Goodbye To All That

I have taken a leave of absence from this blog for quite some time. I simply didn't have the time, the inclination, or the wherewithal to put words onto the screen so no one could read them. Most of my writing and communication has happened on the social-media mecca that is Facebook.

But Facebook is not conducive for everything. I am put on my guard there against over-sharing or writing too much for that limited-space platform. I think the time has come where I need to start writing again and get back in that habit. There are things that ought to be put on paper. If nothing else, writing is a way that I can process things that happen and start to make some kind of sense.

It has been almost four months since my mother passed away from metastatic cancer that started two years before at the ampullary node which is like a junction of the liver, pancreas and duodenum. Those two years were a difficult time of surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation treatments, sickness and tiredness and loss of weight and strength, medications that helped or did nothing, stubborn drive and fight that is the height of human bravery, an uncommon grace, and a perhaps mercifully short "active dying" phase (as the hospice program terms it).

At the funeral, my brothers and I all spoke. Our words were uncoordinated --- we didn't really have time to read what the others had written --- but meshed well by joining the differing aspects of my mother's life. I wrote with the song "Change of Time" in my mind, and I had an acoustic version of that song played as I finished speaking.

There are so many memories. There have been so many tears. There are fleeting dreams. There are the indications of Signs... little moments of occurrences and flashes where you can feel something is at work just beneath the surface... which may or may not be mere coincidence but provides some small comfort at the possibility.

I'm not sure how the family is dealing with this. My niece M. seems to be handling it in stride. She cried when she was told that her Nana had died and was upset that she wasn't there on that Monday afternoon. I suppose it's easier for children to move forward and block out some memories, and although she had some questions about what happened and will no doubt have more (which I have assured her that I will always answer if and when she walks to talk), I think she can intuit a lot of things and deal with them logically. We have spent a good amount of time together when she's at home, playing, watching television, walking Ruff to the corner store for ice cream, when I'm making a dinner, quizzing her in advance of her Friday spelling tests.... Like my other niece and nephew, she has taught me a new depth of the importance of family and the next generation. The time that I have to spend with them and other other family has been the most joyful moments of a difficult, cold, long and dark winter in New England. I have to admit that my 'biological clock' has ticked with a tinge of regret that I've waited this long to even start thinking about relationships and hoping that it's not too late. Once upon a time, I had visions of living out a Spartan life, and yet I now think I would go batty if I were alone for any length of time. A cousin said to me in the days before and after the funeral that when her grandmother, who she was very close to, died rather suddenly a few years ago that she "turned from someone known as the Ice Princess into the bubbly and chatty person here with you today." When we experience a deep loss, our personalities and our priorities can shift fundamentally. 

I am currently writing from North Carolina while visiting and helping a friend. The weather is warmer than the Quiet Corner is experiencing --- including an 84-degree forecast for Friday(!!!) --- and the break from the scenery at home has helped a bit. It was nice to be able to drive and think (or not think, at times) and put some distance to it all. Loss is not something you can outrun, though.

I've had so many things I've wanted to share, lay down and unburden myself of, and perhaps be able to transition from grieving and start healing. That has not happened yet. I don't know when it will. There is someone down here who went through a similar loss and I hope to visit and talk with her and maybe by helping I can be helped.

This is also a bit of an exploration for me, checking out the South and seeing what's what. Northeast Connecticut has been my home for all of my 34 years, but it may be time to move on. The state is becoming more and more unlivable with huge property tax increases, one-party rule, and the state government spending up to the hilt and far beyond which will mean more tax increases. It's a fairly nice place to live if you can afford it. My mum would always be browsing real estate listings in Maine or New Hampshire or North Carolina with an eye toward where she and my dad would spend their retirement. Connecticut was way too expensive, she'd say. She didn't get to retire; she worked at UConn up until three months before she passed (and I must mention here how great her co-workers and bosses were through all this time and how much the "work family" meant to her).

I don't know how long of a timetable this will be. The idea of picking up and moving away from the place I've lived all my life isn't easy. But neither is the prospect of remaining.

“Technology has altered our flow of time.... So many of us have the sensation that time’s arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once." --- Abha Dawesar

"Curiosity is the spark behind the spark of every great idea. The future belongs to the curious." --- Author Unknown

"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds." --- Georges Lemaitre

Kris Delmhorst - "Hummingbird"

A tune I find myself repeating and repeating and repeating this summer is Kris Delmhorst's "Hummingbird" from her album "Songs for a Hurricane."

Besides the soothing vocals, it's the universality of an unrequited love / crush that every human being has had at some point and the simple lyrics that make this song so great.

Blood from a Stone

By James Dufresne

All forms of the expression I have read
make mention of not getting life from something dead,

Not being able to tax or borrow from emptied accounts,
or are flowery words from a heart that's been pained.

But to have the thing happen as forces of gravity and physics collide
and a stone 'neath the stone picked up, with fingers twixt the divide

Provides a moment of expletives, rue, and hurt in goodly amounts
as upon the wanted boulder, the sanguine fluid drained.

You can get blood from a stone.

Have you ever had a moment where you thought you were about to die?

I've had four.

Two involved driving in snow. In one, my car skidded toward the side of a steep hill on a busy road on my way home from classes at UConn and stuck in a drift of snow just a couple of feet off the pavement. Oncoming traffic was such that anyone behind me couldn't avoid either hitting me or crashing head-to-head into them. My car was a 1988 Ford Taurus with All-Wheel-Drive that I'd bought from a man who lived across the lake and was an elder in the church I went to through my childhood. He would sometimes give me and my brothers rides home in the car, one memorable one being when I had an orthodontist appointment after school. He was an emeritus professor in brain research, the hippocampus to be exact, and when he asked if I intended to play football on the high school team and I replied no, he let out a quick, "Good!" well before concussions and traumatic brain injuries were a topic of discussion anywhere. But here I sat in the self-same car with an 18-wheeler barreling downhill in the rearview mirror, promising to deliver a harder tackle than any defenseman could dish out. I truthfully don't remember how the car got unstuck --- whether I backed it out quickly, punched on the gas, or if divine Providence stepped in. It truly was a blur. In the other accident, I was a young driver in a cream-colored Ford Escort station wagon, stupidly trying to return some library books in the middle of a 3" storm, hit a patch of ice at the start of a downhill where wind-squalls had covered the road over, started skidding, *very* nearly smacked side-to-side with a red sedan climbing uphill, and ended up kissing the guardrail at the bottom of the V-dip in the road before coming to a stop, surveying the damage to the fender and sheepishly driving home.

Another involved a minor medical issue that suddenly became a pretty big problem. I've gotten spring allergies pretty bad starting in 2005. Never had them prior to that. I have my own botanical theories about it, but this is neither the time nor the place.... I had fallen asleep in our rocking chair and woke up suddenly, out of breath and unable to move. My thinking mind's toggle switch had flipped but the corporeal one was still being paralyzed by the pons of sleep, and my nasal passages felt swollen. I was aware that I hadn't breathed and was running out of air and could pass out or simply suffocate if my body didn't wake up. And then maybe 10 seconds later, it did, I breathed slowly and purposely through my nose, and the my mouth came on line and joined in the nitrogen/oxygen/etc. feast and I really felt glad to be alive at that moment. It's a feeling I've tried to hold on to during tough times.  I have no hesitation in taking an OTC anti-allergy medication ever since, when needed and when pollen counts are elevated because of all the tree sex.

Lastly, there were a few minutes on 10 May 2011 when I thought there was a good chance I was going to either get seriously maimed or killed in a dog attack involving what I've come to understand was a Cane Corso and a boxer. I haven't written about this before because I reached a settlement just last May (nothing earth-shattering). I was walking my dog, Ruff, on a dirt/gravel back road when the two aforementioned dogs ran across the road and started in on us, pinning us down against an embankment and going for Ruff's throat and chest as I tried to alternately push them off of us. This strategy wasn't working very well, against the main instigator who was easily 100 pounds and tenacious (in the bite report, it was listed as a "Rome X" = Cane Corso = dogs that were used in the ancient Colosseum against the gladiators. I had never planned or prepared to be a gladiator. Who knew?!!?). I yelled out for help. I had my hands up, trying to keep this dog, especially, from imminently crushing my dog's throat. I felt the bite into my finger. It felt like it went on for 10 minutes, but it was probably closer to five. The homeowner came out and had to lay on the Cane Corso as Ruff and I limped away and I started assessing the damage. A 3-inch flap of Ruff's chest was hanging down and this upset me even more than my own injury. We called the local animal control officer, hopped in the car, and drove to the vet, where Dr. Gardner took in the situation and exclaimed that it really said something to her that here I was holding a bloody gauze to my elevated left hand, but the vet was our first stop. Damn straight! Ruff got five stitches, I actually got none despite the depth because, as the ER doctor said, stitches trap in bacteria in dog bites. Followed up a few times with a specialist to make sure there was no more severe damage. I later learned that our brush with the business end of this dog was the fourth --- and most severe --- incident of aggression and that as I had urged in my statement to the ACO, the homeowner had it put down. I can't say that I'm happy about that because I know what it is to lose a dog you're attached to. But it's a relief that no one else in the neighborhood, most not my little niece, will ever be at risk from it. Once a dog bites, it gets easier for them to bite again and this was a breed that epitomizes the latter part of the phrase, "All dogs can bite. Some dogs don't let go." What truly saddens me is that incidents like this are almost totally avoidable, and with this dog's pattern of incidents it was entirely predictable for some poor schmoe who was walking down that road at wrong moment.

And so, there they are. The four times I thought there was a good chance I was going to die. Perhaps this chance in each case was overblown in my mind. Perhaps not. The fear was real. Each event, however, gave me a little taste of mortality, left me grateful for a new day, and imbued a touch of rare grace. I'm not sure how long this kind of afterglow lasts and I surely do not desire refreshers, but all most of the aphorisms about escaping from the reaping scythe and finding renewal on the other side, even if only briefly, are true.