Tag Archives: memory

TODAY IS NOT THE DAY

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15. CRY

  • Tears are a natural cleansing and healing mechanism. It’s OK to cry. In fact, it’s good to cry when you feel like it. What’s more, tears are a form of mourning. They are sacred! 

CARPE DIEM:  If you feel like it, have a good cry today. Find a safe place to embrace your pain and cry as long and as hard as you want to.  (HEALING A PARENT’S GRIEVING HEART: 100 PRACTICAL IDEAS AFTER YOUR CHILD DIES, Alan D. Wolfelt, PhD, 2005)

I don’t feel like it today. I’m okay. I’m a little tired. Just enjoying being in the house on this cold, damp, dreary day. Doing laundry and a little cleaning. Mostly reading. Some meditating. I’m aware that my heart is healing. It’s only taken eleven plus years. 

The night I found my son, I don’t know if I cried. I remember screaming. My heart, my soul, my very self, split in two. It is only now that I feel some mending happening. I’m coming back to myself, acknowledging that my son is indeed dead and gone. My son. The child I raised. The boy who felt things so strongly. I described him as wearing his nerves, as a child, on the outside of his body. My beautiful boy.

Wednesday was the first anniversary of the death of my mother. Not by suicide, like my son. I do believe she gave up though. She was 87 and a half. She’d survived all the members of her family, except for some in-laws, as well as the loss of her best friend. The last loss, the final straw, was her younger sister. Until the last few days, she continued to be active in her assisted living community. Then she was having difficulty breathing, her pulse-ox was very low, but she wouldn’t keep the oxygen on. 

When my sister called to say she was gone, I was shocked. We’d just gotten her on to hospice services because she was refusing to go to the hospital and she needed more care than the facility could provide for her. I told her it didn’t mean she was going to die, that some people graduate from hospice. (I’d worked as a hospice social worker.) Apparently, she decided otherwise.

I had a Mass celebrated for her yesterday at my parish church. Before Mass, I thought about telling the priest the correct pronunciation of her name, but he was running late and I decided not to interrupt him as he got ready. He mispronounced it. Many people do. Obviously not an English major. A vowel followed by double consonants carries the short sound, no? He said it with the long sound. 

I reposted her eulogy, photos, and stories. I felt guilty when I saw my sister posted, “we miss you”. I don’t miss her. Not really. She wasn’t the easiest person to be around. All my life her anxiety took first priority. I remember, even as a child, trying to manage her anxiety. Once, she left the window by the stove open after she hung out some laundry (NY apartment living). The curtain blew into the flame and caught fire. The flame blew across the window shade and it dropped. I called her, in a monotone, “Mo-om, the curtains are on fire.”  I was maybe 10 years old.

I visited her grave yesterday. Afterward, I went to my sister’s. We went out to lunch and then spent time together at her apartment. I got to see my niece too. It was a lovely visit. We are really just getting to know each other. Enjoy each other. 

We agreed that, growing up, we were just a bunch of people living in the same house. Mom was a switchboard operator when I was young, later a receptionist. She operated that way in life as well. She talked about each of us, her four kids, to each of us. In a way, it kept us separate. I remember, having started communicating directly with my sister. Mom told me something about her; and, when I said I already knew, she was surprised…like how dare I already know that. So…looking back, I think it was intentional. Sad to say.

I always knew anxiety was an issue for her. She started taking Valium, Mother’s Little Helper, in the “60s and continued through old age. Later she had Xanax. She didn’t drink a lot, but she’d hobble to the liquor store down the block from her Senior apartment. She spent some time in 12 Step meetings, Al-Anon Adult Children, and talked about getting the best therapy for $1 (donation).

Everybody loved her. Well, there were a few that told my poor sister she was a saint for dealing with her. She had the major care-taking duties. 

On the anniversary, my daughter, granddaughter and I went out to an Irish pub for dinner. Mom loved all things Irish. We would sometimes take her out to an Irish pub, where she would order a quesadilla. I’m not kidding. 

Now she’s with my son. I hope they’re enjoying each other’s company. 

SEVEN YEARS AGO

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Seven years ago today I buried my youngest child. He was 22 and would never live to see 23. At the cemetery, I stood at the foot of his casket while Deacon Steve performed the burial rite. I held the rose I would place on top of the casket when I said my final goodbye to his body. I think it unnerved the deacon, my standing there, not taking a seat under the tent meant for mourners. I don’t know that to be true. All I knew was that I had to stand with him, until the end.

It’s unnatural, burying one’s child. He’s frozen in time, forever 22. This year he would turn 30. What would he be doing now? Would he still be in his room, upstairs, creating computer programs/games? Apps? Beats? Those delightful cartoons? Would he be on his own? Perhaps with a family? Might I have more grandchildren to cherish? Would his jet-black hair be tinged with grey? Would he be clean-shaven or have a mustache and/or beard?

I sit in his room now, most nights, to watch TV. Last night, after watching a film on Netflix, I turned on my back and put my legs up the wall. I don’t remember now what triggered it, but I bawled my eyes out. It hits me like that now and again. Seven years ago yesterday, we held his wake. People poured through and I embraced each and cried in their arms, except for one. I still can’t believe she had the nerve to show up, but that’s a story for another time. It has nothing to do with Joseph. Maybe there were others I didn’t fall into, but she’s the one I remember most clearly. Anger replaced grief, momentarily. Even my therapist showed up and one of the members of my psychodrama group. Honestly, I have no idea who all came, or who didn’t. I have a copy of the sign-in book somewhere…but some of the pages are missing.

To all who showed, to all who sent flowers or food or cards, or thought of us at that time, great love and gratitude. If I didn’t send you a thank you, please forgive me. I tried, but I couldn’t get through them all.

Eulogy for My Son

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I awoke from a nap one day when I was pregnant with my fourth child, and said to his father, “How about ‘Joseph Francis’?” True story. That’s how he got his name. Joseph for the dreamer of the Old Testament and, of course, the foster father of Jesus, and Francis for the Knight of Assisi. He was baptized at Mass – on the very altar from which his Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated – on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, as a demonstration for his brother Eric’s 4th grade religious education class.

I used to say that Joseph wore his nerves on the outside of his body. As a young child, his feelings were often apparent and intense…when he was joyful, he would flap his arms and jump up and down. When he was upset, he fell to
pieces.

Even from a young age, logical explanations were comforting to him. In elementary school he was concerned that he might be kidnapped. While other children may have needed only to hear that it wouldn’t happen, Joseph needed a reason why. I told him the family wasn’t rich enough for anyone to bother. Oddly enough, this alleviated his fears.

Joseph was brilliant. When he was about 2 years old, maybe 3, he went for a walk with his Grandma Martha – my paternal grandmother – and, after a brief period, said to her, “Perhaps we should go home now.”

One day when I picked Joseph up from a summer computer camp, the instructor told me that he’d been teaching the kids how to program a musical scale when he heard “Ode to Joy” coming from one of the computers – guess whose.

Joseph was a thinker, an over-thinker, and a “make-you-think”-er. He had a way of asking questions that not only would make you curious as well, but would make you wonder why you never wondered why before. His sister, Jessica, said that while Joseph was living with her, she couldn’t help but turn to Google every five minutes to research things that came up in conversation.

He loved to draw. As a child, Joseph was inspired by the “Captain Underpants” illustrated series and began drawing his own comics. As he got older, his artwork gained influence from video games, graphic novels, and anime. The comics he
drew featured original – and usually fantastically absurd – characters and plot lines.

Family and friends could always count on him for silly, sweet, unique gifts for birthdays and holidays…and sometimes for no reason at all. Joseph was caring, sensitive, and kind. The time and thought he put into preparing those gifts were characteristic of Joseph’s love for his family and friends. He enjoyed creating presents, but not as much as he enjoyed seeing how happy they made everyone.

Joseph loved to experiment. Once he and his sister Christine stole Comet from above the kitchen sink and bleached the grass in the front yard. I was furious, but they thought it was hilarious. Suffice it to say that I found a safer hiding spot for the Comet after that.

He once kept a caterpillar in a bug box hoping to see it turn into a butterfly. It had made a cocoon, but the box was invaded by ants. They chewed a hole in the cocoon and ate the caterpillar. When Joseph went outside to find that his beloved test subject was gone, he swore vendetta against ants. He took his revenge by holding a magnifying glass over them in the sun with one fist raised high in the air.

Joseph believed that his father was the most successful person he knew. It amazed Joseph how much knowledge Frank has, particularly because Frank is self-taught. Joseph was impressed by his father’s business knowledge and admired Frank’s building and gardening skills. He respected his dad’s dedication to supporting his blended family of eight children and grew to love his second mother, Karen, who treated him as her own son.

George Carlin once said, “Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: ‘We are the proud parents of a child who has resisted his teachers’ attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters.’” Joseph’s free spirit and strong will contributed to difficulties getting through school, but his parents – and even the teachers he frustrated – loved Joseph for his creativity and passion.

Anyone who ever met Joseph loved him from the get go. His gentle, loving spirit will live on in the hearts and minds of all who knew him.

Memory and Human Rights

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The photo above is of the plaque outside the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, in Santiago, Chile.  It is the only photograph I took, but what I saw and felt that day will remain forever vivid in my memory.

The museum chronicles the holocaust of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1973 to 1990.  Our guide spoke only Spanish; our professor would translate as needed.  Since most of our group understood Spanish, there was little translation done.  My Spanish is not so good; and, in a situation that evokes strong emotion, I hear very little, even in my native tongue.  As we entered the Museum, I already had an overpowering feeling of dread about what we were about to witness.  The Pinochet era was filled with human rights abuses and many were tortured, killed and/or disappeared during his reign.

I tried to pay attention as we moved through the building, but one of the first exhibits we saw was a metal-framed bed with a large battery and electrical cables attached that was used as an implement of torture.  I heard very little after that.  We moved from exhibit to exhibit, from floor to floor.  My breathing became more and more labored until, finally, I was close to hyperventilating and tears poured from my eyes.  I dropped out of the tour and found a glassed-in area in which to sit with my feelings.  As I gazed through the glass, on the wall across the way I saw an array of photographs, hundreds of people who had been disappeared never to be heard from again.  And that was only a small percentage of them.

The awareness of unmitigated evil was all around me.  I breathed in the bad and breathed out the good – a yogic exercise I had heard of before but never understood until that moment.  Evil exists in this world.  The German Holocaust was not an isolated blip in the history of the world.  It continues.  We must keep our hearts and minds open to seeing it where it is and confronting it.

In the United States it is more clandestine and insidious.  It exists when corporations are considered people, children are allowed to go hungry and without healthcare, and millions populate prisons having passed through the cradle to prison pipeline.  I will keep my eyes open and speak the truth.

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