I am sure my mom has a living will. But now I need to have that conversation with her. I need to have it now, while it's easy. While we can laugh about it.
Thank you for sharing, sweetie. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I can only hope to be half as strong as you if I ever have to be in such a position. I admire you so much.
Posts: 9538 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I can only imagine the difficulty of speaking for my mother when the only choices are heartrending ones.
Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Thank you guys. I appreciate your kindness.
I'm a little afraid I may lose you here. This is kind of a long post, so I have broken it up a bit. I will probably post the rest later tonight. This is where it gets tricky. I still question whether I did the right thing, sometimes. I know what she would have said about it, no question, but I still wonder.
We went back to the ICU. They let us all in, instead of limiting her to two family members. We had to wait in the hall a bit while they took out the respirator, then they let us back into the room. I was puzzled, and a little amused, despite feeling so raw. We were all wrung out, I think. I know I felt kind of bruised and empty, like an old tube of toothpaste. We all piled in around her bed, most of us touching her. I stood at the foot of her bed and laid a hand on the blanket over her foot. Everyone was standing there expecting her to die, like, right then.
The same way I knew what I would have to say in the meeting, I knew that my mother was not going to die that day. I just knew it. *shrug* I looked around at my family, and some part of me wondered who would have to leave first, or sit down or go to the bathroom or have lunch. There was a duplicity to it. She was going to die, and we would have to go on living. The pain was there, low and immense, but part of my brain hovered over it, detached. This separation of feeling and thought was not new to me; once upon a time I had rather excelled at it. At one time I had made a choice to let myself feel things; at another, I had used Zoloft to dull my lows and bring joy back into my reach.
Now, the Zoloft was gone – I had been there at my mother’s bedside for almost three weeks and off the pills for a week before that, at least. The bubble wrap was gone, and I was this naked pink thing shivering in the wind. That wasn’t all of it, though. The part of me that had always been there, the strength I’d forgotten I had, was there, too. It was right for me to feel this; it was right for me to bear witness to my mother’s last days, feel the pain of my guilt and my loss and honor her.
We were all crying – I was crying, too. I was crying more with guilt than grief. I knew in my heart she was not going to die in anything like the time anyone expected. So, I began to wonder. I knew she wasn’t as weak as they thought, if they expected her to just die like that after having a respirator that she wasn’t even dependant on removed. So, what if I was wrong? What if we should have fought harder for her? I knew that wouldn’t be what she wanted, but I wondered if she might be wrong.
Did I really want her alive so badly that I would go to any length just have her back at home in that cursed recliner… if that outcome was even possible. I had been told by people with degrees that it wasn’t possible, yet those same people seemed to think she’d just stop when they took out that tube, and I knew they were wrong about that. It would be a while before I would abandon these questions. (Two years and counting…) I’ll let you know when I stop second-guessing everything about those days.
I saw my sister shift her weight, her hand high on mom’s left arm. We talked to her and told stories about her. She didn’t stir. We later found out that they had kept her sedated until long after there was any hope of her waking up to speak to us. I knew they kept her on fluids, but I didn’t know what the other bottle was. She could have morphine any time she seemed to be in pain. She never woke up, not really.
Eventually people had to go to lunch, or work, or the bathroom. They let us come and go as we pleased and were very respectful. When it got dark outside, we negotiated who would stay the night with her. Joy wanted to, I think to keep Papa from wearing himself out. I stayed with her until 10pm or so. Her brother Chris and his wife Emily came by that night, and so did Tony, my other stepbrother, who hadn’t seen mom or papa in years.
He had been living at home, partly, when mom and papa married, but only for a few months. He was super nice to me, and always called me “sis”, even from the very beginning. I think he dug the idea of having a kid sister to look out for, having always been the youngest himself. He was a bit of wild one. When someone broke into our house and took a few things, he was the one that papa suspected. *shrug* He was never anything but wonderful to me. He was close with mom and papa for quite some time, until he divorced and re-married. I don’t know if he was ashamed (we had all really liked his first wife) or if his second wife didn’t like us much, but we didn’t see him a lot after that.
There wasn’t much room in there to sit (one chair, a metal trash can with a solid lid and the window sill) and I left a little after Tony did. I missed seeing Emily faint, when she saw mom’s catheter bag was full of blood. Joy and I had gotten used to the sight, I guess. Poor Emily — she’s such a sweet girl. Mom always liked her.
Papa stayed the second night. The next morning, they told us they were going to move her to another hall. ICU is prime real estate for people who have hope of living, I guess. I think they were hoping she’d cooperate and die before it became an issue, but she hadn’t.
We laughed about that, because it was just like mom, to do the unexpected. Even when unconscious, evidently. I don’t mean we were having a party, exactly, but sometimes you either laugh or you cry. Sometimes you do both. The doubts nagged at me; she was still so strong, why hadn’t I fought harder? Because I knew she didn’t want me to. I knew that was the truth, maybe the only truth that mattered.
I wanted my mama back, but she wanted to go. I cannot tell you how many times I nearly broke, nearly went screaming to the doctors that it was a mistake, that we wanted to fight for her. I wanted to tell them they were wrong, that she wasn’t giving up, that she could beat those microbes feasting on her blood, if we just helped her a little. Sometimes I shook with the need to scream.
So, they moved her to a different floor, where the nurses were all new to us, and didn’t read that she had a latex allergy. It felt so incredibly stupid to tell nurses not use latex. Don’t want the dying woman to get a rash. Joy and Starr and I washed her and rolled her frequently. She had bed sores, and now that they had taken her out of the bed with the air bladders that rotated her to prevent pressure points, we had to do it. If she moaned, we called for morphine. Mostly she didn’t seem to be in pain.
I have to say that it did me good to do those things for her. Dip a sponge on a stick in mouthwash and wipe out her mouth, wash her hair and her body, put powder on her in places that might get sweaty. She never would have let me serve her like that, even though she’d have done it for me in a heartbeat.
Sometimes I’d go with Starr and Joy when they had a smoke break. We had to go all the way on the other side of the parking lot, because the law had changed and you couldn’t smoke on hospital property, even in the parking lot. Also, it was the only place our cell phones could be turned on/get signal.
As she was leaving one day, Starr kissed Joy, her daughter. Joy flinched and wiped her face. “Ew, that was a wet one!”
“Was not.” They joked and giggled and teased each other, the way moms and daughters do.
When she started to hug me, I made a big show of licking my lips and puckering, to make them laugh. Mouth-smack-y noises and everything. It became a running joke among us – we still do it at family gatherings. Make the lip-smacky noises, that is, not plant wet kisses on each other’s faces.
I want to take a minute to tell you that my steps (sister, brothers, father, niece) each and every one of them, took me aside (individually) during those weeks and told me that they wanted me to know that I was part of their family, even when mama was gone. They wanted me to know that I would always be welcome, no matter what. Now, in some situations one might be tempted to take that to mean the opposite - that they were just being polite and saying so was actually a way of illustrating what separated us.
But my steps are not the type who would do that. They say stuff because they mean it, good, bad or indifferent. Being around them is like drinking cool water on a hot day. They don’t play those games.
I was with mom all day every day, and even stayed late into the night with my brother or papa, but they kept telling me to go home and get some rest. I never managed to stay longer than 11pm, but I always came early, too. I had nothing else to do. The boys were in school. They had come up the weekend before the family meeting, but had to go back. I told Ron I’d call him when she passed, but there was no point in them missing a week of school only to have to miss more for the funeral. It had become clear that she wasn’t going to be lucid again.
Tony’s wife Tammy came around a lot, which bothered me. She hadn’t seen mom in years. Two years running, mom had gotten Christmas gifts for their family, but they never came by to visit, and that had been at least two years earlier (she’d given up on getting them gifts because they didn’t ever visit).
One day were all in the room with mom, Starr and Joy and Tammy and me, when Tammy started in with the sponges and the mouthwash, digging around in my mom’s mouth and kind of humming to herself as she did it. I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but I was not the only one who found it awkward. Joy said something to her, half-jokingly, and we sort of exchanged glances.
I think this knack of laughing about things that really bother you, making a joke of it so seamlessly… I think that may be a cultural thing. A mountain thing. My mother had it down, and it was a comfort to be with Joy and Starr. We all come from the same stock, I suppose, but Joy was like mom in that she could handle those awkward things better than most, and end up relaxing everyone into a giggle. This time, though, it didn’t quite work.
Tammy kept at it. I have no idea what felt so obscene about her cleaning my mother’s mouth like that. I was strung out from not sleeping, on edge. I think some part of me didn’t want her to touch mom because she hadn’t loved her, yet it didn’t bother me like that when the nurses helped us. My saving grace in that situation was that I’m sure no one knew how badly I wanted to punch this woman. I don’t usually come across as the violent type, and Tammy was only trying to help. She didn’t know most of us well enough to chat a lot, and had cared for the elderly before
I excused myself to the room’s little bathroom and turned on the water in the sink. I screamed. It didn’t make a sound, but I screamed until my throat was raw with it, and my face red. My eyes were bloodshot. I washed my face and went back out like nothing happened, but I had managed not to beat the living crap out of my well-meaning step-sister-in-law, so it was all good.
Joy had brought a CD player and we played music for mom. Once when everyone had gone (and Tammy had gone to another room to visit another person she knew in the hospital), I played “Into the West” for her. I cried, and begged her to forgive me. I felt guilty for her death and guilty for not wanting her to die. Still do.
That day she was visited by a few old friends from church, the pastor and his wife Debbie (who had always been a great of mom’s) and one of my old friends from when Ron and I had lived in a neighboring town. I may have told you about Jim and Jenny. Both of Jim’s parents had died before I met him, and Jenny had also lost her mother at a young age. For the first time, I had an idea what that might have been like. She took time off work to see me (It was me she came for, not my mother, though she had liked my mother a lot).
The last time she really opened her eyes and seemed like she really saw anything, it was when Frances (an old friend from church) came by. Her eyes were going yellow in the whites.
They moved us down the hall to the room on the end, because we asked. It was bigger with more places to sit, and mom’s little room was always stuffed with people. Finally, the others let me stay the night. It had been several days by this point, and I think they feared she would die when I was alone with her. I’m not sure why.
I guess maybe it was that I was the youngest, and they all felt the need to shelter me. Inexplicable, isn’t it? I was as strong as any of them, and I thought they knew that. But I was the baby, and coddling me gave them something to do.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:I don’t usually come across as the violent type, and Tammy was only trying to help. She didn’t know most of us well enough to chat a lot, and had cared for the elderly before
I was getting uncomfortable just reading this, up til this point when it sort of clicked. I wonder if Tammy was not also uncomfortable, so she did what made her feel comfortable, unconscious of how it might appear to the rest of you. Whenever I know I have to be with people I don't know very well (or know just well enough to not know what to talk with them about), I often plan something we can do physically with our hands so that any awkwardness of talking (or not talking, as the case often is) can be eaten up by the doing. More often than not, it's a way not to know people. Or rather, for them not to know me. Cover it up with doing so I don't have expose my inadequacy.
Not that that's any excuse or anything, I just have wonder at your restraint, and at your ability to step back now and see, then relate it to those of us who've never had to go through anything like it (yet). And by relate, I mean make it relatable.
Your story has really touched me, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
jeniwren, I'm sure you're right. I've been in that awkward position, too. I just wanted to be honest about what I felt, even the irrational bits.
Here's what I was going to post last night. I'm going to have oral surgery in a little bit, so I may not really feel up to posting more until next week.
#
When my sister heard that I was staying the night, she came over, too. The larger room had a couch that made a bed. One of mom’s doctors came by. The one that had done the emergency colostomy, I think. She had also known my uncle, and we talked a bit. That is when I learned that mom was still on a sedative. The doctor said she would have had her taken off of it, if she had known; maybe mom could have talked to us, then. She was truly sad to see mom dying, and it really touched me. She stopped the sedative, in the hopes that mom might rouse a bit; there was always someone there to ask for morphine for her if she seemed distressed.
Early in the morning her nephrologists came by. He commented that her kidney function was only now beginning to go. We had to suction her more and more frequently, because of the fluid in her lungs.
The next night, my brother stayed with her. He read my novel, what I had of it. When I came in the morning to take him to breakfast, he backed me into a corner in the elevator, rested his forehead on my forehead, looked me in the eyes (it was close enough to do the Cyclops thing) and told me it was really good. He shook my shoulders told me I had to finish it.
My brother has my mom’s flare for the dramatic. Also, her 1mm personal space. Heh. He bought my breakfast and we talked about online forums, religion and other stuff. He had to buy the food, you know, because we had fallen into the same way of relating to each other that we had had as kids, back when I was six and he was seventeen. I half expected him to carry me on his shoulders or “steal” my nose.
It was incredibly comforting.
We went back up to the hospital room, and he stayed with me until 9:30(am) or so. He showed me how to use the suction machine (though I already knew, I let him show me), and told me when she’d last had a morphine shot. He was exhausted and needed to go home for sleep, but he was dawdling. She’s been off the machines for around a week by then (it all blurred together for me, but I think it was either six or nine days) and he knew it would not be long.
I’m not sure if it was that he wanted to be there or that he didn’t want me to be alone with her when she died. Because he and my sister had decided, unconsciously, that they had to protect me from Bad Things. It had been part of their role in my life since we were kids, resurrected now when all of us were scrambling to find something Useful to do.
When your parents die, it scrambles the order of the universe for you. It sounds stupid to say it like that, but I believe this is the truth. They are the bedrock of our existence; it is impossible and somehow illogical that they could just be gone.
Judy (my sister) had taken off work and said she’d be at the hospital soon, so he risked leaving me alone. He was so tired; I assured him I’d be fine and sent him on his way.
I had an activity bag with me. I had been lugging it to the hospital a lot. It had sketch pads and pencils and paperbacks I’d bought one day when they kicked me out of ICU. The bag had been my constant companion when stuck in the ICU waiting room, or in the hospital room alone. I had chatted with others in the ICU waiting room, early on.
There had been a boy (I say ‘boy’ but he was in his 20s) whose father had a heart attack, who’d asked to see my drawings. We nodded in the halls as we went back and forth to ICU. His father had recovered.
Once, early on, I drew a picture of my mom lying in the bed. The pencil marks are so light I can’t scan it. I’m not sure why I drew her like that; it was a terrible thing to see her that way. My love for her was still the same, even though she wasn’t quite the exotic goddess she’d been most of her life. I wish she could have known how beautiful she was to me, even dying.
I washed her hair with some waterless shampoo, and cleaned her up a little. Her arms were black where the blood had leaked under her skin from various needles, but most of them still appeared to be healing, as was her surgical incision. It’s amazing, the way you can have a scratch on your arm that heals just fine while inside, your organs are failing. Her legs and feet were still shapely and hairless. I had to suction her again, almost immediately. The fluid from her lungs kind of bubbled up and out her nose. The doctor had told us that she was basically drowning.
I believe I’ve told you I almost drowned twice, and was smothered unconscious once, thinking I was going to die. I’m not really afraid of going that way anymore, so I wasn’t as horrified at the thought as you might think.
Finally, I sat down and picked up my book. It was a pulp paperback, one with enough action to hold my attention. I was just getting to a very interesting part that the story had been leading up to for some time, when I just put it down. Head went up, book went down. Just like that.
Mom was still breathing, just as she had been; nothing was different, but I got up and went to her side. I held her hand, and said, “Mom?”
She breathed again, and I looked at the clock. I looked back at her, waiting for the next breath. “I love you.”
She didn’t breathe. The nurse came in.
“Almost gone,” she said, cheerily. I just looked at her. She was talking about the fluid IV. Then she saw the look on my face.
“I think she stopped breathing,” I said.
She got her stethoscope and listened to her chest for a long time. While she was bent over, listening, mom breathed one last time. They call it agonal breathing – it looks strange, reflexive. The mouth opens and the neck muscles kind of pull. It doesn’t look natural, because that isn’t the way people breathe every day, but really it is natural. Usual, no. Natural, yes.
“I think that was the last one,” the nurse said. She was blond, and maybe a little older than me. I think she assumed (as a lot of people my age seem to do) that I was younger than I am. Sympathy radiated from her; I don’t remember hearing what she said, but I remember that she spoke to me. By the time I noticed her lips moving and listened, she was telling me that she would call someone to … do something. The paperwork of death, I guess, and the removal of the central line and catheter. They take out the tubes and all that before giving the body to the funeral home.
She didn’t say all that, but it was what she was talking about. I do remember that she said, “Do you need to call someone?”
I nodded and grabbed my cell phone. I called papa and told him she was gone. I probably told him how she dies, too. It was this weird, slow-mo thing for me. I had known, even though there was no logical explanation for how I could have known, when her spirit left her body. A light went on in my head. Head went up, book went down. Just like that, just in time to say I loved her one last time.
I tried to call Steve, but his cell was in the dead spot (there was a cellular dead spot along the highway to my grandfather’s home, where he was staying – about 8 or 9 miles worth), I’d have to wait and try again. I was about to call my sister when she walked in the door.
She walked straight to me and hugged me. I hugged her and told her mom was gone. After a few minutes, she told me she’d had a dream that morning. She was driving a truck, and mom was in the back, telling her, “You’d better hurry, I have to go.”
There had been a big story on the local news about a guy who had been found dead of natural causes, but he’d been dead a week or so when he was found. The ambulance didn’t want to transport the oogy corpse, because it would have to be out of commission for weeks while it was cleaned and made useable for the living again. Something to do with the state of decomposition. The family had agreed to let the Sheriff haul the body in the back of his truck.
So, yeah. I’m from a town small enough that the Sheriff could think it’s a good idea to haul dead people to the morgue in the back of a pickup, but large enough for said hauling to cause a scandal.
Anyway, she had missed mom by minutes. I think it was meant to be. I think I was supposed to be alone with her when she passed. I don’t know why I believe that, but I do. Being there, and feeling what I felt… well, it is a sacred memory for me.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I agree Olivet that being there at the time of passing is a sacred event. I have similar feelings regarding my Grandma's death. She had some kind of rare stomach cancer that they didn't catch until the day before she died, when she was already dying and we'd already made the decision to take her off the fluids and everything. I relate to the feelings of "just letting her die". I wonder myself about that and have to remind myself that it's what she wanted. Your whole experience is reliving that for me.
Know you're not alone in living and loving and letting go. I've been crying right along with you through your whole memory of this. Thanks for sharing what is so obviously difficult and painful.
posted
I haven't been reading your updates on this until today, Olivet. It's just the way I am, really. If it's a story I really, really enjoy in any medium...well, I try and wait until it's finished, or at least until there is are large segments of it completed, so I can make a real sit-down of it, y'know?
Sometimes I can't restrain myself, though, and read chapters, or blurbs, or previews, that sort of thing. But I end up enjoying it more (if it's fluffy) or gaining more out of it and enjoying it (if it's not) if I wait.
I'm glad I waited, even though you're not finished yet. Your story was echoing sometimes in the back of my mind when it was (relatively) light, back in the <5pages days. I think it would have been clamoring quite a bit, had I been reading it piecemeal while you updated it. I would have had to restrain myself from requesting more frequent updates, which given the intensity on you would have been rude in the extreme.
Anyway, I don't think words like sacred and precious are remotely inappropriate to this story. I am very grateful for what you have shared so far. It is the kind of story that I think might make those who read it-including myself-better people, even in small ways. Reading it evokes some of the same difficult-to-describe feelings as I get when I read Hart's Hope. That's the story I've read most recently that felt that way, that and yours. Some music, too.
Thank you very much again. You are a lioness, and I am grateful to know you, even if only slightly.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Wow. Still digesting. There's a lot of pain, but a lot of good in these last posts. I'm amazed at your strength for writing them down and filtering through your thoughts.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
This is a long one. I just couldn't find a place to break it up. Sorry about that. :/
It's a bit like trying to tell the thing in one breath, because I'm ready to end it soon. It's finished; I will post the end tomorrow.
#
We had a list of people to call and their numbers taped to the window, and my sister and I split it up and called everyone that hadn’t already been called. I think I actually called Sara before some of them, and left a message. My mother’s death had been a marathon of sorts; time seemed to dilate between the time we stopped treatment and the time she actually died. I don’t know about the others, but I hardly slept.
I read a lot. I tried to write some, but found that I couldn’t do it. I did hash out an outline of a story where the slightly arrogant protagonist gets beaten severely with his own severed arm. My brain was a stew of guilt and anger as well as love and closeness with my family. We needed each other now, but only time would tell whether the center would hold.
Mom was the center, you see – she was the one we called, the one we got news from about everyone else. Now, we’d have to actually talk to each other. This seemed a little more daunting than it should have.
Soon, the room was full of us. We waited for hours before they came to take out the tubes and sign the death certificate. I tried to get papa to go for some coffee with me while they pulled out the tubes. I had thought it might be hard on him.
He half smiled at me, kindly and said, “Why? Are you squeamish? I’ve seen it all.”
I blushed and Joy giggled a little. Of course it was obvious he wasn’t leaving her until it was done. It had been a long hard few years for him. He needed knee replacements and he had injured both his shoulders lifting her and caring for her in that time. He certainly didn’t need me to try to protect him from certain realities. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how strong the people you care about actually are. What is it, I wonder, that makes us want to protect people from things that they are actually better prepared to deal with than we are ourselves? I was trying to do to papa what my siblings had done to me.
Mom’s transplant nurse (I believe her name was Jan) had been by to visit a few times, and had asked us to let her know when she passed. My sister and I went looking for her and found her. She had also been our uncle Rondal’s transplant nurse, and she told us stories about how mom and her brother had harangued each other when they were in the transplant center together. Once she realized that their horrible insults were disguised, jocular affection, she had found them both extremely amusing.
We withdrew a moment to let her say goodbye. When she was done, she turned back to us.
“She was such a beautiful person – we always looked forward to the days when her visits were scheduled. I’ve never seen a person more alive.” Tears were streaming down her face, and I knew she was speaking from the heart. “You know, we’re sad to see her go, but I bet there are a lot of people in heaven that are happy to have her there. Rondal and her mama.”
Now, I don’t know what I believe about the afterlife, exactly, but I do know this: there is no place in this world or the next that wouldn’t be happy to have a woman like mother. She could make a friend of a fence post.
Papa told Jan which funeral home would be handling the arrangements, if she wanted to attend, but she said she wouldn’t go.
“I never attend funerals, not even family. Not ever.” She hugged us, said her final goodbyes and words of comfort, then she left.
At the time, I thought it a little weird that she would not attend funerals, but now it doesn’t seem so strange. She was easily one of the best, most upbeat nurses that mom ever worked with or had occasion to meet. I think that in order to be that way she needed to keep hope inside her. Maybe so many funerals would wear down that part of her. In any case, I respect her decision.
The clean, impeccably neat little man from the funeral home came to claim the body with a gurney-like thing covered in dark green velvet. I remember saying goodbye to everyone, knowing we’d meet back at papa’s house, and later go to the funeral home. I remember getting into my car in the parking lot. The sun had been spotty that day, and as I stood in my car door I thought it smelled like rain. I remember that I had been early enough to get a closer parking space than usual, and I was not far from where papa had parked in the handicapped area. (I did tell you he badly needed knee replacements (but had been putting them off because mom needed him) didn’t I?)
I remember thinking that was it. I had been coming to this hospital every single day for weeks. I knew faces. I knew which days the cafeteria served what and whether papa would want to go out to lunch when they served chicken. I knew there was a young, mentally handicapped groundskeeper that I tried to avoid because he would follow me places and it creeped me out a little.
It was so weird to think that I wouldn’t be going back after lunch or dinner, or staying the night, or getting up early to relieve someone else. I remember the black interior of my car was hot and comforting, and I didn’t turn on the AC.
But I remember nothing else in sequence at all. I have no idea if I drove straight home, or if we met at the funeral home first. I must have called my Beloved at some point (though I would not have done that and driven at the same time). We had waited hours for the doctor to confirm her death; I’m sure I talked to him several times during that time. I know I called Sara, even before some of the people on the list.
It’s a bit of a blank, really.
I remember that my grandfather came by the house with buckets of chicken and side dishes from KFC, and the quiet, white-haired man from the funeral home came by with chairs and a book to sign. I think he brought paper plates and plastic cups, too. He put the flowers on the front of the house. It was always pink flowers for the death of a woman and white for the death of a man. He also placed the “Slow Funeral” signs on the street, I suppose.
That had to be after we finalized everything from mother’s pre-paid funeral, and told them what to put in the paper about relatives and things. One thing they offered that we decided to do (even though she had not requested it), was a video that used pictures of her. We had to pick 21 pictures of her, and decide on a song and scenery. We picked mountain scenery because she loved where she lived, but everyone was quiet about the song.
I had always been the quiet one, at least to my family. In Christian school I had had the fortune to be placed with students quieter and more backward than I was on class trips, which afforded me my first opportunity to be the first to speak. I’d be at the weird kid table when the waiter came by the third time, and in exasperation, I’d order something and then everyone else felt safe enough to order. That was tough at first, because I had read the press release that said I was shy and had believed it, but it got easier until at last I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. It was not the end of the world if you chose badly.
I could remember my mother singing, “How Great Thou Art” and it had strangely been stuck in my head through a great portion of my college experience. At odd moments, I’d hear it in my head. The same way a jingle will take hold of your brain and drive you crazy, but it was comforting. I looked down the list; it was there.
I tapped the paper, suggesting it to papa. That was what we chose. I was so tired of choosing, so tired of being the one to speak first. I felt as though I could be happy if I never had to speak again.
The pastor of their church and his wife brought more chicken. Papa had brought out a Rubbermaid box bigger than a footlocker full of pictures, and we all sat down to sift through them. Twenty-one for the video, which they would come by and pick up this evening, and as many others as we liked well enough to display on magnetic boards around the receiving room. We’d narrowed the top choices down to fifty or so, and laid them out on the table. All the siblings and grandchildren gathered around to help narrow them down. We had a few of her as a child, and tried to choose ones that showed the stages of her life, ones of her with friends and family. Papa chose her nursing school graduation photo for the newspaper announcement. She had been so proud and happy – valedictorian after having gotten her GED at forty. She’d proven to herself and to the world that she was no idiot. Those of us who knew her well already knew that, but people say terrible things about beautiful women, sometimes.
There was one of her with her friend Olivia Owen (my namesake) in Germany, and one of her posing in a bikini in front of my father’s car (his mother had taken the picture, to send to him overseas). One of her, much later in life, doing the hula in a modest grass skirt at a church cook out; one of her joking around with the residents at a nursing home where she had worked.
It made it really clear to all of us just how different mom had become in the last few years. We also decided to take a few framed pictures and stand them around on tables in the receiving room. My sister Judy agreed to go early to the funeral home and set it up.
Someone suggested that we put a picture of Donna out there, too, as a way to thank her for the nine years we had with mom that we would not have had otherwise. We thought it was a good idea. Someone said, “We’ll put a picture of her in a two-sided frame, and Libby (me) can write a poem or something for the other side.”
O_O
Well, I did; that night, even though I was sure I could never come close to expressing what needed to be said. My brother had a bunch of printers and stuff with him, because he had to take a lot of his work stuff with him in order to take the time off. He printed it for me so it would look nice in the frame. After the funeral, I gave the framed one to Donna, because she said she would like a copy, when I had time.
When the announcement came out in the paper, people started calling. I had just gotten out of the shower and went to play the messages, when I heard a voice form the past. Johnnie, my friend from Christian school. She’d kept in touch with mom somewhat over the years. She was crying on the phone message. “I’m so sorry, Liv. I loved your mom so much, I’m so sorry. Call me.”
I did call her, and we talked. I told her about the pictures, and she said, “I hope you picked one of her in a bathing suit, she had such a beautiful figure.”
Mother had never seen herself that way, exactly. She had always been most aware of her flaws. I suppose if she’d thought as much of her looks as everyone else did, she wouldn’t have been the same person at all. But Johnnie was right – it was time to celebrate mom’s life, and remember her.
Johnnie came to the funeral, looking even slimmer than in high school. Her freckles were gone, replaced by pale white skin. Her hair was even darker black than I had remembered, and she still had those clear blue eyes and thick dark eyelashes. Four children and all those years, and she was still so beautiful. It was good to see her. She was one of many girls that my mother had taken special interest in. Everyone had called my mother “Mama Ann”, even the kids her children dated. She just had so much love to share; everyone wanted to be around her the same way people look forward to sunshine on a summer day. Being around her was just nice.
Soon, the place was packed. A lot of the people I didn’t know. My Beloved had the boys all dressed up in their good clothes, and was keeping them occupied so I could stand in the receiving line. He’d brought me clothes to wear from home; I assume they were black. I had been unwilling to pack funeral clothes when I drove up.
Debbie, the pastor’s wife, came through the line and asked permission to put my mother’s dance sash in the coffin with her. She had been in a praise and worship dance troupe at the church. We agreed that it was most fitting for it to be buried with her. She had been a natural dancer and athlete, most of her life. As a teen she'd walked on her hands to get the mail. Down the steps, across the walk and back, with the mail grasped between her toes. She'd done backflips and cartwheels in the yard with us until her late twenties, when dad had asked her to start acting her age. He was 11 years older than her, and she always looked so young for her age that I think he felt conspicuous.
Joy and Judy and I had picked out the clothes for them to put on her body for the viewing and funeral. We had decided on red. She had always liked red and the dress we picked was red and black; not her favorite, but it was high-necked to cover the bruising around her central line.
The boys came up to hug me, and they looked at her. The fellow had done a decent job, but no one ever really looks like themselves when they are dead. I think it’s because they aren’t.
Robert looked at her and said, “It’s fake.”
“No,” I said. “That’s Nonnie. They just put make up on her because she’s dead.”
He pointed to her hand. “That hand isn’t real.”
The swelling was gone, and the skin on her hand had shriveled in a way that really DID look fake. “Well,” I said. “It isn’t Nonnie, anyway. Not anymore.”
Donna came and stood with us. I have lost her number and address, which is horrible. I had it on my computer so I could never lose it, but I didn’t have it backed up. I haven’t called her. I didn’t send a Christmas card. *sigh*
My Beloved took the boys away again. It was getting closer to time for the service.
In the sea of faces that the receiving line had become, I saw Ronnie Ellis for the first time in years. Here I was, standing by my fakey-dead mother in the same funeral home where he had stood by his fakey-dead father all those years ago.
His hair was a little thinner, but not much. Still a wispy shock of swooping orange hair, same pale, translucent skin and faded blue eye. He gave me closed smile, and I hugged him for all he was worth. He smelled the same – vaguely metallic and fleshy. I have said before that his scent tripped something in my brain, something that made loving him that way impossible for me, and that was still as true as ever. But I did love him, and was more glad to see him that he realized, I’m sure.
He’d seem mom’s obituary because it was next to that of a coach he’d known in our high school days, otherwise, he would not have seen it. He knew her by the picture, not the name, because everyone called my mother “Ann” which was her middle name; her first name was “Vesta” which was what the obituary had said.
He had spent a couple years in Los Angeles, sub-leasing a house with a friend. They had made a horror movie, that he was trying to get Blockbuster to distribute. Did you ever notice that there are always a lot of cheap, indie horror flicks on the “New Releases” shelves at Blockbuster? That’s what he was going for, I think.
Anyway, he said he’d spent the last two years at Vanderbilt, fighting cancer of the Kidney. He had been on steroids, some of the same drugs that had caused my mother to get so big, and he was easily twice the size I remembered. He’d had the same oncologist as Lance Armstrong, and was now happily cancer-free, but financially ruined. He was back to living with his mom and working; he’d just gotten off work. He apologized for his clothes, which were no more casual than most people had worn, and said he couldn’t stay for the service. I asked him to wait a few minutes because the line was dwindling and I wanted to talk to him.
He said, “Okay” and gave me one of those impish little closed smiles I had once been so glad to see. I was very glad to see it again.
By the time I got free, my Beloved Ron was talking to Ronnie Ellis, and introducing the boys. I begged a pen and a business card from my husband, and gave Ronnie my email address. I also got his in return. It sounds like it was awkward, but it wasn’t; at least not for me. There was no question in my mind that I wanted to catch up with my old friend, and I knew my husband was not at all threatened by him.
I didn’t see him leave.
The funeral was like most I have been to, where they speak of the person’s life, how well they loved or were loved, and how we should not be sad for them because they are with those they loved that have gone before. When Pastor Charles spoke, he recalled to our minds how she was always that woman that the church could depend on to do anything and to get anything done.
There are people you meet who quietly see a need and meet it, just doing what needs doing while people like me are wondering what should be done about it, and whether people would be mad at me for doing it, or whether I knew how to do it. They just get things done, and you never even notice until it’s over.
Well, that was NOT the kind of person my mother was. She would see a need and shout, “Hey! Let’s do this! You can do that, because you’re so good at it, and could you help with this?” Then she would do whatever didn’t get done, but everyone doing everything else would be happy and laughing and thinking, “Wasn’t that just the most fun ever?”
THAT was my mother, and no one who knew her as well as Pastor Charles could tell a story about her and not get a laugh. No one could remember my mother at her best and not be happy at the thought. She was contagious like that. She was once a cheerleader in High School, but she was really a cheerleader all her life, to everyone around her.
As the service ended, I was buoyed up on a sea of men; my Beloved, my boys, my brothers (the natural one and both steps), and my papa. My sister was there, too, but it seemed to me that both of us were somehow made more precious to the men in our lives by the loss of our shared mother; stunted little saplings next to a huge, ruined tree of womanhood.
I dunno. That sounds so stupid, but that is how I felt. I’m not big on hugs, when I have a choice, but I needed and loved every one I got than night.
I exchanged phone numbers with Johnnie, which seemed fitting. She was the one that all the Christian School gang kept in touch with over the years, a hub to that group the way my mother was a hub to our family. My mom’s cousin Joanne (I was always told the stories of how I loved my “No-Nan” when I was a wee girl) asked me if I could have a picture of my mother “when she was young.” I told her to pick one, and she picked one of her not too long before the transplant, which was the only thing that ever made my mom look old.
I gave it to her, frame and all, because I knew we had others and I knew how well she loved Joanne.
Before he could leave, I caught my cousin Brian. I saw my cousin Sheri and her husband and my Aunt Bille (my late uncle Rondal’s wife), and greeted them. It was awkward. We had been so close as children, but with our grandmother and our related parents both dead, we didn’t know what to say. Brian gave me his number. I have talked to Sheri since then, but not Brian. I keep telling myself when I get our Star Wars fan film we made when were kids transferred from 8mm to dvd, I’ll call them all together.
My mother was my age when we made that movie, and good-naturedly agreed to be both Obi-Wan and Darth Vader characters. Yes, THAT sort of mother.
The graveside service was the next day in the same cemetery where my father and both sets of my grandparents were buried. It is on a hill that was visible from the house we had lived in until my mother had married Papa. It had been built by my mother’s father, Hannibal. I remember that when my grandmother Mary had died I couls see the tent and the flowers from my bedroom window for days.
It was almost over. I was so tired. The funeral home provided a family car, and all of the sibs rode together with papa. They parked it on the flat part of the cemetery loop, so he could walk easily to the graveside. I had gone with him the day before to pick the plot; she had asked to buried with her parents. There had been a double plot come open at the foot of her parents’ grave, but papa chose the plot next to her father. I think maybe he didn’t want to think about being buried next to her. I don’t know. Whatever his reasons, I respect them.
The graveside service was not long. The boys were good, and my Beloved was my strength. I was all in. When we left, I noticed a great swarm of carrion birds, circling one side of the cemetery hill. It was eerie. I wondered if they had been attracted by the couple of recently opened graves. Mother’s had been one; the other belonged to the wife of the man who papa had met to pick a grave. It had been strange to be there, watching two newly-widowed older men mark their wives’ graves with those little flags. It was just something that had to be done. A small act that seemed so profoundly painful, but they both bore it quietly.
People had been so nice. I remember an older couple came by, mostly to see me. Their daughter had been a friend of mine from the neighborhood near the cemetery. She was older than me and I always thought she just sort of tolerated the wee girl who tagged along with her. She was somewhere that she couldn’t make it back in time for the funeral, but asked her parents to visit on her behalf.
It was so kind of them, and it made me think that maybe, like mom, I had managed to touch a few people’s lives in a positive way – positive enough that they would remember me fondly, and want to comfort me in my grief. I suppose we all touch the people around us, but I saw myself as separate, shy, at times odd or unfeeling. Maybe I was that way, sometimes, but it is wrong to think that one bit of a person is all there is, even when that person is you.
We left the next day, after writing, addressing and stamping all the thank you notes for flowers and food and kind condolences. My brother told me that now it was up to us to keep the family together, because we couldn’t rely on mom to tell us each other’s news anymore. I was hopeful that we could do it.
So far, so good.
The time has come now that I can remember her and not be all weepy about how much I miss her, but make no mistake – I DO. You know, in most of the things written about grief, people eventually seem to have some sort of visitation experience. Dreams or the like. I was talking to my sister the other day, and she mentioned how bummed she was about Mother’s Day coming up, and how she wished she could tell her mom how much she loves her. She said that just when she had that thought, she felt a kiss on her head and mom say, “You can still tell me; I’ll listen.”
I wanted to scream. Not because I don’t believe her, but because I would dearly to hear from my mother, even if I was just imagining it. I remember when my father died, a while later my sister had a dream in which dad told her that her youngest knew how to get out of her car seat. The dream was right, and Judy had to get a new car seat after her toddler escaped from her seat on the way to preschool.
I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if I was too much a skeptic to ever have such an experience. Then, a few years later I had a dream. I was pregnant with my father’s first grandson, and I dreamed I went to visit him. He lived in some twilight place that didn’t seem like heaven but certainly was not hell. There were candles lighting all these little paths, because it was a special occasion. Anyway, we talked and talked. It felt like hours. The only thing I clearly remember him was, “I love you, baby, but it’s time to go.” Then I woke up, comforted like I had not been before. I had a similar dream before Liam was born.
But my mother? No, not yet. Sometimes I think I hear her voice singing when I sing, and sometimes I see her hands when I look at my own. I have a little red mole on my thigh, just in a place she did as well.
But it’s not the same thing.
More about Ronnie Ellis tomorrow.
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I started reading this because the title intregued me and I was procrastinating... but you've captivated me. Your writing is beautiful; I feel like I've just spent the past few hours living your life in fast-forward. It's amazing, I can relate to so much of what you've written about your adolescence, and looking towards my future, I know I'll never have your strength.
Back on page two I read something, not sure what it was now, that reminded me of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the feeling never quite left me... I'm not sure if I'm actually recommending it to you, but it's an amazing book, and if you have read it, I think you'll know what I mean. I get the same sense reading your words as I did reading the things that Owen says in the novel... that sense that God, or some higher power, IS there and no matter what we might go through in our lives, it all happens for a reason.
posted
kq-You have no idea. This is one of my first steps on the way to becoming Someone Who Finishes Things -- a bigger step for me than maybe you realize. Thanks for sticking with me, kiddo.
Thank you, breyer. I wish I could explain how much you have encouraged me by reading and commenting on this all the way through. *hug*
Dragon-- O_O A Prayer for Owen Meany is, by far, my favorite Irving novel (though I haven't read his most recent). My oldest's middle name is Owen, after that character (and my namesake, Olivia Owen). I think I do veiw the world in that way, honestly. It may be a function of me remembering more stuff and drawing lines of connection through life that I otherwise wouldn't. I don't know. In any case, I am humbled by the comparison. Thank you.
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posted
This is the last post of the story. I hope you don't think less of me for it.
#
I exchanged a few emails with Ronnie, shortly after we came home. The boys were in school a lot of the time, and I was considering taking a class. The only thing that interested me was an overview of filmmaking. We chatted about that a bit. He also told me he was impressed with how well-behaved my sons were. Oh, if he only knew! I told it was all due to their father’s influence. I believe he had used mild forms of bribery to keep them in line at the funeral.
I asked Ronnie if he’d be willing to read a short film screenplay I was working on (based on a short story written by Slash, with his permission). He made excuses about how many screenplays he already had on his hard drive, and I realized he though I was asking him to direct the thing. That had not been my intention; I had just wanted feedback from someone who knew how things get made. I didn’t clarify, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I had never had much faith in his abilities in his chosen profession, though I had never been allowed to see any of it, so what did I know?
I did express an interest in seeing his movie, and asked him to tell me when I could buy one, so he wouldn’t think I was asking for a freebie. He said the thing with Blockbuster was still in the works, and he would let me know.
We came back to visit as often as we could. Papa had surgery on his knee just after Christmas, then his shoulder in the summer and the other knee in the fall, and I tried to be up to visit shortly after each one. I liked baking him special sugar-free desserts. Pies, mostly. He really liked the strawberry-rhubarb, when it was in season.
He took us all over the border into North Carolina to pick out a headstone. He showed me what he had been thinking of, and I agreed. He picked out a design of praying hands to go on the stone. I was a little more inclined towards the one with a song bird, because mom always had birdfeeders by the windows, so she could watch them, a worn copy of Autobahn Field Guide to North American Birds nearby.
I didn’t say anything, though. Papa knew I had a suggestion, he could see it in my face. One of the downsides of choosing to feel things, for me, is that I have a glass face. If I feel it, it is there for the world to see. The thing is, I didn’t want to deny my mother’s or papa’s faith, by slapping a bird on the stone. My mother’s faith had often astounded me, and kept me going through some hard times, when I was young.
I didn’t want to swoop into that final act of my mother’s life and erase that symbol of her faith, like some super hero of doubtfulness. (Agnosti-Girl!). So I kept my big mouth shut, for once in my life. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I felt it was so important, but papa had given me a lot of input on everything about mom’s last days, and I wanted this to be his.
Later that visit, we went into town to pick up some groceries. I hated descending on papa with my whole family and eating up all his food, so we always bought a few things for everyone, as well as fixings for the sugarless treats I usually made for him. As we approached the check out, I realized I had forgotten to pick up some cheese, so I went back for it.
As I made my way up to my Beloved, who was checking out through and automated lane, he made eye contact and pointed to one of the other lanes. Ronnie Ellis and his mother were also there, buying groceries.
He re-introduced me to his mother with the words, “You remember her.”
She did remember me, even though it had been ages upon ages since I’d seen her. She was just the way I remembered, as if time had stopped. Ronnie and I talked about how stuff was going. The Blockbuster thing was still tentative, but he thought it was going forward. We talked about Kill Bill and the movies that inspired it, including Battle Royale, which is banned in the U.S. Naturally, he had a copy.
I told him that my Beloved and I should make arrangements to have someone watch the kids the next time we were in town, so we could really get together and talk, or maybe watch a movie together.
My boys were bouncing around me by then, and I introduced everyone to Bonnie. Life was so busy for me, and Ronnie was obviously feeling bad about being back with his mother. I didn’t care. I had an idea what he had been through (though not a clear one), and his finances didn’t matter to me. I suppose I was still an old flame to him, though, and I had to respect his desire for distance. Or, maybe I’m reading WAY too much into his body language. I suspect that I was right, though – he never could lie to me.
I hugged Ronnie goodbye, reluctant to leave him; perhaps I suspected that our night of kid-free movie watching would never come.
Last July, I took the family up for one last visit before school started. My brother and his family were there, too; we were all gathering for a birthday party for my sister’s daughter Melody. My family stayed with Papa and my brother brought his brood over from Greensboro, where they had finally settled in a nice house. “Big enough for you to come visit with the boys, now that we’re all settled,” he said.
Papa’s neighbors had a bunch of puppies that they had tried to animal control to take. They had taken the mother because the owner said she had tried to bite the baby-sitter, but they wouldn’t take the puppies. There had been ten or so, but they were now down by five.
Two puppies came running down the hill to us when we arrived, whimpering for food. I scrambled them some eggs, figuring they could use some soft protein. It was something mother would have done – she was always looking after strays of all species. Mothering her plants, animals, her own children and any who happed by.
The kids wanted to play with them, so I tried washing them. I had washed the first one twice with flea killing soap, and the water still rinsed reddish. My brother went for some Seven Dust flea powder, and that seemed to work better. His son Ethan went up to the house, looking for the others, but only found two more (one stuck in a hole by the porch) and a bad smell. The owner was gone for the weekend. She had left a couple of cans of food out, which was all gone, and some dry food, which the puppies couldn’t eat. They didn’t have all their teeth.
The kids all played together, with sticks fashioned into swords and bows and arrows; they played with puppies and raked leaves; they went walking in my Grandfather’s woods.
My grandfather had to have two-thirds of one lung removed shortly after my grandmother died. They had found cancer during the work-up for the hernia repair he needed. By the time of this visit, though, he was all fixed up and cancer free; still maintaining his home and land. He even had cataracts removed (he and papa exchanged driving services during the course of the various procedures they had needed), and is entirely self-sufficient. He even has a girlfriend.
The puppy owner finally came back and gathered the puppies. She said she was taking them to a no kill shelter. The kids still had each other to play with, and that was great. Papa had a big family Reunion for all his brothers and sisters and their families, and he made sure to invite my brother and sister and me. We were quite a group, all of us together like that.
I managed to sneak off to visit my mother’s grave, something I had not done since her funeral. I told myself I wasn’t avoiding it – I just didn’t have time. I drove up there with the boys, and had them race each other around the cemetery loop. It’s a small cemetery with only one entrance, and I could see all but twenty feet or so of the loop from my vantage point.
I tried to talk to her, but all I could say was how much I missed her and weren’t the boys growing up fast? It didn’t seem fair that I couldn’t have her around anymore, when so many people still have their parents. That is partly selfish and partly not; I wish the boys still had her around to love them. I know she would treasure them in a way they don’t get from their other antecedents.
But life isn’t fair; it just is. I have been unusually blessed by the people that are in my life, and the family I have, though we are separated by distance and, quite often, ideology. It doesn’t matter so much. I think I became a glass-half-full kind of person when no one was looking.
When we left, I knew we were still a family. Perhaps a strange one, where so many of us had no blood ties to each other, but still a family. Whatever it is that connects us is easy and real, and it did not pass away with my mother.
I drove home on a Tuesday; school started the next week and we had to get everyone ready. On Thursday, I noticed that I had a message on my cell phone.
I got a shock when I heard Papa’s voice, just telling me to call him back when I could. He usually called the house phone. And the message was a little cryptic, for him.
I called him back, shaking. I knew it had to be bad news, or he would have told me what was up on the message. He was subdued when he answered.
“Wasn’t it Ronnie Ellis that you used to go to school with?”
“Yes.”
“Well, honey, it was in the paper that he died yesterday. They’re receiving friends at 7:00pm, with the funeral at 8:00pm.”
“Oh.” My watch said 4:45pm; I could never make the 300 mile trip in that time. “What does it say happened?”
“It just says he died at home, after a brief illness. They found him yesterday.”
That’s all the obituaries ever say. Brief illness, long illness, survived by…
“There’s no way I can go.”
“I know, Blue Eyes.” That was always his endearment for me, dating from the time I began to call him “Papa-san” (as I may have mentioned). He always made my birthday cards out to Blue Eyes, and would greet me with, “How’s my blue-eyed girl?” Now, it was just his way of comforting me, letting me know that, even though he couldn’t always fix things for me anymore, I was still his little girl. “But I knew you’d want to know.”
“Thanks, Papa.” He gave me the funeral home’s website (it was a different one than the one that had handled his father’s and my mother’s funerals), and we said our goodbyes.
I hung up the phone and started to cry. My Beloved came in and I told him that Ronnie Ellis was dead. He told me I could leave in the next little bit and still make it for the graveside service in the morning, but I’d have to drive alone because someone needed to go to the meet-and-greet with the boy’s teachers in the morning.
It felt like a cheat, but I couldn’t go. It shocked me that he was gone, just like that. He was my age, and had been through so much. I had thought things were looking up for him, and then he’s just gone.
My Beloved held me and let me cry. Ronnie Ellis was the first of my close contemporaries to die, and it was just so very raw. I would lie awake, remembering everything I could of our friendship, and the details of our long association came back to me in the darkness.
Finally, I got up and went to the spare room and my computer. I looked up his obituary on my hometown newspaper’s website, and almost posted it here, so I could talk to you guys about him.
Then I decided that, no, it wasn’t about me. Oh, look at me, see how sad I am! No. I wanted you to know him the way I did. I wanted to show you my memories and say, “This is how it was for me; this is who he was to me. I loved him, after a fashion.
There are a lot of things about him that I do not know, and memory – even one like mine – is a faulty thing. But now you know who he was, and who I was, and how it was for me to know him. He touched my life; maybe not the way he once wanted, but he did.
When I began this, sitting in my darkened house with my sleeping family around me, I didn’t know it was going to be as much about me and my mother as it was bout Ronnie. Ten months later, I sit in a public library, amazed that I could open myself like this on such a public forum. If you’ve made it this far with me, that amazes me, too.
Writing this story has healed me, in some ways – which is why I did it. It is all part of the journey, life, death and everything else. It’s all part of the same thing, isn’t it? We don’t have a sign in our heads every morning that says “You are here” or “Battery Power Fifty Percent.” We just don’t know.
Once, when I was at church camp, I stood at the back of the chapel at the end of a prayer meeting. It was still full of people gathered in groups, praying for each other. I was with my dear friend, Lee Piety (no lie – that is his name). We had finished praying, and I was savoring the moment. There was so much love in that room. I had been taught to call it the Holy Spirit, but the best way I can describe it now is “Love”. People praying for each other as the Spirit moved them, as I could feel it around me in the stillness and I wanted to remember how it felt.
The camp director came up to me and stood beside me, quietly watching. My mother had been a counselor there for a summer before I came, and was also there then, but she was with her group. The camp director spoke to me, and I don’t know if mom had blabbed about me, or if he was moved by the Spirit to say what he said or if it was a bit of both. Actually, I spoke first. It’s a nervous habit.
“This is really something.”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “And this is for you, Livvy. You will remember this and hold it in your heart. You can keep this experience with you in a way that most of us can’t.”
The string in my throat was tight again, and I only nodded. His words felt like the truth. I do remember, and I cherish it.
Ronnie Ellis and my mother are still with me, because I remember them. It is my peculiar gift that I remember them well. I have shared these memories with you, and I hope that through them, these people I have loved have touched you, too.
Thank you all for giving me the excuse to do this; it has done me good.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I love this because I can see myself writing it in 15 or so years, different situations, different people, but very similar healing process.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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This is favorite Hatrack thread and certainly the only 8 page thread I've read every post on. It was so beautiful. Thank you.
Posts: 872 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Wow. That was an incredibly moving read, enhanced only by the fact that it's all true.
Made me cry, and I don't think it's that time of month yet when just about anything will do that. So it must be you and your gift for storytelling. It's not just the writing...it's the way it was organized and paced. You began at the beginning and ended at the end and I sit here in awe. Yet at the same time, I hate to even post these thoughts because it feels like I'm diminishing it. It's like critiquing someone's natural movements through life as if it were a play on the stage. And I hate to do that...yet I also want to share with you my true reaction so you know that it was more than just healing for you and hours of writing. It's the sort of storytelling that changes people.
Anyway, I hope you'll reconsider letting Pops put this up in the Landmark archives, because this thread should never fall off and be lost.
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Oh Honey! I'm all goosebumped from your story. You have moved me, and, I'm sure, everyone who has read it. Bless you. Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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This was a remarkable story. It is an honor you feel so comfortable with Hatrack to share your memories with us.
It was incredibly moving and I hope that you benefited from writing it as much as we did by reading it.
You are also an amazing writer as you make the writing of such a painful and intricate story seem effortless, when I know I do not have the capability to embark on such a task.
Posts: 484 | Registered: Feb 2006
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That was absolutely breathtaking, Olivet. I feel honored at having had the opportunity to read it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Wow... just wow. I've been waiting to post in this thread, because I have tried so many times before and have always fallen short. There are so many wonderful threads on Hatrack. So many worthy to be called Landmarks, but this one is definitely one of the best of the best.
Your story is so bittersweet and wonderful, Olivet. I not only feel priviledged to know some part of you, but your Mother, your Papa, Ronnie, your husband, just your whole family. I feel priviledged just to be a small part of that family being a part of Hatrack. Thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for allowing us to carry them in our hearts and minds.
Posts: 822 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Thank you so much for sharing this story, and these wonderful people with us. I feel like I now have vivid memories of wonderful people I've never met, and that's a wonderful gift.
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I've been following this thread since the beginning and now that the story has come to its end, I just wanted to say, thank you, Olivet. Our stories may be far from parallel, but there are enough similarities that much of what you shared hit close to home with me. I'm greatful to have learned so much about you and I feel like I've somehow learned just as much about myself. Thank you.
Posts: 298 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I wanted to do more than echo everyone else in saying thank you for writing your story, but I can't find the words. Its odd, I feel overwhelmed, myself. Like I know more about you than I deserve. *giggle*
Your story touched me, thank you. You are an amazing person.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Olivet: I have shared these memories with you, and I hope that through them, these people I have loved have touched you, too.
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