AdventureWorld

Valediction

I gave the final farewell at my mother's graveside. I was so afraid that I wouldn't be able to get through it without crying. I knew that if I shed one tear there would be one thousand.
I really wanted to honor her in my own way and I felt some kinda odd responsibility to offer any small comfort I could to those who were struggling to find some. Even if it helped only one person that would be worth it.

Here it is:

My mother and I did not share all the same beliefs but we both shared an important faith that the end of our life on Earth is not the end of our existence.
I am comforted so much by knowing how strongly she believed when she left this world she was headed to a very good place. One of the last things she said to me was “I’ll be so happy then.. when this is all over, I’ll be happy again”
She was not afraid. She was ready.
Since my mother was all about loving and comforting others I thought there would be no better way to honor her than to offer all of you gathered here today words from a poem we liked that I hope will give you comfort.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there
I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight
I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there
I did not die

~Adapted from original poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye~

Ascension

At 4;30 AM she broke free of earthly bounds. There is peace at last for her sweet, sweet spirit.

If It's Thursday, This Must Be Purgatory

Goose continues to defy all laws of science and lingers on. Her doctor can offer no explanation how it is even possible that her body continues to function. She is as bewildered as the rest of us--and almost as heartbroken.
The doc wants to help ease Goose through to the other side but, of course, she cannot do more than just make sure Goose is not suffering.  Or as far as we can tell she’s not suffering physically but it’s the two weeks of lingering between the Here and the Hereafter that makes me worry about the possible psychological suffering.
A few nights ago when I stayed with her she started getting extremely agitated whenever the nurses would try to do anything, even just taking her blood pressure. And when they would turn her (every two hours to prevent bedsores) she would completely freak out.
They are gentle and quick and keep the jostling around to a minimal but it seems like it’s a rollercoaster ride to Goose. She would hold onto me with this horrified look on her face. By the time I’d get her calmed down from one roller coaster ride, it was time to go again. It was the worst all-nighter I’ve had with her.
I'm spending most of my time at the hospice with her, with absolutely zero contact with the outside world. I can't even get a cell phone signal out here in the boonies. This town makes Bumfuck look like Silicon fucking Valley, which pretty much says it all.
Sometimes, like right now, a mystery wireless connection appears outta nowhere (there is not any wireless at the hospital or anywhere nearby according to the staff). Then I can do something diversionary while sitting endlessly by her side. Things ike blogging ..and feeling tremendously guilty because I sound like I’m whining about my mother taking too long to die which is not what I'm saying at all, of course, but I still feel guilty. Of course.
Add a round of self-flagellation to my Perdition: To Do List.
It's snowing like crazy here, it makes for treacherous driving but the drive over here through the woods is beautiful.
The family joke is that it's snowing because hell froze over when FabaBoy made his bed (for the first time in forever). More likely it was when I started reading Bible passages to Goose but that's our little secret.
Yes, it has come to that.

Angels Lurk

I stayed at the hospice with Goose all night and she (and we) had a very hard and very crazy night. I got no sleep at all, she was very agitated and the Ativan seemed to just make it worse. At one point she told me she was in pain now so I had the nurse give her some morphine, but she continued to moan. I found the only thing that would ease her at all was if I continuously patted her on the back of her shoulder the way you do with babies.
Speaking of babies, one conversation we had was about “the babies”. She said the babies were “tired, tired, tired”. I asked her if the babies needed to rest and she said “yes, the babies need to rest ..we were out in the country ..far, far out in the country” I don’t know if she was talking about her baby brother and sister who died when they were little. Or maybe she was talking about her babies—me and my brothers—maybe she knows her babies are so tired, tired, tired.
She talked and talked—we had weird conversations about whatever was firing through her damaged brain. Sometimes I think she knew it was me, sometimes I think she just knew there was a presence in the room with her. The end is definitely near. Signs of cyanosis are spreading—her fingers are completely purple and now the rest of her hands are turning blue, too. They are so cold.
Her moments of awareness are few and far between. But sometimes she tells me things so very clearly. Once she said so earnestly and imploringly "Can you hear my father talking?" I hope our Papa John was calling to her, telling her he was there waiting for her. I hope he’s there to bring his baby home.

All This and So Much More

Goose comes in and out of awareness. Most of the time it seems like she can’t see but then for just a moment she seems to be able to—like one day she reached out directly to my face and put her hand on my cheek.
She’s spoken to me a few times, just a few words like yes or no, but she knows it's me. And she’s been able to answer me when I asked her if she was ready to go and see Grandma.
It has always been her belief that Gram would be there to meet her and take her over to the other side. It is oddly comforting; it helps me believe she is not afraid. She does not seem afraid at all, actually she often seems kinda pissed off at The Universe for making her go through such a rough ending.
I’m kinda pissed off at The Universe right now, too. The “why” of this escapes me, what possible purpose does this miserable end serve?
Every moment of the past week of my living has been focused on helping her die. I can’t even sleep, all I can see is that pitiful expression on her face, her tiny little body for some reason reminds me of a baby bird fallen from the nest. I'm like a zombie now--just dead on my feet, wrung out to emptiness inside.
We're moving her out of the hospital into in-patient hospice care today. To honor her end-of-life wishes we have refused any more treatment. Now we will have to make more hard decisions like going ahead with removing the feeding tube.
We don’t exactly know how all this will work. We only know none of it is easy.
Today she sounds like she's literally drowning in congestion. I think that I will never be able to forget the sound of her labored breathing.
Two of my brothers and I have been waiting all day for the ambulance to transport her to a hospice 50 miles away. I hope to be able to ride with her but I know they’re not going to let me. I hope she won’t get scared.

Vigil

The last few days have been crazy and just got even crazier today.
On Monday, The Goose (my mom) was hospitalized but I had all kinda confusing and sometimes conflicting information about what was going on. I’m in CA and the parents are in Bumfuck, Texas so it was very hard to know WTF to do in the absence of solid info.
Initially, the news was she might even be dying; she was in very bad shape when the home health care nurse visited her. She’s the one that said to get Goose pronto to the emergency room of the regional hospital, which is 40 miles away. 
So, the home care nurse was trying to keep us updated by talking to SiL, who’s a nurse, and then OldestBrother passed on info to me in bits and spurts as it came in. And SiL were texting back and forth some, too.
I didn’t know whether to jump on a plane or wait, because if she’s not dying I will need to go when she gets out of the hospital to help out.
She was finally diagnosed with pneumonia and started stabilizing after she got some drugs in her system and was moved out of ICU last night. ..I think.
So, OB and I decided he’ll go now and then I’ll fly in and take over so he can go home.
We don’t even know if she’ll be going home or for ongoing care. We don’t know anything but we talked about how our parents are very old and this might be the beginning of the end. I’m the last child of our brood so my parents are older than all of my friends’ parents. People are quite shocked to find out my dad is in his 90s. Well, except for the ones that know about the dive off the roof he took a couple of years ago.
Today OB called me from the road as he was on the long-ass drive across Texas from his house down south to Bumfuck in the far Northeast. I expected the call to be an update on the Goose but instead he was calling me to tell me my dad is in now in the hospital, too—a different hospital ..in the opposite direction of the hospital Goose is in. He fell and broke some ribs.
It was so very absurd that OB and I started laughing in that punch drunk way of the dazed, befuddled, and/or concussed.
I have that riding shotgun down an avalanche kinda feeling.
Oy fucking vey.

Damage

OldestBrother called me last night about the latest problem with the parental units and then he and I wound up talking about our unfortunate childhoods. I say “childhoods” because he's 14 yrs older than me so we didn’t really have many years of shared childhood. I was still a wee sprog when he left home, under circumstances I didn’t even know about until a few years ago.
Last night I told him things about my childhood, things that happened after he was gone. My not telling him until now was never about keeping secrets --it was my way of protecting him from having to hear it, it’s heartbreaking stuff. I’ve always figured it does me no good to say it and it sure as shit wouldn’t do him any good to hear it.
I don’t really know why it came out last night, but it finally felt like it was time to say it. And he told me about his stuff, too. And we talked about ways we’d been effected ..and we even laughed some, believe it or not.
As I explained to him, TheGreatSantini² was the same father to both of us but our mother was different by the time I came along.  He was the first child, born of a very young mother; I was the last child, born to a mother who'd been ground down by the strain of all those years between us.
There were times when she was in such a depressed state that she was figuratively absent. She was only like that sometimes, but as a child I didn’t understand it. All I understood was that she, that mom, was not my normal, loving mom.
In fact, that mom didn’t seem much interested in me at all.  She never stopped taking good care of me physically, though.—good food, clean clothes, taking care of me when I was sick, I had that.  But, at those times it was just fucked up on top of fucked up for MiniMe--a father with nothing to give but damage and a mother emotionally AWOL. That’s scary biscuits when you’re a kiddo. Trust me on this.
To survive a situation like that you will certainly become one self-sufficient little motherfucker. Color me Exhibit A.
I've developed a certain detachment from the trauma-drama of all of it so it's not really emotionally charged in the way most would think. It seems impossible to explain. I’ll try.
Today, I felt this incredible sadness but it's for HER, that little girl lost long ago, not for ME. I'm OK—well, actually better than OK I think, when I see how fucked up so many other people are. But she just breaks my heart right in two. I just want to tell her everything will be OK, I promise.

Dualing Daddies

I never talk about the particulars of my “difficult childhood”—the difficult being doled out by my father. I never felt compelled to tell The World all the gory details of such personal experiences but suffice it to say that back in the day my father made the Great Santini look like a Girl Scout.
When I was little I thought he was Evil but now I think he was just crazy because he hasn’t been even a little bit evil in a long time and I don’t think evilness ever wears off but sometimes crazy does.
I forgave him a long time ago but there’s been feelings I had about that forgiveness that I’ve never quite been able to put to rest. These things are very hard to explain but FuckabunchaAdventureBoy totally got it when I said it to him—I didn’t even have to do much explaining.
One of the things is that forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting and this causes me to have to deal with the duality of having a father who’s been two entirely different fathers to me—one that was a Horror Show, who showed me nothing even vaguely resembling love; and the other a loving father who thinks I hung the moon AND the stars. Duality indeedy.
Sometimes it would do my head in, like it always made Father’s Day a real challenge—not because it brought up bad or sad emotions but because WTF do you do with that duality on the day designated specifically for sugar coated sentiment about dear old dad.
It’s not like Hallmark makes a card that says You used to be an evil bastard but now you’re pretty nice and besides you’re full of remorse and staring down the barrel of your own mortality which makes me feel really sad for you and then it makes me wonder how I can feel so sad for someone who was so mean to me but lucky for you I do or you wouldn’t be getting this lovely card. ♥  
Oddly enough they have nothing like that so I always have to wing it. I just call instead and say something relatively obscure.
Jcube had a great idea one time--he said call on Saturday instead of Sunday and that will take some of the oomph out of the pomp and circumstance. He always knew the exactly right thing to say to me, better than anyone I’ve ever known.
But meanwhile, back at the hacienda, the thing was that this time when I was in Texas the duality was somehow reconciled—no more dueling duality. He was just my father, an old man I love, who was in a lot of pain; a once amazingly-agile-for-an-old-guy who knew that he had really screwed the pooch when he climbed up on that roof. He knows he'll never be that able-bodied ever again. It's a sad truth.
All I thought about was helping him through all of this.
Suddenly it was that simple. Simple is good; simple is a happy thing.

4j3x2

yesterday

a long laundromat hour, an old fade,
a familiar slide of time;
soap in boxes, machines of it;
a sign begs, "keep this place clean."
outside, the bars are so wetly lit
in their silent huddled storefronts;
electric buses pass by in the rain
with their peculiar leviathan sound
noising the night.
electricity hums along wires
strung above the street,
fine web of wire.
i wait to be inhabited. smoothing laundry,
feeding the tumbling with coins, buses swim
along the street, sighing those metal sighs
there isn't a thing i do today
that does not have your name written, sounded into it;
sounds like something maybe looking for air,
breaching above the wetness,
maybe calling a name
out into that drak, folding sky.

~jesse b. castaldi~

Artifacts

Today I was going through my clothes, sorting out what stays and what goes. I’ve been in a big organizing mode, pulling everything out of closets and drawers and sorting through them.
Finally, all that was left was one small drawer in my bedroom closet. But every time I started to open that last drawer my stomach rolled over, like when you drop too quickly from a height and your stomach can’t seem to keep up with the rest of your body.
In fact, it was exactly like that.
I don’t put anything in those drawers except for travel stuff—toiletry cases, electric current converters, my airplane pillow. When I opened the drawer at first I didn’t even know what I was looking at—I didn’t recognize these things. And they weren’t the kind of things I wear.
I pulled out a beautiful lacy ultra-fem camisole and thought WTF??.. and then I remembered. These were the things I bought especially for that trip to Utah.I thought it would be a really nice surprise to find girly-girl lacey goodness under rugged hiking clothes. I liked the juxtaposition and we liked that word.
There were several things, some of which I don’t even remember buying. I bought them little by little, over several months. Anticipation is one of my favorite things.I put those things there, all together, so I wouldn’t forget any of them. I never took them out until today.
Artifacts of an unfinished life.
I don’t know what to do with them.
I put that camisole on and it looked good, really good, but I don’t think I can ever wear it .. or any of those things. Not even if I had a reason, not even if I decided to go on that road trip with El Papel. Because they’re not his, they belong to somebody else.
I don’t even remember walking out of the bedroom but somehow there I was just standing in the kitchen at the open window. I don’t know for how long.
I wasn’t thinking of anything or looking at anything; I was just standing there. Eventually I became aware of a bird singing, then the sound of distant traffic. I just stood there listening, listening to all the sounds coming in through my window. The sound of time moving on while I remained stuck in that moment.
And when I finally did start thinking my first thought was this is just like something else, something really familiar ..and then in my head I saw Buffy standing at the kitchen door in The Body. The scene where she just stands there staring out the door, staring but not looking. Not seeing.
And we hear the ordinary sounds of  life all around her. But in that moment time stands still for her while life just keeps moving on without her.
I always thought that scene captured grief perfectly. I was right.