burials, the grief for all of these losses, a grief I still feel, and most poignantly for David, who died so young.

As I move onward in my life, I now experience what I couldn’t imagine at all: what it’s like to have a son who’s been dead for nearly 30 months. There’s a symmetry in that: he would have been 30 in October, and now it’s been 30 months. A month dead for each year alive.

I suppose it will always be a strange thing. How can my son’s body, once strong, vibrant, and alive, now be lying in the cold frozen ground of New England?

Powerful Music

I heard Shankar Vedantam's Hidden Brain podcast last week, "Fresh Starts". In 2006, Derek Amato struck his head after diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool and woke up to discover that he could compose music at the piano. An acquired savant. He can’t pick out “Twinkle, Twinkle”, but he can spontaneously create intricate pieces and play them fluidly.

I don’t watch television, so maybe I’m the last person in America to hear about Derek. He’s teamed up with a jazz singer, Mandy Harvey, who totally lost her hearing in college. Derek wrote a song for her, "The Script".

As I listened to Derek play on the "Fresh Starts" podcast, I remembered a George Winston album: Winter (1980). Winston was creating beautiful albums at the same time Jim and I were creating of our marriage and family. I listened to that tape countless times in the 80s, in southern Indiana and New Hampshire. We chose to have no television, so radio and tapes were my window on the world.

I love classical music: Bach, Mozart, Brahms. But there is something in George Winston and Derek Amato that touches me deeply as well.

Snow covered the ground this morning, brilliant white and light as feathers. Massachusetts is in a George Winston mood.

Freezing Rain

I was first aware of the freezing rain on the top step of my kitchen porch. Balancing a black plastic bag of clothes to donate to Goodwill on top of a box bound for the same destination, I sensed the sole of my shoe slide, just a quarter inch, enough to wish I had a free hand to grab the bannister. Leaning on my elbow, I was able to balance the load and inch my way down to the sidewalk.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen freezing rain. More often, in winter, it either snows, sleets, or just straight-out rains.

A layer of ice coated my blue car. As I scraped the windshield, it broke into large, ragged pieces the size of dessert-plates, like impossibly thin, delicate sugar candy.

On Mass. Ave. I had a sweet David moment. A pedestrian with a large blue umbrella crossed the street ahead of me. I stopped, as is Commonwealth law, and waited until he arrived safely at the opposite curb. I could hear David telling me, disparagingly, that the law said you had to stop until the walker’s foot touched the opposite curb. “I guess that’s in case he decides to turn around and go back across.”

As part of his end-of-year accounting, Jim wrote to each of our kids, reporting the balance in their ‘HeirBanks’, where we keep track of their loans and debts. His email to me was brief:
            "I’m missing David..."

The Little Green Guestroom

I woke up this morning in the small guest room in Riverdale (the Bronx). at Peter's and Xiomara's. The last time I slept in that room was March 18, 2014. How do I know with such certainty, without consulting a calendar? Because the following morning I was lying in bed, waking up luxuriously slowly, when my cell phone rang. It was David, calling from Korea, where his Army unit was stationed. Only, he wasn’t on base; he was in St. Mary’s Hospital in Seoul, where he had just been diagnosed with leukemia.

I must have driven home that day; but I don’t remember it. A week later we picked him up at Dulles Airport and drove to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which I dubbed WReNMiMiC. (I wanted an acronym and Matt found one: a real word, wrenmimic, that fit perfectly.)

My thoughts last night weren’t morbid; there was just an awareness of the significance of the moment. I also had in mind an old friend of mine, who is suffering from a rare and very aggressive cancer. I had just read the latest CaringBridge post from her daughter. The highlight of the post was that she'd taken a shower after days of excruciating pain.

My friend Kimberly, whose husband died of pancreatic cancer much too young, remarked once that cancer steals a person’s dignity. That’s true. The autonomy we so cherish, or would cherish if we didn’t take it for granted, evaporates. We lose the ability to get dressed and go out to the grocery store, watch a movie without pain, enjoy the pleasure of taking a shower independently, cook a meal, and eat raw fish at a sushi restaurant (if you like that sort of thing. I do.).

The memories last night haven’t sent me down into the abyss of grief. I’m feeling quite calm.  Life goes on: there are meals to cook, sushi to eat, grandchildren to play with.

Although I returned to my near-monthly routine of driving down to New Jersey and New York City about a year ago, I hadn’t sleep in the guest room again until last night. Peter and Xiomara have been trying to close on an apartment for over a year, and had filled the little green room with furniture and appliances destined for the new apartment in North Riverdale. On earlier trips, I've slept on their couch.

But yesterday, the bed had returned to a horizontal position, with a lovely comforter on top. The extra furniture and appliances are in the new apartment, which is being painted.

I was worried about sleeping in that little room, haunted by the ghosts of the past, but I've developed a little stratagem. After lights out,  I count by threes. I’ve always had some dyscalculia, so its a challenge to  get past 39. The concept is to focus on the task of counting and let other thoughts and worries drift through my relaxed mind. I start playing with the numbers, noticing when familiar numbers come up: 54, 60, 81 and checking that the digits always add up to a multiple of three. I know, it’s elementary stuff, but it works. The concept is to keep enough focus to let go of agitation and let my mind drift in and out of consciousness. I don’t know if this will work long-term, but right now it’s a useful tool in my mental toolbox.