Seasons Change; So Did I

Seasons change. A month-and-a-half ago it was Summer. Now it is Fall. As Fall progressed, the leaves turned bright shades of yellows, oranges, and reds. Now, in mid-Fall, they have turned brown and fallen off the trees. The bright greens and dark reds of the deciduous trees are gone and we’re left with the darker greens of the evergreens. The frequency of blue skies with no clouds or the puffy cumulus clouds have been gradually replaced with an overcast of various shades of gray, and the rains are coming more frequently here in the Pacific Northwest. From now through winter, other than the occasion break in the clouds showing patches of blue, it becomes rather monochromatic here in Washington. It’s the price we pay for a beautiful, green late spring when the deciduous trees sprout their lighter, brighter green leaves and the flowers begin to bloom again.

The seasons change as the year progresses, and no matter which season we are experiencing, there are sure to be weather changes within each season. Superficially, our lives seem to parallel nature this way. The difference is that when we are confronted with change, it alters us emotionally. Sometimes that emotional change is temporary, sometimes it is truly life-changing. Everyone who has experienced change knows it can be good or bad. Good experiences leave us feeling satisfied, happy, sometimes even euphoric. Sometimes the good experiences can change us for life. Bad or unhappy experiences take all the good feelings away and leave us hurt, wanting, sad, unhappy, afraid, angry, or a confusing combination of all those emotions. They, too, can change us for life. I think most of us have had both good and bad experiences that have profoundly changed us and our outlooks on the way we view life. Have you ever tried to remember what you were really like as a child and then compare that to what you’re like as an adult, and then wonder why you changed, and what made you change? Well, buckle up! This is going to be a long one.

Personally, bad or unhappy physical and emotional experiences seem to have had a more profound and permanent effect on my emotions a bit more than good experiences. Both good and bad experiences have affected the way I think, the way I act, the way I emote, the choices I’ve made, my outlook on life…and death…but I believe the bad experiences have made me more of what I am today. Only lately have I begun to wonder about this, and the three things that have had the most effect on me, the three things that have elicited the biggest changes in me, have been music, anger and death. I learned about them all at a fairly young age. I would add that I have believed in God since I can remember. Even after being confronted by Catholic summer school and atheists, I still chose to believe in God because for me to only believe in Man and Mankind, and even myself, they and I will usually let me down. For me, it’s a matter of faith. At one time, however, I wondered if He believed in me. I felt abandoned for a while, until I turned and sought Him…but that’s a different story.

As a child, I was happy, friendly, curious, adventurous, and even-tempered. I had no reason to be afraid of very much because my world was full of love, gentleness, fun, and a developing sense of adventure. One of my first real memories, however, involved music. My mother was a classical pianist, and I was brought up on Rachmaninoff, Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy. When my dad was working, building his fishing resort, mom and I would be home. She would fix me breakfast, tidy up the house and I would help her, and she’d play with me for a while before she’d sit down at the piano, a beautiful little spinet, and play.

One day, for some unknown reason, I dragged a cushion off the couch, placed it at the end of the piano, and sat on it to listen to her. I leaned back on the side of the piano and suddenly, I could not only hear what she played, I could feel the music and the emotion through the wood, through the back of my head to my teeth, and through my back all the way to my breastbone. It felt as though I was part of the music…and I was hooked. I was three years old. To this day, sixty-eight years later, I can still lose myself in music, even when I sing and play my guitar at home, or in church with our praise team. This is one of the good experiences that has changed my life and helped me cope with life’s twists and turns as I got older.

Where did the anger originate? In retrospect, I believe my anger was born out of fear and dread, and that began shortly after I started school. I was smaller than most of my classmates and a bit more ‘brown,’ too. I guess that made me a good target. I got picked on by a few of the bigger kids, two of which turned out to be my nemeses. It seemed that I got pushed around at least three or four times a week beginning in the second grade. By the time I was in third grade, I dreaded going to school because I knew I was going to be picked on, shoved around, knocked down, and my shirt pockets torn off because the worst one was finally in my classroom. He made me afraid to go to school until my mother taught me how to fight. She also taught me, because I was smaller than my bullies, to turn my fear into anger and use my anger to my advantage. She told me that I would have to get mad, to get very angry…not the shouting and yelling angry, but quietly angry inside and look for the bully’s weak spots, and then use my anger to find a way to hurt him back. When my dad found out she taught me how to fight, he took me aside and had a little talk with me. He told me it was good that mom taught me how to fight, but that I should never start one…or he would be the one to end it. It was better to not fight, to try to walk away from it, but if there was no alternative, if I was cornered, then I should fight. I should fight to win, not only that fight, that battle, but fight to win the war for all time so I’d not ever have to fight that person again. If someone else started it, I should finish it any way I could. There were no rules, it was just a fight to win forever.

The day did come where the bully came after me, and I fought him to a draw. He hurt me, but I really hurt him back. He never touched me again. That gave me the courage to step between other bullies and those they were pushing around, the rest of the way through school. But it was while I was in the Army that I learned hand-to-hand combat and how to harness my anger and turn it to rage. Not a ranting, screaming, uncontrolled rage, but a cold, calculating, seething, hateful rage that I could control until I needed it. Then I would use it to physically punish whoever wanted a piece of me. It eventually got me demoted and sent to Vietnam. Only after the Star Wars movie premiered in 1977, and the series that followed, that I could describe it in just a few words: There is power in the Dark Side. I may have learned too well because, even today, and depending on my surroundings, it is never too far from the surface.

Throughout the years, though, it has been death that affected me the most. After losing my best friend, Pam, when I was six, I was sad for a while, but life went on. When I lost my Grandpa Ellison when I was eleven, I was sad and angry that my mom and dad wouldn’t let me go to his funeral. I had to stay home and look after my little brother. I was in shock when my first fiancée was killed in a one-car accident on White Pass during Christmas break. Her car skidded off the icy road on her way to the lodge to call me. I was twenty-years-old. We were both in college and my grief was too hard to handle at the same time I was going to school. I opted for a ‘geographical cure’ and I dropped out of school to enlist in the Army to get away.

While in the Army, I saw and did a lot of things that can’t be unseen or undone no matter how hard I tried, especially in Vietnam. One thing that cut me to the heart, though, was when I watched a young Army Private die in my hospital room from burns that covered 95% of his body after our charter plane crashed on take-off in Anchorage, Alaska after a refueling stop. I had met him just a few hours earlier. He was a nice, polite young man and it was the first time he’d ever been away from his home in Houston, Texas, except for Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training at Ft. Bliss. We were on our way to Vietnam, and I was going back for my second tour and to reenlist once I got back there. I had protected him from three other soldiers who were bullying him in the McChord Air Force Base Terminal just prior to take-off. We ended up sitting in the same row during the flight to Anchorage, so we chatted. I marveled at his innocence, his naivete, and his love for his family. He made me wonder where and when my innocence left me. I was twenty-two. He had just turned nineteen when I watched him take his last breath. Even under heavy anesthesia, I watched as a doctor and nurses tried to revive him, tried to give him an emergency tracheotomy, and finally stopped and hung their heads. I heard the doctor say, “He’s gone,” just before I faded out. When I awoke, his bed was vacant, freshly made. He still had some innocence left, he was a nice guy, and it left me sad, angry and confused that he should die instead of me. Of the two hundred thirty-nine military and dependents aboard that plane, forty-seven died in the crash. Forty-five were military. He was the last to die. I was haunted by that for forty years.

Two days later, when the weather cleared, I was air-evacuated out of Alaska with a dozen other burned soldiers and flown non-stop to the Burn Ward at Brook Army Medical Center (BAMC), San Antonio, Texas in a C-141 hospital plane. My four months in that hospital with others that were burned worse than I, with others who were not only burned but had lost limbs and parts of their faces, taught me courage and to look past injuries to see the real people behind them, and to understand that they wanted no more than to heal and to be accepted for the people they were.

Burns just plain hurt like no other physical pain. I watched others, mostly military, sit silently, with clenched teeth and tears running down their faces from the pain as dead, charred skin was removed, as bandages were being changed, from scrubbing their own eschar from their burns because it hurt just a little less than if someone else did it. I began realize how special my fellow patients were. There were very few who felt sorry for themselves. Over half of them had more injuries and were burned worse than I. They wanted no special treatment above what anyone else had, no matter what rank they held or how badly they were hurt. They wanted to be looked at and treated like normal people instead of burn victims. They worked hard at their physical therapy to regain strength and flexibility. It was slow and painful, and I saw a lot of tears roll down burned faces, but nobody cried out, and no one complained. I respected them immensely. I admired them. I understood them, I empathized with them, and being with them, healing with them, changed me forever in both positive and negative ways.

You see, I learned to tolerate physical pain and keep going despite it, and keep my complaints to a minimum. I learned to look past burns and scars and deformities and missing limbs, and see those men as they wanted to be seen, as I wanted to be seen…as human beings with souls who wanted to live and love and walk again. At the same time, I developed an intolerance for those who whined, for those who wanted pity, for those who quit trying because something was too hard, for those who needed drama in their lives, for those whose lives were governed only by emotion instead of reason, for those who cried over anything and everything, and for those whose feelings were too easily hurt. Little did I know what awaited me years later.

Seven years after I was discharged from the hospital and the Army, my dad passed away suddenly when I was thirty. I didn’t get a chance to grieve because my brother and I were taking care of my mother while she grieved, as well as all the legal matters and dad’s funeral, and then I went home to my wife and two children. We divorced about three years later, and I remarried two years after that. I lost my mother when I was forty, and once again I did not have a chance to grieve the way I needed to because my brother and I took care of the legal matters and funeral before returning home to our families and to work.

Then, in November of 2010, after two previous bouts of cancer, lymph nodes in 2005 and triple negative breast cancer in 2008 that were ‘cured,’ my wife of twenty-eight years, Lou, died from the effects of brain tumors that metastasized from her breast cancer when I was sixty-three. I was her primary caregiver until she passed away at home, on my watch. I knew it was inevitable, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I held on to the smallest chance for a miracle, but when it didn’t happen I was crushed. One is never ready to lose a loved one, though it is imminent. I was in shock for days and went through all the motions of taking care of legal matters, writing an obituary, and taking care of her cremation as she wanted. After her memorial service, closure was there for everyone else, but not for me. After twenty-eight years, I was alone with nothing to do and I began to grieve. I holed up in the house, going out only for groceries and my prescriptions because I didn’t want to be seen. I only communicated by email because I couldn’t bear to see anyone or talk with anyone. I didn’t know what to do except weep shamefully in the privacy of my home. I had become one of those weaklings, one of those criers that I could not tolerate.

How does a man cope with the loss of his wife? I had no idea. I was a fighter but there was nothing for me to fight except myself. I tried to fight back the tears and the heartache, but it was impossible. I wasn’t strong enough to do that. What made it worse was that I finally realized how my mother felt after dad died, how dad felt when grandpa died, how lonely I was when Grandpa Ellison died, how I felt and how my first fiancée’s family felt when she died, how I felt when I watched Private Charles Echols breathe his last breath in my hospital room and how his parents would have felt, how I bottled up my grief over the loss of my dad and then my mom because I didn’t have the time to grieve, and now it was all coming down on me. I not only grieved over the loss of my wife, I was grieving the deaths of all who touched me. It was almost too much for me to take.

I had no idea how to deal with such deep emotions, especially my own. I looked for some thing to fight, but there was only me and my grief to fight. But how was I supposed to do that? In a sudden flash of awareness, I understood why men would suddenly die after the loss of their wives, or why a man would commit suicide after the loss of his wife. Yes, I understood now what being this alone could do to one. I wasn’t about to take my own life, but I did pray every night…just before I fell asleep from exhaustion…that I would die in my sleep. I also remember how disappointed I felt when I’d awaken four hours later to the same old ceiling. I began to spend a lot of time on the computer, trying to find out how men coped with the loss of their wives. Very little was written about the depth and breadth of emotion or how to cope with it. The only comments I could find were (paraphrased), “It’s normal to feel that way after the loss of a spouse.” Normal? So what? How do I cope with it? What can I do? One thing I did get from my internet journeys was that it was helpful to write about how one felt. I had been doing that since my wife was placed in hospice care at home. I had decided to keep a journal so our sons would know how much I loved their mother, and the things she and I went through as I cared for her and watched her fade a little more every day until she finally died. I wanted them to see us as real people, not just mom and dad. I had continued that after she passed away, but there had to be more.

It was just after Lou’s memorial service that I received an envelope from Franciscan Hospice Bereavement Services. In the envelope, I found a card that offered bereavement counseling in a group setting that was limited to twelve. The head of the bereavement services name and phone number were on the card, along a message to please call soon to reserve a place in the eight, weekly two-hour group sessions that were to begin on February 1, 2011. I stared at that card for a couple of minutes before I tossed it onto the coffee table and sat down. I thought about it for a few minutes before I got up to go back into the office to write in my journal. I remember staring at the computer screen and thinking it might be helpful to attend that bereavement group, but I would be admitting that I was weak, that I couldn’t go through this by myself. I felt ashamed I even thought of it. Thankfully, I spent Christmas with my sons and grandchildren in Olympia. It was a welcomed break, something different to look forward to for a day.

After Christmas, the days passed with the sameness of the previous day until it was New Year’s Eve. I had been invited to a get-together by friends of ours, and there would be three couples and me. I didn’t want to be the ‘odd man out,’ so I declined. I spent New Year’s Eve finishing up my journal, then I sat down and watched movies on HBO. I could hardly wait for 2011, just to get out of the year that Lou died. Just before midnight, I turned the channel to watch the New Year’s festivities and the countdown. When the clock struck midnight and ushered in 2011, I couldn’t help but break down and cry. It was my first New Year’s Eve/Day without my wife in twenty-eight years. I guess it was around 1:00 a.m. before I went to bed, but I reminded myself it was now 2011, and 2010 was now a memory…albeit a sad one.

When I awoke late in the morning, I made my way to the kitchen to turn on the coffee pot and TV to college football bowl games, I saw the card from Franciscan Hospice Bereavement Services still lying on the coffee table. I left it there, got my coffee and sat down to watch football. I went through the motions of living through that day, much the same as every other day before since Lou died, until I went to bed. It was like living through the movie, Groundhog Day. January 2 was the same as January 1. I awoke to the same old ceiling realizing that I didn’t die in my sleep once again, dragged myself out of bed and went to the kitchen to make my coffee…again. I sat down in the living room with my freshly brewed coffee and saw the card on the coffee table…again. I stared at it and drank my coffee. How weak was I that I couldn’t get through this by myself? How did other men do it? I’d have taken a bullet for Lou, I’d have taken her cancer from her if I could have and would have died in her place, but I had no idea how to cope with the overwhelming heartache and loneliness that seemed to wash continuously over me and through me. I picked up the card and reached for the phone. I made the call, feeling like a weakling, like I betrayed whatever Man Code there was about sucking it up and moving on. After talking with the head of the bereavement services and securing a place in the group sessions, I cried once again. It felt a little different this time because there was almost a sense of relief. However, the guilt from being weak did not leave.

As February 1 approached, I began to have doubts about going to the group sessions. I wondered how many men would be there, and would I be the only one? I began to try to talk myself out of going, including the morning of February 1 when I awoke. I laid in bed, not wanting to go, not wanting to show my weakness. Nevertheless, I got up, showered, got dressed, made myself some breakfast, took a deep breath, and left the house. I told myself I could always sit in on the first session and then just not return. I got to the building, parked the car, and walked into the office. I was greeted warmly by the receptionist and she showed me the way to the conference room where the session was to be. On the way, I was greeted by the hospice people who had taken care of Lou and showed me how to in their absence. I took a deep breath…again…and walked in. I saw mostly women, and then saw two other men. I breathed a sigh of relief and joined them. The facilitator came into the room, closed the door and introduced herself. She was younger than all of us, but she told us her story. She had lost her husband three years ago and decided to join a bereavement group because none of her friends understood what it was like to lose a spouse. It made no difference how old we were, whether we were male or female, what race or creed we were, whether we were rich, poor or in-between, or what the age differences in the room were, we were united by one common thing: Someone we loved very much and dedicated our lives to had died, and now we were grieving our loss.

We all sat there with tears in our eyes. She sat down and had us go around the table introducing ourselves and telling the others who we had lost and why we decided to attend these sessions. When it got to me, I introduced myself, and through a veil of tears that rolled down my cheeks, told everyone how long my wife and I were married, when she passed away and from what, and that I felt weak for having to come to the sessions because I didn’t know how to handle my grief. I didn’t know how to fight it. There was a moment of silence, and then she told me that I wasn’t weak, that it took a great deal of courage to come forward, to decide to make the call and attend the sessions instead of holing up at home with the grief eating my insides out until I got sick. She said there was no right or wrong way to grieve, there was simply grief, and it was an individual thing unique to each of us that we should acknowledge. She said there was no time limit on grief and it would take as long as it took, and we should let it. She told me that the room we were in was a safe place for all of us to talk about how we felt because we all were suffering from loss, and that we were not alone in our grief. After we had all finished introducing ourselves and telling everyone why we were there, we took a ten-minute break.

Most of us stood, visited the restrooms, or got a drink of water. Of all the people in the room, two of the women didn’t lose their husbands. The youngest, who was somewhere in her mid-to late thirties, had lost her father. The other, who was in her mid-fifties, had lost her mother. The rest of us had lost our spouses. The three of us men found ourselves talking with each other. I was the youngest of them by two years. One was sixty-five and had been married for thirty-four years, and the other was eighty-two and had been married for fifty-eight years. He wanted to leave the group as I had thought I would, but the other gentleman and I had decided to stay because we felt we couldn’t do this by ourselves. The older gentleman thought about it, and said he’d stay if we did. I believe it was the best decision I could have made at that point in my life. I believe it saved my life.

Our group bonded as the sessions progressed. It didn’t take long to realize that we were in a safe place because we were with others who suffered a similar loss and felt the same pain, the same loneliness, the same emptiness, the same fear of not knowing how to cope, and the same fear of being among those who didn’t understand. We drew strength from each other because we understood each other, we listened to each other without judgement, we talked and bared our souls to each other, we cried in front of each other, and no one judged another because we knew how they felt because it was how we felt. Even after the eight sessions ended, we, as a group, did not think we were quite ready to be without each other. We found two different places to meet in the four weeks that followed, then decided to meet at a local restaurant for brunch on the same day at the same time as our previous group sessions. By this time, our original group of twelve was down to eight. In the last five years, the youngest woman who lost her father moved to a different area, another lady lost her only daughter a year after she lost her husband and she joined another group, the oldest gentleman passed away two years ago, and the oldest lady moved to an assisted living facility last year. Now, over seven-and-a-half years after that first session, there are four of us who still meet every Tuesday at 11:00am for brunch. We have become like an extended family to each other.

So how has all this changed me? First, I must admit that my stay in the Burn Ward of Brook Army Medical Center, hardened me to the point that I had little sympathy for people with ‘small’ injuries, including my own. To even see pro football players take a hit and lie writhing about on the ground, then being attended to by the trainers, and finally rolling over and getting to their feet to run off the field for one play, was hard for me to stomach, especially after seeing helicopter pilots and co-pilots get shot more than once and still be able to fly their choppers back to base, bouncing a landing sideways and smoking and crawl away from the wreckage, or seeing the other door-gunner get shot and return fire using only one arm. It took me a few years to realize that those chopper pilots, co-pilots and door gunners were a cut or two above most civilians I knew, and I should not have bothered to compare them. I had to relearn or reawaken compassion for people who had no idea what I saw military personnel and veterans go through. I am still a work in progress.

After my wife died, I became one of those weaklings that I had become intolerant of. For the first time in decades, I cried. I wept. My heart ached, I wanted to give up and die because I could not handle my emotions. It would have been easier had I shut down like I did when my first fiancée died and I joined the Army. Yes, I did have other relationships afterward, but when I felt that I was getting too close and could get hurt, I’d distance myself a bit and then tell whoever I was with, “Well, I guess I’d best be movin’ right along,” and then I’d leave. It took a long time to recover my feelings, and it was difficult feel vulnerable again, but I did it. I had to if I wanted to have any kind of a meaningful relationship, if I really wanted to fall in love with someone. And I did!

When my wife died, there was a point that I could have ‘turned it off’ and gone on, but I made a choice not to. I made a choice that I would never again shut down, that I would feel every nuance of my loss, as hard as it was for as long as it took. I hurt so badly I wanted to die, I prayed that I’d die. I had never felt that way before…ever! And then I was in it and had no idea how to handle it. It has been said that God only gives a person what he or she can handle. I used to believe that, but I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that things happen and God is just there waiting to be turned to, waiting to be asked for love, for support, for strength, for comfort. I don’t believe that God is like a spiritual ATM that will give you money or make you rich if you pray for it. He has told us, through His Son, Jesus Christ, that His Kingdom is not of this world. After what I’ve seen and experienced, I believe that. I also believe that my faith in Him has provided the support I’ve needed to make it through some tough times. Even though I was angry at God for letting my wife die, I realized I still believed in Him because I was angry at Him. There were so many times I would rail at Him, ask Him why, even though I knew the answer. He lets things happen and life on earth goes on with or without one, yet He is always there for us. When the weight of my grief would drop me to my knees and I could barely breathe because of the ache in my chest, I would ask Him for respite and He would grant it. Every time. It’s a matter of Faith. I have a relationship with God.

I also believe that the amount of grief one feels is directly proportional to how much he or she loved. Grief is the price of Love. I was beginning to understand, and I was grateful for that. With the understanding, came the empathy, being able to understand what others were going through when they lost a spouse or loved one. It’s difficult enough to lose family members, especially one’s own children because they are the flesh and blood of a union between a husband and wife who chose to love each other, and that is what makes losing a spouse to death so hard. A spouse is not family until he or she is chosen by the other to love and cherish, and they choose you back. Once I learned all this, I wanted to pay it forward, to give what I learned to those who need it, to those who want it. I will always be a work-in-progress. Someday, I hope to be the person God wants me to be. This is what I hope.

Oh! And yes, though I experienced such crushing grief, not shutting down emotionally turned out to be a most wonderful thing! I have found love again, with my Debbie.

Life can be…and is…good! Keep the Faith!

This is how I’ve changed.