Did You Have A Thanksgiving?

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., a day of turkey with all the trimmings, or ham with all its different trimmings, or lasagna…or whatever…and a day of football games and perhaps old movies. People celebrate so many different things…and rightly so, because the first “thanksgiving” was probably just a feast put on by the Pilgrims from the Mayflower and the Wampanoag, who probably crashed the party but were welcomed and even provided deer meat for the feast. President George Washington, by proclamation in 1789, called for the last Thursday in November to be a day of Thanksgiving to nationalize the tradition. In 1939, President Roosevelt wanted to change the date and make it earlier because he thought it would be good for consumer spending, but some states disagreed. Finally, in 1941, congress enacted legislation that President Roosevelt signed into law making Thanksgiving the last Thursday of November. This information is courtesy of Politifact.

This Thanksgiving was, most likely, a day celebrated with family and/or friends. Yes, we were memorializing a tradition that most people really know little about. Our ‘traditions’ are probably much more centered around food, family and football. But what about “thanksgiving?” What about being thankful for what we have? Leading up to this holiday, I’ve read a lot negativity from “the few” about Thanksgiving being a ‘white privilege’ holiday, about white foreign invaders taking everything from the indigenous people of North America (Indians), and so on, and honestly, I could not care less about what they write or say about the non-political correctness of this holiday, nor will I ever be guilted into paying reparations for anything that was done over four hundred years ago, or even a hundred sixty years ago…or yesterday. No living person now can be held responsible, or should be held responsible, for what happened then. It happened. Time to move on, get jobs, and quit whining. Someone always has it worse. What concerns me is what’s happening now in 2017.

Debbie and I celebrated our Thanksgiving at home, quietly and happily. We had a leisurely morning, having our tea and coffee, some breakfast, and relaxing. Then we hit the kitchen and I got to be sous chef, doing some slicing and dicing for our Thanksgiving dinner of scalloped purple potatoes, farro-caramelized onion-mushroom dressing, homemade creamed corn-and-oyster casserole, and ham. Debbie assembled and cooked it all, and it was delicious! Neither Debbie or I had ever tried using purple potatoes for scalloped potatoes, nor had we ever tried the farro dressing or the creamed corn-and-oyster casserole before, but they all turned out great and are “keepers,” as far as I’m concerned! We do love to try new recipes. After that, we sat and binge-watched a few episodes of This is Us, just enough football to see that the Washington Redskins beat the New York Giants, and then topped it off with a recorded episode of Wheeler Dealers as they bought, restored and sold a 1989 Ford Escort RS Cosworth. It was a beautiful, eclectic, and peaceful day for us. I am so thankful for Debbie.

We all celebrate our holidays in similar-but-different ways. As I get older, I begin to realize that I have much to be thankful for because of the things I’ve survived and all the personal losses I’ve had. I believe a lot of people are that way, especially the older they get. I am thankful to have survived rheumatic fever, bad choices, Vietnam, a plane crash, and so far, my diabetes. I’m thankful to have loved and learned what I did during twenty-eight years of marriage to Lou, who passed away seven years ago. I am so thankful that I live in a country that allows me the freedom and opportunities to own a comfortable home, to have more-than-basic amenities like heat, lights and (eye-roll) internet, a bank account, a refrigerator and pantry full of good and healthy food, a dependable car, and the freedom and ability to write and say pretty much what I want to. I am more thankful that I am in relatively good health, am retired and have some means to remain so. I am thankful that I had parents who raised me in a loving home, instilled in me a good work ethic and taught me that nothing in this world is free except the air to breathe (until someone finds a way to tax us for that, too), and that whatever is worth having is worth working for. I am thankful to have music, love, life, family, friends, faith in God, and that I can still sing a little, to name a few things. I am most thankful for Debbie. I am thankful for ALL these things, my family and friends, and for Debbie every day!

What are you thankful for? I don’t need to know this, but I believe that you do. By the way, thank you to whoever reads this. May your thanksgivings happen every day.

An Overdue Letter to My Mom

Hi, Mama.

Here’s wishing you a Happy (and very) Belated Birthday and also a belated Happy Mother’s Day! I can’t believe you’d have been ninety-six on May 17. It’s hard to believe you’ve been gone for thirty years, but I’m glad you’re with Dad now. I’ve missed you both and think of you both almost every day…still. You’re probably wondering why I’m writing to you after all these years, but I’ve wanted to tell you for a very long time how much you have shaped my life and to thank you for all you did for me. I am proud to be your son. I’m sure you heard it from Dad since I wrote to him first, but I wanted you to know that you are my hero. Yes, I told Dad in a letter to him a few months ago, but now I want you to hear it from me. You are the most amazing person, and by far, the strongest, most steadfast person I’ve ever known.

Things sure have changed here since you went home to God, but I think you know that. I’ll bet you’re glad you don’t have to teach under the conditions that many teachers do nowadays. It seems the kids have more rights now than those who teach them, and so many parents hold those teachers accountable for the failure of their children instead of the children themselves, or because those parents were too permissive and didn’t instill any respect or values in them like you and dad did with Jim and me. It doesn’t take “a village to raise a child,” it takes real parents like you were.

Mom, Grandpa Ariong, Uncle Tony, Grandma Naty, Uncle Severo

Do you know why you are my hero, Mom? It’s because you refused to be defeated throughout your life. You led a rather protected life in the Philippines, in a beautiful large house with manicured grounds surrounded by a high wall and gated where your family had maids, a gardener, a chef, a butler/chauffeur, and you even had your own maid. You played the piano so well you could have been a concert pianist. Your father was a city engineer for Manila, your family were frequent guests at the President’s palace and highlighted in the Society section of the Manila newspapers. Many of your relatives were either doctors, attorneys or senators in the Philippine government. You had it made.

You went to an all-girls Catholic school from grades one through twelve, and continued at a Catholic University until you were a sophomore and the Japanese bombed Manila during World War II. The incendiary bombs almost burned Manila to the ground, and your entire household packed all the food and family silver and left Manila on foot. Your beautiful home burned to the ground, and then your maid was shot by a Japanese sniper. Your father’s knowledge of the terrain surrounding Manila helped you escape the city by hiding out in the swamps, and it took you some time before you reached Baguio in the north, where you stayed with your aunt at her villa. When the Japanese finally occupied Baguio, I know they took your father to design and build bridges for them through the mountains and the swamps to help the Japanese keep supply lines open. That’s probably what kept the rest of your family safe. Still, your father was able to get information past his Japanese captors to the guerilla fighters so they could plant explosive charges and blow up his bridges after they were completed. You didn’t find out about that part until after the American forces landed and drove the Japanese forces from Baguio. I remember him as being one of the kindest and gentlest men I’ve ever known.

Isn’t that when you finally met dad? You told me the American forces asked permission of your aunt to set up their headquarters on her property near her villa and she consented. Dad was one of the general’s aides, wasn’t he? I know that you told me you met at a dance and he was such a handsome soldier. He was a major by then, wasn’t he? I’m thankful you told me these things, Mom. I thought it was so respectful of Dad to ask your father for your hand in marriage, and incredibly insightful of your father to tell him yes, but only under the condition that he had to return to the United States when the war ended, think it over, and if he was serious and truly loved you, he would return to the Philippines to marry you. I guess you know the answer to that, don’t you?

Mom’s and Dad’s wedding photo, July 1946

He did! I’ve seen the photos of you both when you were living in the Philippines and Dad worked for the State Department, and then with me as a baby. You both were so young and such a beautiful couple. I know it had to be difficult to make the decision to leave your home, your family, your country to accompany Dad back to the United States to really begin your new life. I know it was even more difficult to end up living next door to Grandma and Grandpa Ellison, especially when Grandma Ellison didn’t think you were good enough to marry her only son because you were Filipina and Catholic. Wow. Two strikes right there. I think the single, saving grace was the kindness and acceptance of us by Grandpa Ellison. He was a good man, and I can see where Dad got his character and his values. In a way, I can understand why we ended up living beside Grandma and Grandpa Ellison. Dad was their only child and loved his parents very much.

Dad, Mom, and me at one month

I know it was difficult for you, Mom, but you must know that Dad loved you so much and was so proud of you, regardless of what Grandma thought, or thought she wanted for him. He knew what he wanted…you! I know that. I could see it whenever he looked at you. You knew nothing of housekeeping, washing clothes or cooking when you first came to the U.S., but you learned. All you knew how to do was to play the piano. I still have your first Betty Crocker Cookbook. I also know that Dad spent an inordinate amount of time away from home because he was building his dream, the resort. He wanted that resort so much and he wanted it to be a success to provide for you. I know those years were tight, especially when you gave birth to Jim. You even learned to sew and used to buy material to make our clothes. Do you know that I still remember the Davy Crockett flannel shirt you made for me? I loved it, Mom, because it was a Davy Crockett shirt, and that you made it for me. And I loved all the sweater vests you made for me, too. I was proud to wear them.

That’s me, holding my 1 month-old brother, Jim

I also know it was a little easier when Dad and Sig Stockholm built our new home a bit farther away from Grandma. It almost seemed we were in a different world there and we could breathe easier. I know that your dad designed it and that the mahogany ‘tiles’ for the walls was Philippine mahogany. Bill Permenter built our beautiful Arizona sandstone fireplace. It was beautiful home, Mom, and Dad wanted that for you and all of us.

You even became a Naturalized Citizen of the United States! I remember the day we all went to Seattle to watch you and be with you when you took the oath to become a citizen. You studied for the exam, aced it, and then you became an American Citizen. I know how proud you were, and I know how proud Dad was of you! It wasn’t too long after that when you were asked to teach Spanish at Langley, was it? I remember the State of Washington even granted you a special certificate to teach, even though the war interrupted your college education in the Philippines. You taught, and then went to the University of Washington during the summers to get your degree. You stayed at the dorm during the week and came home on weekends. I took care of Jim, Dad took care of both of us and ran the resort, and you studied so hard and did so well. I remember the summer quarter that you challenged some classes and got twenty-two credits! You were amazing! I also remember how angry you were when you got a B. You graduated with a degree in Romance Languages with a minor in Education, and you got your Phi Beta Kappa key, too. No more special certificate for you! You even got your Master’s Degree. We were all so proud of you! I still am.

Everything you did, you did to the very best of your ability. You could have been a concert pianist, Mom. Though you weren’t, you gave me my appreciation for music. One of my first memories was when I was three and we lived in the ‘little house’ next to Grandma’s. I dragged a cushion off the couch, put it on the floor and sat on it. You were playing a Rachmaninoff concerto and when I leaned back against the side of your spinet piano, I was shocked to be able to not only hear the music, but to feel it all the way through my back to my breast bone and forehead. I could feel the emotion with which you played, Mom, and it has stuck with me all these years. When I sing in church with our praise team band, I sing that way…with emotion. Music became a salve for my soul a long time ago because of you! Thank you for that gift. I wish you could have heard me sing in church just once. It’s okay, though, because not even the boys have ever heard me sing in church, either.

I know that I had you and dad wondering where you went wrong with me because of some of the things I did and the decisions I made, probably from the age of ten on. I know I caused you a lot grief but I was trying to find out who and what I was and where I fit, and have some fun along the way. I must tell you that I had a tough time trying to live up to your expectations especially in high school and college, and I rebelled big-time. You were a tough act to follow. Although I made some wonderful friends at Oak Harbor, I wish you had never taken me out of Langley at the end of my sophomore year. I felt that I was just beginning to grow as a person, a student and an athlete, and then I had to start over as a junior at a new and larger school. Yes, I did okay. I made some new friends there that I still have, but I did feel a bit displaced my junior year. You and Dad pushed me hard, especially after you made me take that IQ test. I know it was a test for ‘potential,’ but I felt doomed when the results came back and knew you’d want me to live up to my score. It was brutal, Mom. I hated it because I wasn’t you.

I still graduated in the upper fifth of my class with a 3.14 grade point average, and did get accepted to Washington State University. I thought I wanted to be a civil engineer because that’s what your and Dad’s vision was. I took a load of math, chemistry and physics classes, along with some general engineering classes, and began to realize it was not what I really wanted. You wanted me to follow in your father’s footsteps, but after the first year, I was only an average student because I was beginning to feel that I didn’t want to be a civil engineer. I had no passion for it. It only took the next semester to show that, and because of the heavy partying and, to put it mildly and succinctly, my unruliness, the Dean of Men finally invited me to his office, made me pay for a replacement door to my dorm room because of the burn marks, and told me I had three days to get off his campus and to never return until he was dead. I know that was not your vision, nor was it exactly mine though it served my purpose…I got out and had a lot of fun before I left.

You know I spent the next year at Everett Junior (now Community) College, trying to raise my grade point average, but I was only wasting my money and time, so I dropped out and joined the Army. Lynn’s death had a lot to do with that, too. From that point, it took two years, nine months, nine days, one hour and forty minutes worth of the U.S. Army, including duty stations at Fort Lewis, Washington, Fort Ord, California, Fort Gordon, Georgia, Fort Lewis, Washington, Cu Chi, Republic of Vietnam, a plane crash in Anchorage trying to return to Vietnam, and finally the burn ward at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas before I saw home again for any length of time. It was a rocky ride and a tough trip, but I made it back. Had all my promotions been ‘linear,’ I’d have gotten out as a Command Sergeant Major. As it was, I was lucky to get out as a Specialist 4^th Class. I was told I had an anger-management problem. Anyway, the physical scars healed a lot quicker than the mental and emotional scars. It seems I still pick the occasional scab off one of them now and then, and have to let it scab-over again, trying not to pick at it until it heals and just itches occasionally.

I must tell you, though, that I enjoyed the brief time I spent at home after I was discharged from the Army because we finally got to talk about life after those hectic years, and I got to know you and Dad more as people than just “Mom and Dad.” I was grateful and quite surprised that you apologized to me for pushing so hard after you saw my IQ test score, and for not asking what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had to gently remind you that once, while I was in high school, I did tell you and Dad what I wanted to do, but I was outvoted. I wanted to buy an old sportscar and restore it so I could drive it to school. I was already working summers, and I had a plan to work after school to make even more money so I could afford to buy parts and still save for college. But both you and Dad said no. Neither of you wanted me to be a mechanic and that I should be a civil engineer instead. Dad said I’d be spending every spare moment working at some job or on the car instead of doing my homework. He was probably right, but at least he’d have known where I was on weekends. That’s when he bought that blue ’58 Volkswagen Bug and told me I could drive it and learn how to maintain it. It was like the time he taught me how to drive that old ’53 Chevy dump truck with a four-speed, non-synchromesh transmission when I was fifteen. He told me if I could drive that thing, I could drive almost anything on the planet. That was a lot of fun. As for the VW, well, I did learn how to tune it up and maintain it, and I was grateful for it, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

It took a while, Mom, but that time at home helped. I decided I could try to combine whatever engineering and math I learned with the drawing skills I learned from Professor Douglas. I decided I was going to go back to school to become an architect, so I did, and I did well this time. After four straight quarters at Shoreline Community College, I graduated with an Associate’s Degree in Arts and Sciences with a 3.8 grade point average, taking physics, calculus and art classes. I was accepted into the University of Washington School of Architecture and Urban Planning. I was on my way.

Anyway, I guess life got in the way and you sort of know the rest. I met a girl, got married, we had a son, I dropped out of school, got a job at Seafirst Bank using what education I had and became a space planner, a project coordinator, a project manager, had another son, became a Purchasing Officer and furnished bank branches and administrative offices across the state, and was drinking too much. I guess the stress of work and family life and those old mental and emotional scars were too much of a load for me to carry. Then, very suddenly, Dad died. I was numb. I know you were devastated. I wish I could have helped you more emotionally, Mom, but I didn’t know what to do except, with the help of Jim, take care of the bills, make the burial and memorial service arrangements, and let you grieve. I wish I would have known what to do. All I could do was be there. Along the way, my home life suffered, and I didn’t get to grieve for Dad.

I began to drink even more, thinking I could anesthetize myself from the stress and pain, but it didn’t work. On June 12, 1980, I took my last drink and checked into a treatment center. I was a hot mess. Twenty-eight days later, I emerged sober but still wanting to drink. Thanks to AA, I didn’t. Shortly afterward, the nine-year marriage ended. I left the bank and went to work for a commercial furnishings dealership with the idea that I could use my experience from the bank to make it as a salesperson, space-planner, and custom furniture designer. It was about this time that I married Lou. I knew her from my days at Seafirst. My “success” sure took a while…like almost eleven years, which included a six-year stint with two custom furniture manufacturers and another five years as a partner in a minority-owned commercial furnishings dealership. I did okay, but not as well as I’d wanted.

It was about a year after I became a partner in that minority-owned dealership that you died, Mom, just over ten years after Dad died. Once again, life got put on hold as Jim and I took care of the estate, the will, the bills, and your memorial service and funeral arrangements. I missed you, Mom, and didn’t get a chance to grieve for you. Your leaving us left a big hole in our lives. We left the house pretty much as you did for a few years until we decided that it was time for us to cut the ties to the island and sell the house. Neither of us had the time to take as good care of the house as we would have wanted.

About the time Jim and I sold the house, I adopted Lou’s sons, Craig and Blake. I’m glad I did. Four years or so later, I got this great job at another dealership as a GSA salesperson where Lou worked. I got to use everything I had ever done before to become successful as a GSA salesperson to the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the Coast Guard, NOAA, and the U.S. Army, doing their space planning, specifying their furniture, designing custom furniture for conference and reception areas, selling it all to them, and managing the electrical work, and the delivery and installation of their new furnishings. The last ten years I worked there, I never had to make a “cold call.” The dealership was sold in 2001, renamed and moved from Seattle to Bellevue, and Lou I worked together for fifteen years total before we retired in March of 2009.

We had one good year together as retirees before Lou was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died eight months later, on Dad’s birthday in 2010. It was her third bout of cancer since 2005. It was then I realized what you went through when Dad died. The pain and loneliness was unbelievable. I think I was able to finally grieve for Dad and for you, too, after all those years. I must say that it took a while before I grew accustomed to my ‘new normal’ of being alone. Joining a bereavement group was a big help to me. I wish I would have known enough when Dad died to try to find such a group for you, Mom. It wouldn’t have been quite as lonely to be with those who truly understood what you were going through. I believe it would have helped you emotionally. I’m so sorry for that.

About seven months after Lou died, I went on my first road trip alone. I sure cried that first day because it was the first time in over twenty-eight years that I went on vacation without Lou. I was so surprised when it got better every day after that. At the end of two weeks, I had travelled about three thousand miles to places I’d never been and took about 1,400 photos of Paradise, Lake Oroville, Lake Tahoe, Heavenly Valley, San Jose, Carmel, and Monterey, California. Two weeks later, I went to the family reunion in Lakeside, Montana near the north end of Flathead Lake. On a whim, I went to Glacier Park, drove around the eastern side of Lake Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and stopped at the Columbia River overlook just east of Vantage. Once again, I took another 1,400 photographs and travelled close to 3,000 miles again. I was a new man, Mom. Life had become exhilarating again!

Then, about nine months after Lou passed away, and almost three weeks after I returned home, I met Debbie. It felt as though we had found each other after never expecting we’d find anyone! We fell in love three days after we met, hiking and photographing at Paradise on Mount Rainier. It was idyllic and fitting for us. You’d like her, Mom. You’d love her, too. She’s so good to me and for me. I’m truly happy again. I’ve been blessed beyond measure!

For someone who didn’t want any drama in his life, I guess I created a lot of it around me just because I didn’t think about consequences with regard to others…especially you and Dad…and I’m so sorry for that. As I seem to have 20/20 hindsight, I can’t shake the feeling that I failed you and Dad numerous times when I was younger. It almost feels as though I blundered my way through the china-shop of life, breaking a lot of things as I bulled ahead…and sometimes backward. I honestly didn’t expect to live this long. I expected you and Dad would outlive me, but instead, here I am. Since I am not blessed with the gift of foresight, I have no idea what my purpose is. I simply keep living a day-at-a-time, as best as I can, and as I always have done. Yes, I do make some plans, but they’re more rough outlines until I get close enough to figure out what I’m going to do once I get there. I hope, though, that I have made you a little proud of me along the way, even if it’s nothing more than I’ve managed to survive things that killed others. Yes, I know I’m a bit too glib.

I’m sorry this is so long, but I wanted to tell you these things. You are still, and always will be, my hero. I love you, Mom, and miss you so much. Still.

Your son,

Bob

PS – Is there golf up there? Just wondering…I’d dearly love to play one more round with Dad. Please tell him ‘hi’ from me, okay?

Life Comes Around

Life Comes Around

It has been about three months since I’ve written anything except for some short descriptions of photos I’ve put on my personal Facebook page, and some miscellaneous comments on political posts that I’m tired of seeing. A lot has happened in the months I haven’t written, including my mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, a family reunion in Bemidji, Minnesota, and an ensuing road trip through South Dakota because Debbie and I haven’t been there before. I’ve also attended one of my high school’s “Class of ’65 Turns 70” mini-reunion/70^th birthday party get-together on south Whidbey Island, a “Krusty Pup” taste test for two different hotdog blends deep-fried with the same batter for the upcoming Washington State Fair in Puyallup, a return to South Whidbey for an old friend-and-classmate’s memorial service, a following reception and celebration of his life, and a pig roast.

Everything I’ve encountered during this time has reminded me of family and friends I’ve lost, family and friends I still have, people “left behind” after the deaths of their spouses, sights I’ve gotten to see with Debbie that we’d only seen in photos, and of my own mortality. These things have elicited both bittersweet and wonderful memories, and empathy for those experiencing deep grief. I also have an appreciation of how every state has its own innate beauty and ruggedness. South Dakota, you may ask? Yes! Whatever preconceived ideas you may have of what South Dakota may be like, toss them. To me, South Dakota is beautiful in its variations, from rolling farmlands or prairie on one side of the road to an immediate drop-off into the Badlands on the other, seeing rivers, lakes, wildlife, and historical sites. Being from the Pacific Northwest, the only downside to South Dakota was the heat. Almost every day, the temperature was somewhere between 95 and 100 degrees, from Sioux Falls to Sturgis, and that included side trips to The Badlands, Wall Drugs, the Mammoth Dig in Hot Springs, Deadwood, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Mt. Rushmore, Custer, and Custer State Park, and then Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, to name a few. It was hot, but it was beautiful! And we were blessed to see what we could, time allowing. Perhaps I’ll write more about our road trip later.

Now, I’m remembering my childhood friend and classmate who passed away suddenly just over three weeks ago. Life goes on for the rest of us, even his widow…but it’s so different for her now. Her life has almost come to a stand-still. She is marking time, grieving deeply and privately, and most probably, wanting to join him. For some time, each day will feel the same to her as the day before, and she will relive the pain of her loss and the sudden, crushing loneliness without him. I know she has the support and prayers of her children and grandchildren, as well as her closest friends, and Langley’s Class of ’65, but right now, that will be of little consolation to her. She must now take the time to grieve. I said this when my wife passed away, and it still holds true: The memorial service provides closure for everyone else except the surviving spouse and close family.

4th birthday Party at the resort with Johnny and Carol Jackson, me, Betty and Bobby Blasko.

I really can’t remember how my old friend and I first met, but I suspect that it was through our dads. My dad was building a resort, and his dad, Paul, was a carpenter. I suspect Paul helped dad build the boathouse and some of the cabins. I remember celebrating my 4^th birthday at the resort and my friend, Bobby (yes, another Bob) his older sister, Betty, were celebrating with me and several others. When school started in the fall, Bobby and I were in the same first grade classroom and played together every recess. We were practically inseparable. I can remember us running almost everywhere on the playground together. Through the grade school and junior high years, though we occasionally would end up in different classrooms because there were two classrooms for every grade, we remained good friends. I can remember visiting him at their home just off the Bush Point Road, west and north of Freeland until they moved into Langley. I can also remember getting in trouble with him for talking and laughing too much during class whenever we were in the same home room. I can also remember how not-pleased mom and dad were when I’d bring home a grade school report card with a minus in the “Deportment” section and a note from the teacher that Bobby and I talked too much. It seemed I didn’t have that problem when we were in different classrooms.

Though we remained friends, we drifted apart in high school because we took different classes and had developed different interests. My parents transferred me to Oak Harbor at the beginning of my junior year, and I lost touch with Bob until our twenty-year reunion. From then, I only saw him at the reunions I attended…the twenty-fifth, thirtieth, fortieth and fiftieth reunions…and only got to speak with him briefly. For that matter, I lost touch with all my Langley and Oak Harbor classmates until we’d meet at the reunions. But since the fiftieth reunions for both schools, I am now able to keep in touch with several classmates from Langley and Oak Harbor on Facebook, and we do get to visit occasionally at parties, pig roasts, or breakfasts. And I must say, I love seeing them all!

Trinity Lutheran Church, Freeland, WA

Two weekends ago, I said my final good-bye to Bob. Whether it was or wasn’t important to others that I be there, it was important for me. I do know that many people, including me, went to the service to honor Bob and show support for his wife, Joan, and his family. It also was…and is…a reminder to me of our mortality, that life on earth is not guaranteed for any specific time. I didn’t get to see Joan at the service, but I did see her at the reception afterward. She was surrounded by a lot of their friends offering their condolences, and she looked as if she was holding up well. I waited until they had all finished before I approached her. She saw me and hugged me, and she whispered, “The pain is overwhelming.” I whispered back, “I’m so sorry, Joan. I know.” We talked for a few minutes and I told her I would be ‘there’ for her if she needed to talk. I don’t know that she will, but I wanted her to know that I understood and would be there should she feel she can’t talk with anyone else.

Just after we parted, I felt a hand on my arm. I stopped and turned to see who it was, and she said, “Do you remember me?” It was my eighth-grade girlfriend, Linda. I hadn’t seen her in years, probably since my mom’s funeral in 1987, or possibly briefly during one of my class reunions. We hugged and laughed and told each other how good it was to see each other again after all those years. Then her eyes dropped and she asked if I knew that she had lost her husband, Roger, another of my classmates, three years ago. I told her that I had and that I was sorry for her loss. She knew I had lost my wife almost seven years ago, and she told me that she had thought of reaching out to me, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She said she didn’t want to bother me. I told her I wished she would have. I asked her how she was coping, and she said that she still had some rough spots, even after three years, but she was now beginning to emerge from her social isolation. I let her know that she could get in touch with me any time just to talk. I hope she will. She also told me she was going to buy my book. If she does, I truly hope it helps her realize she is not alone in the way she feels.

All of us who have lost a spouse go through similar phases. The first phase seems to be the shock of the loss, no matter if one’s spouse has been sick and slowly dying, as mine was, or has died suddenly. No one is ever ready for that loss. I wasn’t, though I was my wife’s primary care-giver and watched her brain tumors claim a little more of her every day until she quietly passed away one morning just after I finished cleaning her up and dressing her in her favorite nighty. I was in shock until the pain of the loss hit me. In most cases, it is such an overwhelming pain that seems to squeeze so hard it can be difficult to breathe. And in that pain, is a devastating, crushing loneliness. For me, it felt as though I was the last person on earth, that my heart and soul had been ripped from my body, and the woman I loved so much was no longer there to love me back. The worst part was there was no hope she ever would be. Sometimes the intensely pointed pain subsided to become the most paralyzing ache I had ever experienced, and I wanted to die just to be with her and to stop the pain, the ache, and the loneliness.

It may take hours, or days, or weeks, but anger may creep into the mix, too, to sometimes replace the alternating pain and ache and the now-constant loneliness, or to augment it. The anger that may directed at the deceased spouse can stem from many reasons, and among them are leaving the surviving spouse alone so suddenly, for leaving like this, for getting sick, for not taking good enough care of one’s self, for not going to the doctor sooner, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The anger can be directed at the doctors, the hospital, or the method of treatment for not being able to save the spouse. The anger can also be directed at one’s self, for not insisting the spouse take better care of him- or herself, for not realizing sooner how sick he or she was, for not getting the spouse to the doctor sooner or getting another doctor’s opinion, for not doing enough, or for merely surviving. And eventually, it boils down to the questions, why him or why her, and then, why me?

No matter the reason for the loss, it seems to be easier for the surviving spouse to assume the burden of guilt for the loss, for the cause of the loss, for the anger of the loss, for not doing enough, or for just surviving. Sometimes, others will add to the burden of guilt with a comment like, “Well, you’ve gotten over her (or his) death quickly,” implying that you didn’t take long enough to grieve as they thought you should have. Or perhaps someone will comment, “Oh. You’re still grieving? I thought you’d be over that by now.” Those are people who have no clue, and the best response is to walk away. At some time or another, I believe we all feel some guilt for whatever reason, even if we must make it up because we may feel the need to place blame somewhere. It can be such an impediment to overcome to begin the healing process.

Since the length of time for grieving is open-ended, how does one begin to heal from such a loss? From my personal experience, I believe that one must grieve before one can heal. There is no right way or wrong way to grieve, though some ways may seem incongruous to others. There is also no specific length of time as to how long one grieves, so don’t believe what others may tell you. Grief is a highly personal and individual response to loss. It is the emotional suffering from the loss of someone we love and it takes however long it takes to work through it. The loss of siblings and parents are enormous losses. The loss of a child is absolutely devastating because parents don’t get over the death of a child. They must find a way to come to terms with that loss, and then live with it for the rest of their lives. It can destroy marriages because of guilt and blame.

However, the single thing that makes grieving the death of a spouse or a partner different, is that the spouse or partner was not related. You chose that person to love, and that special person chose to love you back. You invest yourselves, your separate lives, to share and build a life together, and then when you lose your spouse to death, it leaves you with half a life left to live, and you will have to learn to live as a single entity once again. That is a major adjustment, especially if you and your spouse have been married for many years.

If you find that you are not coping with your grief, I would suggest seeking professional help or a bereavement group, to be with others who understand what you are experiencing because they are experiencing it also. It does help many to cry and talk about how they feel, to ‘get it out’ so it doesn’t eat at them from the inside. It helps to know that you are not alone in whatever you feel. And know that you are not weak to want to or need to attend a bereavement group. It takes courage to ask for help. That’s what I was told because I thought I wasn’t strong enough to cope with the death of my wife by myself. If I could have, I’d have taken her cancer from her, I’d have taken her sickness on myself, I’d have taken a bullet for her, I’d have wrestled God for her. I didn’t know how to fight this grief from her loss, though.

However, with the help of the counsellors in my bereavement group, I learned I didn’t need to fight the grief. I needed to acknowledge it, experience it, let it work its way through me in its own time, and to have patience with myself. And for me, I prayed a lot. It all helped me find my “new normal” life and find happiness and a new love once again. I wish this for all who have lost a spouse or lifetime partner. Now, I want to help those who have lost a spouse because I finally understand. Life does come around.

Oh! And the pig roast? It was amazing and a wonderful way to end that long, emotional, and thoughtful day on Whidbey Island with so many people who are becoming closer friends.

A Milestone Birthday…for Me

A Milestone Birthday

I Wish You Enough – a poem by Bob Perks

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.

I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.

I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.

I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.

I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.

I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.

I wish you enough “Hellos” to get you through the final “Goodbye.”

I am grateful to have lived this long because I now realize that I have always had enough, like the poem says. I celebrated my seventieth birthday on Easter Sunday. Wow. Seventy years old. I can’t believe it. Sure, so many others have celebrated their seventieth birthdays and beyond, sometimes far beyond, so maybe it’s no big deal to you, but it is to me. You see, I never expected that I’d live through my twenties. I have survived rheumatic fever and a heart murmur as a young teenager, Vietnam, a plane crash that killed forty-seven people in my early twenties, being diagnosed with PTSD seventeen years after I was discharged from the hospital and the Army at forty-one, and being diagnosed with diabetes at the age of forty-seven. That was the physical stuff.

I lost my first friend, Pam, to leukemia when I was six years old. My Grandpa Ellison passed away at the age of sixty-four when I was eleven. My father passed away at fifty-nine when I was almost thirty. Between the ages of thirty and forty, I lost my Grandma Ellison, and my Grandpa and Grandma Baltasar. My mother passed away when she was sixty-six and I had just turned forty. I have also survived the deaths of friends, girlfriends, close friends, a fiancée, uncles and aunts, fellow soldiers, high school and college classmates, and the loss of my wife of twenty-eight years when I was sixty-three. The loss of my wife in 2010 caused me to want to die. Yet, and despite having diabetes, here I am. I know, though, that I could go at any time for any reason. It says in the bible (paraphrased) that only God knows the number of our days. I believe that, but I do try to be as healthy as I can…now. The reason for that, for me, is a quality of life issue as well as being blessed with another Great Love…my Debbie. I want to be as healthy and active as I can, experiencing the joys of sharing life and love with her right up to the time I drop. I’ve always joked that I want to be sliding sideways, dirty, naked and broke, right into the grave, completely used up. I’m afraid there’s more truth to that than many believe.

Being alive for seventy years has brought a lot of scars. It also brings empathy and some knowledge. I don’t quite think the way I did when I was eighteen and almost indestructible, but I do tend to look at many things the same way. That may be a drawback, but seldom have I been accused of acting my age. Yes, it can be a drawback. I did come up with a ‘new’ definition of the word, maturity, years ago…for me. Per Bob, maturity is the realization that I am older and slower than I was at eighteen, and I can now be caught from behind. So, I don’t do what I did when I was eighteen. But what else have I learned in all these years?

In my youth, my first “ah-ha” moment occurred when I was three and realized that I could lose myself in music when I pulled a cushion off the couch to sit on the floor with my back against the right side of my mother’s spinet piano while she was playing. I’ve said before that I believe my mother could have become a concert pianist, but the first time I leaned back against the piano while she was playing a Rachmaninoff concerto, I felt the music through my head and back, all the way to my breastbone at the same time I was hearing it. I could not only hear the music, I could feel it and feel the emotion with which mom played. From that moment, every time my mother would play, I would sit on the floor and lean back against the piano and feel the music and let it take me where it would. Few people can say they got to hear and feel music written by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven, to name a few of the more famous composers. It was then I began to learn how music could affect people, especially me.

In elementary school, I learned that I was somehow ‘different,’ and that words can hurt. I made a lot of friends and was accepted, but there were always a couple of bullies who would push me around and call me names. I was the little brown boy, a half-breed, a “flip” because I was half Filipino and smaller than most. That pretty much ended in the third grade when I fought the class bully to a draw in the coat closet. We hurt each other, but he never touched me again. I became less afraid of getting hurt and learned I could make a difference by standing up to bullies for myself and for others. I never lost another fight. I also learned what I had felt, and what Martin Luther King put into words almost a decade later, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Grandpa & me, The Fishermen

When I was eleven, my Grandpa Ellison died from a second stroke two weeks after he was sent home to recuperate after his first stroke. He was a kind and gentle man who taught me how to fish and took me with him and his best friend, Charlie. When I was six, he gave me my first fishing pole and a level-wind reel. He taught me how to use his table saw and drill press. He taught me how to use his hand planes and the rest of his tools. He taught me how to carve things from wood, make whistles from willow branches, and about his cherry and apple trees. He taught me about the outdoors. He gave me my first pocket knife. It was the knife he had carried for decades. He was my buffer from Grandma Ellison, who lacked empathy for my mother because she was Filipina and Catholic, and not good enough for her son. She didn’t have much to do with us though we lived right next to her. Her actions only reinforced how I felt about discrimination. I loved my Grandpa Ellison and his loss left an empty place in my life. I wanted so much to go to his funeral to say good-bye, but I wasn’t allowed. I had to stay home and take care of my little brother while mom, dad and grandma went to his funeral. I was angry about that, but I did as they said. Children know and feel more than adults think they do. I believe children should be given the option to attend funerals of loved ones to pay their last respects if they wish. They should be asked.

In my “tweens” and teens, I learned that being in nature calms me. To sit on a log by a small stream in the woods, seeing the rays of filtered sunlight highlight a thick carpet of moss is like a salve for my mind and soul. It was more beautiful than any cathedral and made me feel closer to God. Sitting next to a creek, swollen with snow melt, hearing and seeing the water rushing past me makes me feel as though any worries, any sadness, any anger can be washed away and dissipated. I feel renewed afterward. Standing on a beach in the middle of a storm with the rain stinging my face, tasting the salt spray from the waves crashing on the rocks, and screaming in anger and frustration into a wind so strong it whipped Puget Sound into whitecaps and ripped the sound of my voice away, was cleansing. I learned how small and insignificant I was in the grand scheme of life, and that I was not the center of the universe.

As a “tween” and teen, the music of the day…rock and roll, ‘soul’ music, and pop or ‘cross-over’ music from pop and country artists…was all over the radio. I listened to two radio stations then, KJR and KVI and found that different songs fitted the different moods, problems, and heartaches I had at the time. In the privacy of my room, I listened to those songs and sang them. I found that the music was a salve for my soul and I wanted to learn to play them. I had made enough money doing odd jobs that, by the time I turned sixteen, I bought myself my first guitar and a book of chord diagrams. It was a Sears Silvertone F-Hole acoustic guitar with an arched top, in black and white. It cost me fifty dollars, which was big money for me then. One of my friends who was a couple of years older and played guitar, taught me how to barre chord and that most of the songs on the radio were either three or four chord progressions. I picked that up fast. I would sit in my room, listen to the radio, and became good enough to play along with most of the songs I heard. Music does soothe the savage beast.

I also learned that, even through stretches of becoming a social and party animal, I needed alone time to recharge and re-center myself. I lived by Henry Van Dyke’s quote, “It is better to burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle, too, than to put it away in the closet and let the mice eat it,” much to my parents’ chagrin. And yes, I knew that quote as an early teenager. I would party until I dropped or was grounded. But when it was time to recharge, I would disappear from the social and party scene, sometimes for weeks. When I was grounded, I never made a scene or fought them. Most of the time, it was a relief to me that the only place I could go was to work and then home. It got me off the party merry-go-round and I relished the peace and quiet of being able to spend time alone to center myself. I learned that I was an introverted extrovert.

All the above was the base for what I am and how I feel today. I was brought up by a father and mother who believed that people should work for what they want…jobs, promotions, raises, anything and everything…because they will appreciate it and value it more than if it was simply given to them. They taught me that there is no substitute for experience, and that failure is a thing that can be overcome and is part of experience. It is not a final sentence unless one chooses it to be. They taught me that I could accomplish almost anything I wanted if I mapped a route to it and worked at it. I was taught that I should not be dependent on anyone for my well-being because they will then own me. They taught me that nothing worth anything is free, there is always a cost to someone. They taught me that I am responsible for my actions, and that all my actions or lack of action, is a personal choice, and that I should own that choice and take responsibility for it. I am only a victim of my own choice. They taught me that what happened in the past is done; what counts is what I do now for the future. Because of these values that were instilled in me, I have observed and learned that people who are given too many things without having to work for them, or simply demand them, expect that others will take care of them and give them what they want, and then they become angry and indignant when they don’t get it. This is evident in our society today.

I have learned that marriage, or any relationship worth having and keeping, is not a 50/50 proposition. It is 100/100…an all or nothing commitment by both parties. It will never work if one person always gives more than the other. I have learned that money will not buy happiness, though it can rent it for a short while. I have learned that money is not the root of all evil, it is simply a tool. How a person obtains that money and how it is used determines who or what is evil. I have learned that amassing a mountain of possessions will make one look successful, but does not guarantee success in life. I have learned that rushing through work, vacations, children, the journey through life without lifting one’s head to appreciate the scenery just to reach a destination, perhaps retirement, is not what life is about. The entire journey is the destination and what it’s all about! Stop to enjoy the sights, smell the roses, hug, love, and be with your children in the moment, be with whoever you’re with and wherever you are in the moment, watch the birds, wonder at clouds, let the beauty of a sunset bring you to tears, be honest but be kind about things, do the right things for the right reasons, do no harm, and love as though your heart has never been broken.

And when you have lost a loved one or a dear friend to death, grieve. It is natural and no one needs permission to grieve. Grieve as you will, as long and as hard as you need to because there is no right way or wrong way, nor is there a specific amount of time in which to grieve. Grief is an individual thing and must be dealt with or it will eat at you from the inside. Try to remember that the amount of grief you have is directly proportional to how much you have loved. Seek out others, such as a bereavement group, who are going through what you are because they will understand and accept you the way you are. There is strength in numbers, and a bereavement group is a safe place for your grief and your feelings. You will help each other, you will cry together, you will talk with each other, you will bare your feelings with each other, you will crawl together, you will eventually stand together, and you will become stronger together until you are able to face life again as your own person. Though it may hurt, give grief time, and don’t be hard on yourself. As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 27 in 1849, per Wikipedia:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;

I feel it when I sorrow most;

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Lastly, and I don’t care who knows or what they think, I believe in God and that Jesus the Christ is His son and died on the cross for my sins, and for the sins of mankind. I’ve believed for a long time, though for many years I thought He had deserted me. He had not. It was I who turned away from Him, and through Him found my way back. He was always with me. My belief helped me through my grief when I lost my wife to cancer in 2010. Though I was angry at God for my loss, I never lost faith in Him. I talked to Him, screamed at Him, and prayed to Him several times a day for weeks…and months…and when I was ready to listen, I was given answers in the most unexpected ways. Only once was my prayer answered as I asked, and that was when I prayed that He would take my wife home to Him so she wouldn’t suffer anymore. The next morning, after I had cleaned her up and put her favorite nightie on her and kissed her, with just a sigh she left me to go home with God. It broke my heart and it took a long time to heal, but with His help, I did. Though my other prayers were never answered as I asked, I always received more than what I needed when He knew I was ready. This I believe.

These are some of the important things I have learned in seventy years on this earth. I am blessed to celebrate one more birthday!

Good Grief and Making Lemonade

Good Grief! Making Lemonade?

Clichés. Some are real eye-rollers, a lot are real tuner-outers, and most are just plain corny. The definition of cliché is: A trite or overused expression or idea, says the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, as well as other dictionaries. So, from where did “good grief” come? In a nutshell (another cliché), it is a ‘minced’ oath for, “Good God!” I didn’t know that before I looked it up. It apparently has to do with the “G’s” more than anything, and softening the oath somewhat.

I do use clichés, as do most people, but I also like to look at the literal meaning of words and phrases. Take, for instance, the exclamation, “Good grief!”

Per Merriam-Webster:

Definition of good: a (1): of a favorable character or tendency. Also included: handsome, attractive, suitable, fit, profitable, advantageous, agreeable, pleasant, and so on.

Definition of grief: 2a: deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.

So, in a literal translation, the exclamation, “Good grief!” could mean a favorable tendency for deep and poignant distress caused by…bereavement. To me, that seems like quite the oxymoron. What could be so good about grief?

On the surface, not much is good about grief, especially if one has lost a spouse. Grief hurts. It is a horrid reminder that love shared has become only one-way. The one who grieves loves, but doesn’t feel love in return. Grief is a reminder, too, that a once-happy life with a spouse, a soul mate, is no longer because that mate has died, and he or she is gone from us and that a life lived together is no more. Life has suddenly changed, and most humans don’t adapt well to that kind of change. Grieving the death of a spouse is physically, emotionally, and mentally painful. I felt as though my heart was crushed and ripped out, that there was a jagged hole torn through my soul, that I was barely a survivor and a prisoner in the desolation of my own home surrounded by memories that were more painful than migraines…and there was no relief. What’s so great about all this?

It does take a while to get through all this…for days, for weeks, for months and for some, even years. For me, it was worse than the movie, Groundhog Day, awaking every morning disappointed that I didn’t die in the middle of the night and must face the same pain and loneliness day-after-day-after-week-after-month. With help from my bereavement group sessions, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. I was not alone! With the help from my bereavement group, I found out the reason I felt this profound loss was because I loved my wife so much. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have felt as bad. The more I invested, the more I lost. But that was the good part! I loved. I was capable of great love. It was a gift for which to be thankful.

I can’t say…I won’t say…that it was easy to be thankful for this at first, nor will I say it happened overnight. It happens when it happens. I was not thankful for a long time. For me, it was months of eighteen- to twenty-hour days because I was only getting four to six hours of sleep a night. I remember the first day I awoke after my wife’s death and felt good. It was my birthday in April, almost five months after my wife died. It was as though I was gifted with peace and healing that morning. I remember opening my eyes and not feeling the ache in my chest, of not feeling as though I was stuck in a life of pain and loneliness. There was still that empty space in me, but edges of that hole were not as rough, not as jagged, and the hole seemed as though it was growing smaller…it felt as though I was finally healing. I almost felt new. It was that day that I really began to have good memories of my life with Lou. I’m also not saying that I stopped crying every time a good memory surfaced, but gradually the tears were fewer as those good memories would bring a smile. So now, what good came out of this grief? Keep reading.

When the grief began to subside, I was better able to see it. To me, it was much like the devastation that a forest fire brings. When a spouse dies, it can be as shocking and spontaneous as a tree in a forest being struck by lightning in the middle of summer, setting the branches ablaze. The fire would consume the tree and then jump to another tree and then another, carried by the wind. Embers would fall to the underbrush and it, too, would burst into flames and the fire would spread. When everything flammable was consumed, the fire would begin to die. What remains would be the charred tree trunks of what was left of the forest, standing on the blackened, smoldering ground because there was nothing left to fuel the fire. The embers would gradually cool and die, the rains would come and the ashes would soak into the wet ground, leaving a scar on the earth. In a while, though, dormant, protected seeds begin to sprout…from the underbrush as well as the charred trees. Sometimes, those seeds that sprout after a forest fire need that fire to be able to germinate. The scorched ground becomes as a newly-plowed field, and new growth…new life…begins to sprout and grow.

It can be similar for most people who have lost a spouse. A different life begins anew. A caveat to this is that the different life happens anyway, regardless of how one feels about it. Life does go on but is suddenly different without your spouse, and when that loss is suffered, new feelings of grief emerge. When grief strikes, it is consuming, it dies slowly and it leaves emotional scars in a similar way that a forest fire does. Whether that life becomes a good life or a life spent in grief, mourning, or guilt for wanting to be happy again is up to the individual. After a while, grief, mourning or guilt can become a way of life. I believe it can become habitual. I believe, after the pain of loss begins to subside, grieving or beginning a new, different and good life really does become a choice for the survivor. One can choose to remain in grief because it has become familiar, or one can choose to move on, to create a new, different and good life for one’s self. I do believe that is what a departed spouse would want for the survivor. In my case, before her brain tumors stole her memories and motor skills, and eventually took her life, my wife told me that she wanted me to go on living, to live well, and to find someone new to love because I had too much love left in me to simply go to waste. That is the single, most selfless and loving thing anyone has ever said to me. She planted that seed in my mind and heart.

When one is grieving, there doesn’t seem to be anything good about it. I would tell people who are grieving, though, that the grief they are experiencing is because of the love they have for the spouse or loved one they lost. It is only after the pain of loss dulls and good memories begin to appear, that one realizes that healing has begun. Yes, waves of loneliness and sorrow will still wash over and through one, but gradually those occurrences will happen farther apart. At the same time, one will begin to understand how others feel and have felt because of the loss of a spouse or loved one. We really begin to understand empathy at that point, and better yet, we begin to feel it.

Before my wife died, I wasn’t much of a writer. I don’t think I am now, though I have authored a book and write this blog. I’m guilty of rambling, but I do write from the heart. The reason I write is that I was told that I can put feelings into words that people can read and relate to. This became important to me after my wife died because, as a man, I didn’t know how to cope with the feelings of loss of someone I had chosen to love. I looked in the libraries, I looked on the internet, and I attended group bereavement counselling sessions, yet I could not find anything written by men for men who were grieving the loss of their wife. Yes, there was so much written about grief and what to expect in almost clinical terms, such as “You may have feelings of anger, at God or at your spouse for leaving you, feelings of loneliness, abandonment, guilt or despair. These feelings are normal.” Uh huh. It that all? This does NOT prepare one for the depth and breadth of those feelings, the pain of loss, of unrequited love, of loneliness, of utter desolation. Men are supposed to be tough, we’re supposed to suck it up and move on. I’ve always been a fighter. I’d have taken a bullet for her, I’d have taken her cancers from her and soldiered on, I’d have gladly taken the pain from her, but I couldn’t. All I was left to face were the horrid emotions of her death on my watch, a death I was powerless to stop. How do I fight that?

I managed to find the words to describe my emotions, my pain, my loneliness, and I wrote them down in a journal that I had begun when Lou was placed in hospice care and I became her primary caregiver. I wanted my boys…our boys…to know how much I loved their mom, what we went through during her last days, and to know us as people, not just their parents. Since I was caring for her, I only managed to get out three times a week for two hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to shop and run errands while the hospice workers visited with her/us. I stayed in touch with family and friends via emails that eventually found their way into my journal because I was told my emails were shared with other family members, friends, work associates, high school and college classmates across the United States, and gave them all insight to what it was like to care for a dying spouse as she slipped away a little more every day. I received emails from unexpected sources, from people I hadn’t seen or heard from in decades, from friends of friends, telling me that by writing about the emotions I experienced while caring for and watching my wife die a little more every day, I gave people insight into what really mattered in life.

After my wife died, I continued to write, to keep in touch by email because I couldn’t bear to face the world outside the safety of my home. Again, I found the words that described my emotions, and profound pain and loneliness from my loss. And again, I received emails thanking me for sharing my grief because it gave them insights to the emotions their parents and friends had experienced when they lost their spouses. I put grieving into words that were not simply clinical, but I described the breadth and depth of emotions, and the exquisiteness of the pain I felt. Until they read my emails, they had no idea how someone grieved, especially a man.

I helped them understand the people they knew who had also lost spouses by reading about my grief, my pain, my loneliness, my anger and my prayers. Others who had lost spouses told me, that because of my writings, I had put into words what they were feeling or had felt, and they knew immediately they were not alone. I had helped people! The first time someone wrote to me and told me that, I dropped to my knees and wept. I thanked God that I could use what I had, my own experience, to help others, to let them know they were not alone and that it was okay to grieve, okay to cry, okay to hurt as long as it took them, and that there was no set pattern to grief and no set time limits. It was personal and individual, and it was okay to seek help within a bereavement group. It was not a sign of weakness.

All this led to getting my journal published. I was encouraged by many to incorporate the emails I sent and some I received into the journal, so I did. Over four years after I began my journal, I submitted it to Westbow Press and the manuscript was accepted. After some reviewing and editing, it was submitted for publishing along with photos I took for the front and back covers, and it was published as The First Snow: A Journal about a Man’s Faith-based Journey through Grief. Because of my book, I was contacted by another author, Yvonne Broady, who wrote Brave in a New World: A Guide to Grieving the Loss of a Spouse. To shorten the story, we became cross-country friends via emails because of my book. She wanted to know how a man grieved, and we have since become like brother and sister though we’ve only met face-to-face on Skype. We shared our life experiences and got to know each other as if we were old friends. She is truly my sister.

I hope she doesn’t mind me writing about her, but she has become such a large part of my life, my sister in life on parallel journeys through grief as she lost her husband to cancer, too, about a year before I lost my wife. After several months of exchanging emails, she asked if I would co-facilitate a comfort and bereavement group with her in New York led by her pastor, the Reverend Debra Northern. It was my honor to accept, to be able to pay ahead the help, support and guidance I received from my bereavement group when I lost my wife, to talk about what I experienced in my own grief to help to create an emotionally safe place for people who have lost their spouses so they may grieve and talk about it without being judged or rushed to heal. It has truly been my honor to be part of that group since May of 2016. I Skype in to the sessions every Tuesday afternoon to be with Yvonne, Reverend Northern, and the beautiful people in that group in New York. I am blessed to be able to help people through their grief because of my own experiences.

The old cliché goes something like, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I can’t remember who to credit with the somewhat-cynical statement that said (paraphrased), if life gives you lemons, you can’t make lemonade without water and sugar. Well, in my case the water came from all the tears I shed, and the source of the sugar was the love and comfort I received from God, my family, a bereavement group, and my dear friends. It did take a while…a good long while…before I was finally able to make lemonade. But with a lot of help, I did. I hope now to be part of someone else’s recipe for lemonade by being a source of the sugar with whatever love, comfort, and help I can offer from my experiences.

Good Days, Bad Days

We all have Good Days and Bad Days, and each sometimes lasts for days…or weeks. My entire life…perhaps like yours…has been a series of peaks and valleys…good days, bad days, and the “tweener” days on the way up to good or down to bad days. My parents were down-to-earth people and very caring and loving. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been told, gently, that the only thing that I’m guaranteed on this planet is that they will love me no matter what. They may not necessarily like me or whatever it is or will be that I do, but they will always love me. They also reinforced the adage that it doesn’t make a bit of difference if I have a good day or bad day, it’s how I choose to deal with it that determines what kind of person I turn out to be. They also told me that I was not guaranteed to be a success at anything or that I was owed anything. It was up to me to make good or bad of whatever opportunity confronted me.

I remember the first time I began to realize that I was not the center of the universe. I was not quite four years old and observed that mom’s tummy was getting bigger. It was then that she and dad told me I was going to have a baby brother or sister. There was going to be a baby in the family. I wasn’t exactly excited for them…or for me. Suddenly, I knew I wasn’t going to be the center of mom’s attention. I began to feel somewhat displaced. I think my parents knew that, so they included me in the “we’re going to have a baby” thing. They began to build me up by telling me that I was going to be the Big Brother, and that they needed me to help them raise my brother or sister, and that it was an important responsibility. They also told me that they would not love me any less, that life didn’t work that way. They told me that life was full of love and they would always love me, and they would love the new baby just as much as they loved me. The days were getting better.

Through the second grade, school was pretty good; recesses weren’t so good. I was small for my age and got picked on regularly. Class-time was good…a peak. Recesses were the valleys. Summers before and after the second grade were so good. I looked forward to them. Then began the third grade. I began to get shoved around a lot more, and a couple of bullies emerged. I toughed it out until I went home one day with the pocket ripped off my shirt. Mom asked me what happened so I told her. She repaired my shirt and quietly ordered a set of half-sized boxing gloves from Sears. A couple of weeks later, they showed up. She was the one who taught me how to box. She had learned from her brothers as she was growing up in the Philippines.

I believe it was just after Christmas, I got a chance to use what I had learned from her. The class bully decided to pick on me as I was putting on my jacket to go out for recess. So I pulled him into the coat closet, put my head on his chest, and as he was pounding on my back, I worked his stomach over pretty good. We finally fought to a draw…we hurt each other…but he never touched me again. That was a good day.

Things got a little better throughout the rest of grade school, junior high, and into high school, except for a couple of skirmishes with another bully, but that finally evened out, too. It was when I was sixteen, though, that I was reminded…in the Grand Scheme of Things…my problems were NOT crushing or insurmountable.

As a prelude to this, I must say that I believed in God and Jesus. I did have some problems with Catholic summer school around the age of twelve as I was being taught the Baltimore Catechism and was an altar boy. I had questions as to ‘why’ certain things were done and when they were mandated, such as, why did I have to confess my sins to the priest and receive penance to do? Why couldn’t I talk directly to God or Jesus and confess my sins directly to them? Was there a large “golden book” of penance? Was there a points system for various sins and was the penance, i.e. how many “Hail Marys” or “Our Fathers” or “Acts of Contrition, based on the points system? I just wanted to know. If I was going to be a good Catholic, I wanted to know why I needed to do these things, but that was just me and my curiosity. The sisters had no patience with me and either didn’t know the history or didn’t want to take the time to explain it to me. I have always suspected that they didn’t know the history and didn’t want to show their ignorance. They probably had learned it all by rote, and expected the same of all of us in the catechism class. So, I got whacked on the knuckles with a ruler a lot. It got bad enough that I didn’t want to be an altar boy anymore. For me, those were bad days.

Anyway, when I turned sixteen, my mom told me that she knew I was having a struggle with church and…as an unheard-of gift to me…I didn’t have to go anymore if I didn’t want to. She asked me if I believed in God and Jesus, and I told her yes. I had for a long time. She breathed a sigh of relief and told me she hoped I would find the answers I was looking for, and she hoped that someday I would return to a church I could relate to. In the meantime, I should keep on praying. That meant the world to me. That was a particularly good day.

A couple of weeks later, I got my driver’s license and was soon able to take the car and begin going to dances and dating without double-dating with another couple. It wasn’t long after that I got dumped by my girlfriend. I should have been used to it. I got dumped regularly because I was ‘too nice,’ but this time it was because I was ‘too bad.’ I guess it was something I said. From that point, I couldn’t buy a date with anyone from school for the rest of the year. I know because I tried. Those were bad days for a teenager.

One spring Saturday, a few weeks before school was out, the weather got pretty nasty. The wind began to blow in gusts around forty miles per hour, the sky darkened, it began to rain, and I could see whitecaps on Puget Sound from the living room picture windows. It was a day suited to how I felt. I got dressed, put on my jacket and headed for ladder to the beach a couple of neighbors to the south. I wondered if I was making the right decision as I was descending the almost seventy feet of ladder and the wind and rain were buffeting me about, but I hung on and kept descending. When I reached the beach, the four-foot waves were crashing on the beach just below the high tide mark where all the big logs were. I waited for the spray to abate before I made my way behind the logs to stand on a rock behind them, right at the base of the bank.

The wind was blowing in my face and I could feel the sting of the large rain drops on my forehead and cheeks. I could taste the salt spray from the crashing waves. It was all I could do to maintain my balance on the rock whenever the wind would gust. The sound of the wind, the rain, and the crashing waves was almost deafening and I remember standing there, looking up at the dark sky. I’m not sure if the frustration I was feeling boiled up, but I remember screaming as loud and as hard as I could exactly when a wind gust hit me and the waves crashed, rolling along the beach and sending their spray up and over me. The wind seemed to rip the sound from me and the crashing waves must have buried whatever sound escaped me because I couldn’t hear myself screaming, not even in my own head.

I stopped and took a breath. I was so surprised. I stood and let the wind, rain and salt spray hit me again and again. As I looked around, I can remember looking up at the dark sky, I can remember watching the waves crashing on the beach and against the logs and wondering at the power behind them, and I can remember feeling the sting of the raindrops on my forehead and cheeks and mingling with the tears forced by the wind, blurring my vision until I blinked them away. I can remember tasting the salt spray. In my life to that moment, I had never felt so insignificant. I stood on that rock for another few minutes, taking in the storm as it battered the beach, the logs, and me. I felt so small in the world, yet it was as if God was speaking to me…and giving me perspective. My problems didn’t seem so large anymore. Soaked to the bone, I climbed the ladder and went home feeling relieved and very calm. Life would go on for me.

My mom and dad were great teachers, great leaders, and incredible parents. They had taught me a lot about life and how to live it, through the good days and bad days. I needed to remember those things. They taught me that I should do the very best I could with the divine gifts that were given to me, and they taught me not to think too highly of myself because somewhere there was almost always going to be someone luckier, smarter, faster, stronger, and better than me at any given task I was performing, whether it was in the classroom, in music, in sports competitions, on the job, or in life in general. They taught me that people have different talents, and while some may excel at only one thing, others can have slightly lesser talents across a broader spectrum and be just as valuable because of those gifts. The ‘trick’ was to find that area where one could excel, or at least, where one could be successful. Only once in my life have I ever been ‘the best’ at anything, and that was when I won my fourth-grade spelling bee.
My mom and dad also taught me that good days and bad days are part of life…everyone’s lives…and how we react to those days defines who we are as people. The bad days need to be experienced so we know how good the good days can be. They taught me not to feel sorry for myself when I was having a bad day…or a string of them…because, once again, there was always someone who was having a worse day than I was. I lost my Grandpa Ellison when I was eleven. I was sad and angry that I didn’t get to say good-bye to him at his funeral, but my father had lost his father. I lost my first fiancée in an auto accident in late 1967, but her parents had lost their only daughter only two years after they lost their only son, just twenty-one, to a stroke. My brother and I lost our father in 1977, but my mother had lost her husband, her one Great Love.

My life had many peaks and valleys, and occasions where I couldn’t tell one from the other. One occasion I remember was immediately following the plane crash in Anchorage that kept me from returning to Vietnam. Heavily sedated, burned, beat up, bandaged, unrecognizable, and lying in my bed in a room with two others, I watched and listened to a young man I knew, Private Charles Echols from Houston, Texas, die in his bed across the room, surrounded by doctors and nurses trying to keep him alive. He was nineteen. I was twenty-three. At that time, the line between a bad day and a good day blurred for me. I had thought then that Charles was having the better day, though later I would wonder why I lived and he didn’t.

Finally, when I was air-evac’d to the burn ward at Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio, I saw others who were in worse shape than I was. Yes, I was having a stretch of bad, painful days, but many others there were so much worse off than I. Until then, I had only known what it meant, but when I arrived at BAMC it was there in front of my eyes and it was no longer just a saying. That stuck with me and drove the lesson home.

Through the good days and bad days of the years following my discharge from the hospital and the army…including a marriage, the birth of two sons, a divorce, job changes, meeting and marrying Lou, adopting her sons to be mine, too, and the loss of my mother…nothing could have prepared me for the loss of my wife of twenty-eight years. A string of bad days followed, stretching into weeks and then months. Thankfully, I joined a bereavement group to be among others who had suffered similar losses, and to learn to cope with the pain of loss and the loneliness. It was there I met a lady who had lost her husband of almost fifty years, her brother-in-law, and one other family member in the span of two months. It was difficult for all of us, but we formed bonds and drew strength from one another. Now, just over six years later, four of our original twelve continue to meet for brunch every Tuesday. The oldest lady, Ellie, doesn’t come anymore because she is preparing her home for her daughter who is recovering from a stroke. She’ll be moving in with Ellie after she’s discharged from the rehab facility. The oldest man, R.J., passed away last December. Don has remarried and brings his wife to our Friendship Brunches now. The other two ladies, Sandra and Darlene, still attend as I do. We have survived and thrived. I am so happy to have found love again, too, and my days now are good. In varying degrees, I think all our days now are much better than they were six years ago.

Good days and bad days…sometimes I think it’s all matter of perspective. I don’t know if anyone has seen the movie or remembers The Thirteenth Warrior starring Antonio Banderas. It turned out to be a rather bloody movie that premiered in 1999 but, believe it or not, the first time I saw it was on HBO shortly after Lou died in 2010.  I spent a lot time alone then watching movies as a distraction to my grief. A particular scene comes to mind when I think of ‘perspective.’ After the Vikings found the ‘bear clan’s’ (eaters-of-the-dead) mother-figure and Buliwyf, the Viking warriors’ leader killed her and was dealt a soon-to-be-fatal scratch by her poisonous claw, the Vikings fought their way down underground caves through a good portion of the ‘bear clan’ tribe. A wounded and exhausted Helfdane, played by Clive Russell, decides to stay behind in the cave tunnels and cover their escape. He knows he won’t make it out alive, but he remarks to the sorrowful Ahmad, played by Antonio Banderas, who was trying to help him, “Today was a good day. Run along now…go!” He even smiled and winked as he turned to face the approaching enemy, knowing he was going to die in battle and go to Valhalla. As I said, sometimes it’s a matter of perspective.

I am so grateful and thank God for these good days, yet I thank Him, too, for the bad days because they are the measure of what good days are. During our Ash Wednesday service last week, the following prayer was offered, and it seemed most fitting for this writing:

Let me rejoice and be glad. For I am aware, O God, that you have given me life in a world I cannot always manage. I cannot control events and circumstances, nor can I escape involvement in human hurt and pain. I cannot ward off illness and suffering either from my own life or from the lives of those I love. But I can rejoice that each day brings the marks of your Presence. I can be glad that nowhere is outside the circle of your care. So keep me living, O Lord, not lopsidedly but wholly. Keep me alive to your Presence in our world everywhere. In your name and Spirit, help me to reach out hands of help and hope to others.

 This is the day you have made, this day and tomorrow and tomorrow.

 Amen.

Creatures of Habit

Creatures of Habit?

One morning last week, one simple act showed me what a creature of habit I am. I’m sure most people can relate in one way or another, as many of us have morning routines. I get up, put on my sweats (Hey! I’m retired!), and test my fasting blood-glucose level because I’m a diabetic. Then I take my thyroid medication, I head to the kitchen for a small glass of lemon juice…two teaspoons of concentrated lemon juice in a half-glass of filtered water…just to get started. As the Keurig is busy making my first cup of coffee, I head back to my home office and turn on my PC (not my pc-ness…I am not very politically correct, but that’s just me) before I fetch my hot coffee.

After dunging out my email in-box and responding to various emails, which usually takes another two or three cups of coffee, I head back to the kitchen to prepare my brunch…read “late breakfast.” All those duties/tasks can be performed on auto-pilot as they don’t require much thinking. For that matter, either does breakfast. I know where almost everything is located in my refrigerator and I seldom look through everything because for me, easy is good. This is what spurred this writing.

There are two egg cartons side-by-side atop the shelf covering the right crisper drawer. One is for hard-boiled eggs and is labeled so in small printed letters, and the other is for raw eggs. Since the carton for raw eggs is always on the right side next to the refrigerator wall, I grabbed an egg from that one to make a ham and cheese omelet. I already had preheated the frying pan and had melted coconut oil awaiting my egg, when I tried to crack it…and crack it again. It cracked, but wouldn’t open to spill its contents into the hot pan. I took a closer look at the egg and found it to be hard-boiled instead of raw. Hmmm. I opened the refrigerator, looked at the egg cartons only to see that they had been switched. I guess Debbie switched them when she was refilling the cardboard carton from the plastic, two-dozen egg carrier she got from Costco. That explained it. It was time to change plans.

Since I didn’t want to waste the egg, I turned off the range and took the pan off the burner to cool, then shelled the egg. I put the grated cheese away and got two Babybel cheeses from the package in the refrigerator and a slice of ham I was going to use in my omelet. I sliced a banana into a bowl, covered it with Ezekiel 4:9 Golden Flax Sprouted Grain Crunchy Cereal, sprinkled a little coconut sugar on it and added coconut milk to it and sat down to a different-but-good breakfast.

It broke me out of my habitual routine.

So…what’s this got to do with anything else? I’m not saying that a habitual routine is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the habit and the routine. When my wife of twenty-eight years died just over six years and two months ago, it was my morning ritual, my habitual routine, that helped me get out of bed every morning and helped me go through the motions of taking care of myself. Blood-glucose testing, taking medications, making coffee, turning on the PC, and sitting in the living room staring at the outside world while I drank my first…and sometimes second and third…cups of coffee before I made breakfast for myself, was what got me out of bed and kept me going, even after only four hours of sleep.

As my dear friend, sister and author of Brave in a New World:  A Guide to Grieving the Loss of a Spouse, Yvonne Broady recently wrote in her blog that every day for her was like the movie, Groundhog Day, waking up to relive the day before over and over and over again, repeating the same mindless routines, reliving the same mind-numbing pain and loneliness from the loss of her spouse, seeing constant reminders around the house of what used to be that would bring sudden tears, and feeling more alone than one could have ever known. It was that way for me, too. And for me, it was only my habitual routines that made me put one foot in front of the other and keep moving until I’d collapse from physical and emotional exhaustion, only to repeat it the following day, and for many days after that.

But as in the plot of Groundhog Day, though he was disappointed to keep awakening the following morning from trying to kill himself the day before, one day Bill Murray’s character stopped trying to kill himself and began to try to improve himself and to have some fun…to make the best of a bad situation. Similarly, one day I stopped praying that I would die in my sleep and began to take tiny steps to begin making the best of a bad situation, to begin living again in my new and different life, not as Bob and Lou, but as just Bob. It was a slow and oftentimes painful process, but I could slowly feel myself becoming a whole being again.

It was difficult to break some old habits because I had become emotionally or physically attached to them, or because I had become comfortable with them, as bad as they were. On June 12, 1980, I had my last drink of alcohol before I checked into a treatment facility for twenty-eight days. I couldn’t have done it alone. It saved my life though I lost almost all my old friends and a marriage. I began to live my life again, and this time without alcohol. Though it took two years of AA meetings every day and two to three over the weekends, I had broken a habitual and addictive routine by replacing it with another until I was finally free.

On March 17, 1990, I smoked my last cigarette after smoking three packs a day. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that the intense craving for a cigarette lasted for approximately two minutes and would then abate. Those cravings came five minutes apart the first couple of days, but I knew that I could withstand two minutes at a time. I did, and I did it “cold turkey.” Over the following weeks, the five minutes stretched to ten, then to fifteen, then to a half-hour, then an hour. In three weeks, the only time I craved a cigarette was after my morning coffee and then after dinner. In a little over a month, the cravings were gone. I began to live my life without cigarettes and broke another habitual and addictive routine.

Sometimes, I believe the sadness of grief can become habitual, too. I couldn’t help but feel sad as I grieved over the loss of my wife to cancer. The mind-numbing pain and loneliness, the sadness of seeing the constant reminders of a life that is no more, the guilt of wondering if I had done the best I could in caring for her, and the feeling of being left alone, of the isolation and emptiness, became a cloak I expected to wear every day. The days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months, and I often wondered if the months would stretch into years of never-ending pain. I wondered if I’d ever be happy again. Sometimes, if one doesn’t reach out for help, the sadness lasts a lifetime because when it is combined with guilt, it will transform into depression. I hurt and I was sad, and I didn’t want to become more depressed than I already was.

In doing some self-examination, I knew I wanted to be happy again but didn’t know how to change my situation. I decided to seek help through a bereavement group because I needed to be with people who understood and were experiencing the kind of grief I was. It was a big step for me for a several of reasons:  1) I thought I wasn’t strong enough to get through my grief by myself; 2) It was so far out of my comfort zone to show my grief; 3) I didn’t want to “get used to” grief as a way of life; 4) I didn’t know how to fight my grief though I was mired in it, so I thought I was weak; 5) I felt a need to be with others who understood how I felt; 6) I was close to the end of my rope.

It was a matter of my personal survival.

I had survived an adventurous childhood of riding cows through barbed-wire fences, sliding down the ninety-foot bank to the beach in front of grandma’s house in a gunny sack, falling out of more trees because of broken branches, crashing my face and my three-speed English racing bike at thirty-five miles per hour without a helmet on a gravel road, rheumatic fever, and later, getting tossed out of college, the death of a fiancée, Vietnam, a plane crash, alcoholism, a divorce, and losing my wife of twenty-eight years to brain tumors. I’d have taken a bullet for my wife, and I would have taken on her cancer if it meant she would live. But it was not meant to be and I didn’t know how to handle that. I had been able to fight everything else that happened to me, but I didn’t know how to fight her dying, so I prayed hard until the only thing I had left to look forward to was the beginning of my bereavement group.

I believe that first step away from my grief habit saved my life. Because of my grief, my loneliness and self-imposed isolation, I had begun to understand why some people who had lost their spouses committed suicide. I didn’t want to take my own life, but I understood why they did. Instead, I prayed every night that I would I die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to face another day with all that pain and longing, because that’s all I had to look forward to…just like the movie, Groundhog Day.

Those bereavement group sessions helped show me ways to begin to cope with that grief, and showed me ways to begin to unburden myself of it. One of the things that stuck with me was the recommendation to journal my feelings. I had already begun to do that when I was caring for my wife almost two months before she died. I did it to keep a record of what it was like to care for her, what it was like to cope with losing a bit more of her every day, of what it was like to see what hope I had left for a miracle cure erode by the day, and to show my sons…her sons…how much I loved her and would have gladly taken that bullet…that illness…for her. I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. I wrote about every aspect of my grief from every conceivable angle.

I also began to push myself to be out in public more alone. I would even choose to shop at different stores because I finally realized that no one cared who I was. I was anonymous…I was almost invisible, non-descript. I was simply another shopper that no one paid any attention to. No one could see the hole through my heart and soul, no one could see my pain and aloneness because none of the other shoppers knew me. It was raw and scary at first, leaving my comfortable hermit zone, but my confidence grew as I wore my average guy disguise and no one could tell anything about me just from looking at me. Yes, occasionally a memory would leak from my eyes, but that got easier to control as time passed. The new habit became fake it until you make it, and it would last until I got home. The first few times I returned home after an outing, after I’d close and lock the front door behind me, I’d lean back against it or sit on the stairs to the main level and just weep. But at least I did it! I was breaking out of my habitual isolation. It got better day by day, week by week, until one day there were no more tears.

You may ask, what is this fake-it-until-you-make-it thing, and how does it work? Very simply, it is finding something to smile about and then smiling, wherever you are and however badly you may feel. You could be standing in the middle of Aisle 5 in your supermarket feeling the loneliest you’ve ever been because you’re shopping without the love of your life who just died, and you want to cry right there. Take a deep breath, and try to remember something that made you smile. Let the smile come to your face. Smile at a happy baby in a shopping cart pushed by his or her mother. Smile for no reason except to smile. Don’t let your face forget what it feels like. Acknowledge other people in the store. Smile at others who are shopping alone. Your smile may be the nicest thing that’s happened to another on that day. And they may even return your smile. You don’t have to be the happiest person on the planet to just smile. It’s a beginning, and it works.

As spring drew near and the weather began to improve, I forced myself to go outside more. I could see that my back yard needed attention, so I finally began to weed and prune the shrubs and trees, and I began to redo my little pond…for me. I began to do things for me now, and to think of myself as an individual instead of the abandoned half of what used to be a team. That ‘habit’ was one of the hardest ones to break, but my back yard and getting my hands dirty to get that yard to where I wanted it was therapy for me. I began to really enjoy working in my back yard because I could see the day-to-day changes I was making in it…and in myself. Because of this almost-instant gratification, I also began to notice the little things like the new sprouts of my trillium and day lilies, the first signs that spring…the season of renewal…was here. I began to notice the birds that were showing up in my back yard and was amazed at the variety of the species. Some of my old habits were changing into new ones, and better ones. They made me smile more, and I felt better than I had in months.

Change Can be Good or Bad; It’s What You Make of It

It did take a while for me to overhaul some of my old, dark, self-destructive, and isolationist thoughts and habits by replacing them with new, more outgoing, emotionally- and personality-stretching thoughts and habits. These new thoughts and habits got me out of a cycle of habitual grief and sadness, and away from depression. There was no magic pill that made it so, yet the whole lonely, painful journey became magical in itself with each realization that I was outgrowing my grief. I was healing. Though there was no magic pill, there was…and always will be…a magical ingredient. Time.

What’s so magical about Time? That ingredient is always part of every recipe for the destruction of individual or a collective of lives, places, things and civilizations…or their healing or building up. It is the one ingredient that allows the other ingredients to mix, to bind together, and to strengthen or weaken. The other ingredients in the recipe are what will determine what is destroyed or healed. Most of those other ingredients spring from the attitudes, feelings and beliefs of humans (except for natural catastrophes). In those of us who have lost a loved one or a spouse, grief is one of those feelings.

It’s a paradox, to me, that the best way to prolong grief is to try to avoid it by not acknowledging it or running from it, while the quickest and healthiest way through grief is to face it, acknowledge it, and experience it instead of avoiding it or running from it. I’ve had some experience at both. They both hurt like Hell. In past blogs, I equated grief to the darkness of night…the absence of light. Some people are afraid of the dark…and grief…so they try to avoid it or run from it. If one chases the sun to try to stay in the light, one will only get tired and scared that the darkness will overcome them and, eventually, it will. When it does, the fear and weariness from running and the time it took to try to avoid the grief, will cause one to huddle in the darkness to try to wait out the night or the grief itself. I believe this does the most damage to one’s self and eventually hurts the worst.

Conversely, if one turns and faces the darkness and walks into it, one has more of a chance to deal with that grief with more energy, heightened senses, and on one’s own terms, as frightened as one is. It’s still a scary and painful experience, but if one keeps walking through that night toward the new day, and though one may stumble and fall to one’s knees several times, one will navigate through the darkness of grief in less time. As I navigated that darkness myself, I remembered a quote by Charles Beard: “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” If you can see the stars, you are not truly alone. I was also told that if I clutch my pain tightly in my hands and then open my hands to let it go, my hands will then be open to receive something else…perhaps even a blessing of happiness. It was so difficult to remember all this. Sometimes the grief dulled the senses so much that I missed the opportunities for good things to happen to me. I prayed that wouldn’t happen to me too often.

On most occasions, time passes too quickly. The exception to this, when time seems to stand still, is when one is grieving. There is no magic pill that will make grief pass any quicker than it does. There are no shortcuts. It is work. It is painful, and it feels as though it will last forever. It is my personal experience, however, that grief will pass faster if it is faced and dealt with. It helped me to join a bereavement group to be with others who were experiencing the same kind of grief over the same type of loss. There is strength in numbers there. There is a kinship, a commonality among these people, no matter their race, creed, or social status. There is only loss and grief, and acceptance of what you are going through. There is no judgement, there is no right or wrong way to grieve because grief just is, and there is no timetable because everyone there knows how personal grief is. It can take weeks, months, or years to heal from grief. Yet, it is the passage of that time as well as a belief, a faith that the grief will ease, that will make it so. I also believe that a faith in God helps, too, because it is difficult enough to go through this alone. When I was away from my bereavement group, I spent a lot of time talking with God, both in anger and begging for patience and a respite from the pain of my loss. He is big enough to take it all, and kind enough to grant me the respite when I needed it. I promise that it does get better, the pain does subside, good memories will vastly outnumber the bad ones, and life will get better. With Time. Be patient with yourself.

Most facilitators of bereavement groups have also experienced that loss and are there to help guide those grieving, to bolster them, to help them express themselves, and to help break and keep the bereaved out of their habitual grief. They do understand the feelings of helplessness, anger, loss, loneliness, sadness, hurt, and grief. They are there to give back, or rather, to pay forward, the gentleness, the kindness, the acceptance, the affirmations, the patience, without time limits and without judgement that they received from the facilitators who preceded them. That is what I hope I’m doing now.

A Week to Remember

December, 2016, was an interesting and busy month. There was a lot of preparation for Christmas, including shopping for my grandchildren and Debbie, wrapping the presents, putting up and decorating the tree, setting up the Christmas village on the fireplace hearth, complete with the HO-scale cable car, setting up the Crèche…the wooden stable I built and small ceramic figures I painted to remind us that our Savior was sent to save the lowliest of us, and then practicing playing the guitar and singing the Christmas version of Hallelujah by Cloverton because my pastor asked if I would sing it at the 11:00pm Christmas Eve service. Debbie and I spent a wonderful, quiet Christmas Eve together, enjoying a movie and each other’s company, and then went to the 11:00 pm service at our church.

The service was all about the Christmas story…readings from the New Testament, from Mary’s visit from the Angel, to her marriage to Joseph, to the trip to Bethlehem, to the arrival of the shepherds and the wise men, and then the birth of Jesus. Sections of the story were told…read from the bible…followed by Christmas carols or special music specific to the readings. I played and sang the Christmas version of Hallelujah at the end of the first reading, accompanied by our music director and pianist extraordinaire, Casie, and Marty on another guitar. It was an honor for me to be able to sing to the glory of the Lord and play with the caliber of musicians we have. After the service, we wished everyone a Merry Christmas and went home. We took turns filling up each other’s stockings that were hung from the fireplace mantle above the Christmas village, and relaxed a while before we called it a night.

Christmas Day, we slept in a little until mid-morning, had our tea and coffee, had breakfast, and then searched our stockings for the gifts we exchanged. I loved it. Afterward, we got dressed and drove to Olympia to celebrate Christmas with three of my four sons and their families. Six of my ten grandchildren were there, and we had such a wonderful time! I love my boys and their families dearly. I can’t think of a better way to spend Christmas than with family. They are all so loving and accepting, and Debbie is part of the family and is well-loved. I am so blessed and so incredibly happy!

Then there was the other part of December…the part aside from the Christmas preparations, the part aside from the celebration of Christ’s birth, the part aside from the family fellowship…the part where 2016 could end because of the deaths of so many entertainers and musicians throughout the year, the part that gave pause for thought, the personal part where two more important people in my life passed away, and my thoughts of how their passing impacted their families during the Christmas season, and my remembrances of them and what they meant to me.

The first part was the passing of my Aunt Charlotte…she was 102 years old. I was expecting to see her this summer at our family reunion in Minnesota. Aunt Charlotte was very special to a lot of people, but she was also the last remaining person of the generation that began the tradition of our family reunions. She married into the family as I did, but some fifty years before me. She married a man who was one of twelve children. I married one of the daughters (Lou) of one of Aunt Charlotte’s husband’s sisters (Grace), so technically, Charlotte was my aunt by marriage. Now, since Aunt Charlotte has passed away, the second generation—the children of that first generation, who are now in their mid-to-late 60s through 80s—are now the torch-bearers, so to speak, of the reunion tradition. I am one of those near the tail-end of that second generation, though I am an “outlaw.”

I did say that Aunt Charlotte was very special to a lot of people. She was very special to me, too. You see, there was to be a family reunion in July, 2011 and I wasn’t planning on going. My wife, Lou, had passed away in November of 2010, and I felt reticent about attending her family reunion by myself. I had known about it for some time, but I took off on a solo road trip about a month before the reunion because I needed to get away from everything. The first day on that road trip was emotionally brutal for me because for the first time since we married in 1982, Lou and I were not going on a vacation together. I must say, though, that by the end of that road trip, I was a changed man. I had begun to enjoy life again and found that I could be by myself quite well. After two weeks and almost 2,000 miles and 1,400 photos later, I was back home. I had been places I’d never gone and seen things I’d never seen before. I loved it! And then I got two phone calls from each of Lou’s older sisters asking me if I was going to the family reunion. I told them no because it was their family reunion and I was an “outlaw.” They both told me that I should reconsider because I was the last and closest link to Lou, and that people would like to see me. I told them I’d think it over.

I washed clothes, had my truck serviced, mowed the lawn and cleaned the house, and thought about it. I finally decided I’d go. Besides, I’d never been to Flathead Lake in Montana. So I emailed the reunion contact and asked him what I needed to do and where I could make reservations to stay. He gave me the information I needed so I sent him a check and called and emailed a motel and secured my reservation. I began to get emails from “family” members from California, Montana, North Dakota, Texas, Colorado and a couple of other places telling me they heard I was going to be at the reunion and that they’d like to see me. I was amazed. With my reticence waning, I went.

The first afternoon of the reunion, a Friday, I was sitting at a table at the lodge talking with a couple of people I hadn’t seen since the last reunion I attended, when I saw Aunt Charlotte. I excused myself to go say hello to her. She smiled at me and asked me to sit and chat. She told me she was glad I had decided to come. I told her I hadn’t planned on it until Lou’s sisters had called me. I had thought it was more their family reunion than mine, that I had married into the family and was kind of an “outlaw.” She laughed and patted my hand and told me that once, a long time, ago, she was an “outlaw,” too, because she married into the family. And now she was the matriarch! She was one of the first to tell me that I was part of the family and she wasn’t going to let me out of it because that’s the way families go on. And if I should find someone else and even remarry, she—as well as her children, if she had any—would become part of the family, too. That’s just the way it was.

As I sat there and pondered what she said, she told me she heard that I’d brought my guitar. I said that I did, and she told me she’d like me to play her a song. Someone else came to the table just then and was talking to Aunt Charlotte, so I thought I’d just sit there and maybe she’d forget she’d asked. She didn’t. She told me to get my guitar and play her a song. I got up, got my guitar, pulled my chair around in front of her and said I was going to play her a love song, so I did. I played and sang Arms of a Woman by Amos Lee to her. She sat there and smiled so big and blushed all the way through the song, and when I had finished, she leaned forward and patted me on the cheek and thanked me. She said I had made her feel special. I told her that she would always be special to me.

Are these family reunions large? Yes, they are. Are they worth attending? I most certainly think so. I’ve not known a more accepting, friendly and loving group of people in my life. More than once during that reunion weekend, people would tell me what Aunt Charlotte did, that I was part of the family and that they wouldn’t let me out of it even if I met someone else and remarried, because that’s the way families go on. I have truly been blessed with this family. I would hope that one day, my sons will make the time to bring their families to one of these reunions and meet those of their generation who outnumber us. It will broaden their horizons, they will meet relatives they’ve only heard about from their parents and grandparents, and either rekindle old or make new friendships of all ages as I once did…and still do. It is worth it, plain and simple. Family is important, and my family is exceptional. And true to their word, I took my Debbie to the last family reunion, and she is now part of the family, too.

The second part was the passing of R.J. He was either the oldest or second oldest-by-months of my bereavement group from Franciscan Hospice and Palliative Care. He was eighty-eight years old. I met R.J. on February 1, 2011, the first day of our group sessions. He was one of three men who attended, along with nine women. I thought I was going to be the only man there, but was rather relieved to see there were two others. The three of us men and seven of the women had lost spouses, one lady had lost her mother, and the youngest woman there had lost her father. R.J. had been married fifty-eight years when his wife passed away, the longest of us all. I had been married for twenty-eight years, the shortest time in that group.

When we took our first break, R.J. had told Don and me that he was thinking of not attending after this first session because every time he talked about his wife, he would cry. He said it hurt so much, and he had even waited a year before he decided to attend a bereavement group. Don and I told him we felt the same way, but that we needed to be there because we didn’t think we could make it on our own. We both had prayed that we’d die in our sleep so we wouldn’t have to deal with the pain and loneliness, but kept waking up every morning disappointed. R.J. told us he was going through the same thing. I told him I needed to be around others who felt the same way, suffered the same kind of loss because they were the only ones who would understand the way I felt and wouldn’t judge me for the way I was feeling. He took a deep breath, and said he’d stay. Interestingly enough, the lady who had lost her mother announced, after the first session, that she wouldn’t be back because it hurt too much. I was a bit surprised at that, but it was her choice. I hope she is at peace.

R.J. did stay. Eleven of us made it through the eight weeks of sessions and were part of the group, as a whole, who decided that eight sessions weren’t enough. We continued to meet on our own at two different locations over the next four weeks for the mutual support, comfort, and safety we felt among the others who felt the same. During that time, three of the ladies dropped out of the group until there were eight of us. We began meeting at a small restaurant for brunch. We not only provided support, comfort and safety for each other, we had become good friends.

Over the next year, one of the ladies dropped out because she lost her only daughter in a scuba diving accident, exactly 364 days after her husband passed away. She had a difficult time admitting that her husband had died. She had been treating her loss as a divorce and had not admitted that her husband had really died and had not really grieved his loss. She stuffed it. Now, because of the loss of her only daughter, she joined another bereavement group because she realized she had some unfinished grieving to do, and now it was for two people. I still pray for her.

The next year, the young woman who had lost her father dropped out of the group to move closer to Seattle for her job. I often wonder about her because she had never cried for her father, even during the original eight sessions. I hope she’s well.

Now there were six of us, three men and three women, and for the next three years we continued to meet for brunch every Tuesday morning at 11:00am. We had not only become good friends, we had become family. During that time, I had met Debbie, fallen in love, and brought her to introduce her to the group. Don had met Linda, fallen in love and remarried. Linda became part of the group. Over those three years, we had become more of a friendship group than a bereavement group, though R.J. would still get choked up every time he mentioned his wife’s name. It wasn’t long after we began meeting at the restaurant, about three years after he lost his wife, that R.J. lost his second oldest daughter. She was only fifty-four years old, as I recall. The Brunch Bunch attended her memorial service to let R.J. know that we were there for him. Despite this, we watched R.J. become emotionally stronger, more outgoing, and more talkative as the months wore on. He had a great sense of humor, liked pretty, young ladies, loved to go to the casinos, looked forward to our brunches, and had a great appetite. And he loved his cherry pie! He kept us laughing with his jokes and stories, and was loved by all of us. During one of our after-brunch chats, he told me he had wondered why he was still around. He missed his wife so much. It seemed as though he was just biding his time until it was his time. He said he was ready to go whenever the Lord wanted to take him.

During the fall of 2016, Ellie, the eldest of the ladies and about R.J.’s age, was beginning to have some physical problems, too. She was finding it more difficult to get around and was only attending our brunches once or twice a month. She stopped altogether around the end of November because her daughter, who lived in California, had a stroke. She was in her fifties. After she was discharged from the rehab facility in California, she was brought up to Washington and placed in a rehab facility near Ellie so Ellie could visit her every day. She will likely move in with Ellie after her discharge from rehab.

It was during late summer/early fall that R.J. began to have some physical issues. To make a long story short, he stopped attending our brunches because he had fallen a couple of times, was placed in rehab facilities to gain some strength back and was placed on oxygen. Despite the physical therapy, he seemed to grow weaker and more weary. During all of this, he was also moved to an assisted living facility by his two younger daughters. He had been hospitalized a couple of times for various things, and though he would recover, he was growing weaker. He was hospitalized one last time, and eventually passed away on December 17.

Once more, our Brunch Bunch was there for R.J., but this time it was to say good-bye to a good friend. I must admit that I had mixed feelings about his loss. I had known he was biding his time until his time came to be with his wife and daughter, and to await the rest of his family. Though he hadn’t been at brunch for several months, he was still with us. And then one day, he wasn’t. It’s a loss we all still feel, especially his remaining daughters and their families. He was their father, their grandfather, and their great-grandfather…the patriarch of their family. Now he only lives on in their hearts and memories.

Yet, I believed he was finally happy to be with his wife and daughter. He would not need his oxygen, he would no longer need his walker or his wheelchair, he no longer needs to live in assisted living away from his home that he built for him and his wife, and where he raised his family, and he would no longer need assistance to even stand up or take a shower. He would no longer be in pain from his physical ailments, or emotional pain from the loss of his wife and second daughter. He was whole again, without pain, and with the love of his life. I couldn’t feel bad for him anymore. He is where he had wanted to be.

Though I hadn’t seen him in a few months, I realized the finality of his being gone during the service. He had been taking turns being in his assisted living facility, the hospital and physical therapy, and my intentions were to visit him when I could. I must admit I got caught up in life, trying to get my house in order to be able to sell. As my dad had once suggested, my personal road to Hell was paved with good intentions. I never did visit him, though I thought about him and prayed for him a lot. I’m sorry, R.J., but not for you. I’m sorry for your family, for your friends, and I’m sorry for me.

All-in-all, it was a month to remember. It was a month of preparation, of the joy of celebrating Christmas with our families and remembering the birth of our Lord Jesus, and remembering the losses of a dear family member and a dear friend, and celebrating their lives. Godspeed, Aunt Charlotte and R.J., and once again, God bless us, Everyone!

Thanksgiving: Sometimes No, Sometimes Yes

Here I am, long after Thanksgiving, still trying to write about thanksgiving, and I don’t mean the holiday. In four months, I’ll have been on this planet for seventy years. It sounds foreign to me because it really sounds as though I’m getting to be an old man, yet I most certainly don’t feel as though I’m that old…except when I do something stupid that pulls muscles in my back. I’ve been told I look like I’m in my 50’s, I feel better than I did in my 40’s, I still think like I did when I was in my twenties and teens (probably not a good thing), I have a pretty good memory (it’s why I don’t do things now that I did when I was in my teens), I’m in relatively decent physical condition, I still have my own knees, I still like to hike and photograph nature, I’m still not afraid to scale my 24’ extension ladder or get up on the roof when I must, I still take care of my garden and my yard…I still like to do a lot of things because I can. I’m very thankful for these gifts.

Through the years, I’ve suffered personal losses of people who were my world when I lost them…my grandparents, my dad and mom, and my wife of twenty-eight years…and dear friends I knew from school, from the army, from work and from church. I survived all that, as well as Rheumatic Fever, daring to swim a reservoir spillway in college, Vietnam, a plane crash that killed forty-seven people, diabetes (so far), and other things that might have killed me. I’ve not been thankful for some of those things, especially when they were fresh. Though I didn’t expect I’d live this long, I am thankful to still be here, thankful to be in decent health, and thankful to still have friends and love in my life. Those of us who are of this late-middle age or early-old age (as those younger view us…and as some of us view ourselves) seem to be more thankful now for what we have and what we’ve survived than when we were younger. I can recall many times when I wasn’t very thankful at all.

As I have aged, I have become more thankful in general. But as I look back on those things I was not thankful for at the time they happened, I am now thankful for the way they happened to me, but not necessarily thankful they happened at all. My first experience with losing a friend occurred when I was six. A playmate of mine, a six-year-old girl named Pam, quietly passed away from leukemia just before I…we…were to start first grade. I got to see her for the last time about a month before she passed. Mom took me to Pam’s house to play while she visited with her mother. We sat on the floor and played games until she got tired, then we said our good-byes. In less than a week she became too tired to get out of bed, and since her immune system was compromised, I couldn’t visit her anymore. Three weeks later, mom sat me down and told me that Pam had gone to sleep and didn’t wake up. She had just faded away and died in her sleep. Mom cried and told me that it had to be so difficult for Pam’s mother because she knew how she’d feel if she lost my brother, Jim, or me. It made me sad for Pam’s mother. At six, though, I was a little too young to comprehend much else, other than I would never see Pam again.

However, at age eleven I was beginning to understand when I lost my Grandpa Ellison to a stroke. From the time I was three, he took me fishing and taught me all he knew about it. At six, he gave me my first fishing pole, which I still have. He taught me how to use hand tools and how to safely use his drill press and table saw. He was gentle, kind and patient, and he loved me. He had a stroke that hospitalized him for almost a month. He was getting better, so the hospital released him to finish recuperating at home. Two weeks later, he suffered another stroke and died almost immediately. I wanted to go to his funeral, but I had to stay home with my little brother, Jim. I just wanted to say good-bye to him, but it was not to be. I missed him so much when died. I was not thankful for his loss. It was years later, though, that I became thankful he went quickly and didn’t suffer any longer than he already had.

My father and mother both passed away quickly and unexpectedly. My father died during exploratory surgery to see what had caused some internal bleeding…when the doctor opened him up, his unseen and unforeseen aortic aneurysm burst and he never regained consciousness. Ten years later, my mother passed away from a sudden, massive heart attack. In neither case was I ever thankful they passed away. In both cases, though, I was thankful they passed away quickly with no suffering. When dad died, mom, Jim and I were the ones who suffered…especially mom. When mom died, Jim and I suffered. It is always the survivors who suffer such emotional pain. We were never thankful for that. They died too young.

I’ve lost other relatives, both blood and by marriage, for which I was not thankful, either. Their deaths left gaping holes in my family. How can anyone be thankful for those deaths? I’ve lost friends, too. Some were high school and college friends, some were comrades-in-arms, soldiers, and some were friends from church. I’ve not ever been thankful for their losses.

My wife of twenty-eight years, Lou, passed away here at home with me at her side. She spent her last seven weeks bed-ridden. Prior to that, she did suffer. Her brain tumors were stealing her memories and motor skills and she knew it. The tumors in her bones and internal organs caused her such pain. I was helpless and prayed so hard for a miracle cure. When that miracle didn’t happen, I prayed for her to not suffer, but that was not to be until she was placed in hospice care with me at home. My job, my life then was to make her as comfortable as possible during her remaining days, and to let her know she was home where she wanted to be, and loved. I was thankful she was not in as much pain because of the prescription pain killers, but I was not thankful that she was dying more every day, right in front of my eyes. No, I was most certainly not thankful for that. But I was very thankful that I got to make her last wish come true, though it caused me such grief. She died at home with me at her side.

Since then, time has passed and I have healed. I survived, I grieved, I leaned on God, I yelled and screamed in anger and loss at Him, I begged Him for respite from the pain and loneliness, and during my grieving, I realized that I really had a relationship with Him. Yes, I prayed a lot, but I talked to Him more than I prayed to Him. And when I was least expecting it, He answered me and my prayers, though I never directly got what I prayed for. Yet, I always received more than I needed when He knew I was ready. It took a while, but I finally healed. Some are not as fortunate. Some never heal, some will always carry guilt…whether real or imaginary…that they could have or should have done more. I carried some of that same guilt, too, but time, prayer and my boys made sure I knew that I couldn’t have done more than I did at that time. This realization was a cause for thanksgiving, too.

Yet out of all these losses, and because of them, I have gained so much insight, so much empathy and understanding for what such pain can do to those who survive those deaths of loved ones and friends. I am never thankful when people die, yet I am thankful to have gained…earned…that insight, empathy and understanding that came from my own losses. I have changed, I believe I have grown and evolved emotionally, and I believe I am stronger for it. I am thankful to have come this far, and it seems that as the years go by, I am becoming more thankful for having survived this long.

Several paragraphs ago, I wrote, “It is always the survivors who suffer such emotional pain.” Yes…and no. You see, there is one exception for me. There was once a man who died for me to save me. For you, too…for all of humanity. I am reminded of Him every Sunday when I have communion. I wonder at His bravery when I hear the words, “Do this to remember me,” that he told those around him at His last supper. For this, I am so thankful because I could never have saved myself.

But at the same time, I wonder how God felt when He saw His son take his last breath on the cross. I know that He knew…They both knew…that God, the Father, sent Jesus, the Son of God, to earth as a man to be tortured and die for our sins so that we may have everlasting life. I cannot fathom that. Why did He do that? Was it so, that through Jesus, He could truly understand the foibles, the pettiness, and the weaknesses of man, as well as how we can care, and love, and be gentle, and believe? How can God be thankful for the death of His Son? Can it be because after over two thousand years, we Christians remember His son, our Lord Jesus, and what he taught us? Perhaps one day we’ll know.

And now “that time of the year,” the ‘holiday season’ is upon us…that time that we celebrate Christmas with Black Fridays, massive sales, sell-it-with-sex TV commercials for perfumes, TV specials, jammed shopping mall stores and parking lots, worrying over what gifts to get the children and grandchildren, school plays and concerts, office parties, and gift exchanges. I’m sorry, but as I’ve grown older, I’m becoming less and less thankful for all of that. What I am thankful for is the fellowship and the getting together of families to celebrate Christmas together.

Yes, as I get older, I am becoming more thankful for things that are not things but, rather, matters of the heart…for sharing, for gentleness, for understanding, for giving, for kindness, for peace, for love. Oh! And by the way (lest we forget), it’s also the season that many of us celebrate that from which Christianity is derived…the birth of the Christ Child in a barn in a town called Bethlehem over two thousand years ago. I am truly thankful for that miracle! Thanks be to God!

Merry Christmas to all, and God bless us, Every One!

Remembrances and Affirmations

Remembrances

Last weekend was…interesting. I was planning on attending a memorial get-together for an old friend and work associate of mine who I’d known since the late 1970’s/early 1980’s. As far as I can remember, I met him during my last year at Seattle-First National Bank when he was a furniture manufacturer’s representative. I got to know him better and began working more with him around 1985 when I worked for the Craftsmen, Ltd., a custom-contract furniture manufacturer, as a custom furniture designer and job estimator. Jim had opened his own business, a commercial furnishings dealership in Everett, Washington, specializing in used office furniture sales with some new.

He would stop by our shop in South Seattle and either bring a sketch or describe a custom piece of furniture he needed for a project, we’d discuss the design, the details, what he wanted it to do, what species of wood in which it would be constructed, and what finish he’d like on it. I’d do a rough sketch of the piece(s) he wanted, and if he agreed with what I sketched, I’d do a hardline drawing for his approval and then price it for him. His reaction was always to try to talk the price down so he could make more money when he sold it. It was a game that we both expected to play, and we’d always laugh about it. He’d win some, and I’d win some, and we enjoyed the banter and our visits.

I had found out we had more in common than just furniture. Both of us were the same age, politically conservative, Vietnam vets, and were in Vietnam about the same time though he was in the Navy and I was in the Army. He was cruising the rivers and going through areas that had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, and I was flying over them in Hueys that had flown over, through, and had most likely landed in areas that had been sprayed, during my flights on courier runs to different fire bases. We also had soft spots for underdogs…we both rooted for the Washington State University Cougars. I regaled him with stories of my days at WSU and he told me some stories of his youth, growing up and his love of fishing and hunting which he picked up from his grandfather in Montana. He enjoyed hearing me talk about my dad and our resort.

He knew Lou, my wife, since the commercial furnishings industry in the Greater Seattle area was a relatively small, intimate industry because almost everyone in it knew almost everyone in it as we all competed against each other. He used to get great enjoyment kidding me about what a lucky guy I was and wondered what in the world was she thinking when she married me. We both got a good laugh from that.

As time went on and I left the Craftsmen, Ltd. to return to space planning and being a commercial furnishings dealership sales person, and when Jim opened a store in the Olympia area, we saw less of each other until my specialization as a GSA Account Representative caused us to lose touch altogether. We did our business in different markets, so our paths just didn’t cross.

It was almost twenty years until I saw Jim again, and it was under sad circumstances. It was at Lou’s memorial service. He approached me with tears in his eyes, we hugged, and I thanked him for coming to honor her. He said he wished it could have been under different circumstances that we saw each other again, and that he came to honor both of us. That was December 11, 2010.

During the early part of September this year, I got a call from my good friend, Mike, who kept me posted on what Jim was doing, and would bring and take back greetings to him. He told me that our Jim was in hospice and dying from cancer. He was shocked to learn that Jim had been placed in hospice in late July. He asked if I’d accompany him to visit Jim, because he was given four to six weeks to live. I agreed immediately. On September 16, we drove to Gig Harbor to visit him.

It was a house…a former residence that had been turned into a home hospice. There may have been four to six people that were being cared for there, Jim among them. He had his own room that may have been the family room at one time. It was very pleasant and he had a view of the manicured back yard. Mike and I finally met his wife, Suzie, a tiny lady with a walker and an assistant to help her get around. Mike and I had known that Suzie had been having physical problems for a long time, and Jim had told Mike so many times that he expected that he would outlive her. Yet, here she was, out and about, getting around quite well though she had her assistant with her. I let Mike walk in first, and he and Jim exchanged hellos. Then I walked in. I stood there and looked at him, not knowing exactly what to expect, but even without hair from his failed chemo treatments and his face slightly swollen from the steroids and pain meds, he was very recognizable. He was sitting up in his hospital bed and looked at me. Suddenly he broke into a big smile and said, “Well, I’ll be damned! Bob! Thanks for coming to see me!” I hugged him and told him it was so good to see him again. Since his wife was still there, we stepped out so they could spend their time with each other. When his wife and her assistant left, we went in to visit with Jim.

We stayed for a little over an hour. We talked about a lot of things, but let Jim reminisce about his childhood, the summers he spent with his grandfather in Montana learning to hunt and fish. We talked about our early days in the furniture industry. We talked about our mortality. Once again, he told us he thought he’d outlive his wife, but now he knew that was not to be. He knew he didn’t have a lot of time left, but he still prayed for a miracle. I told him I’d pray for him, too, and that brought tears to his eyes. He told me that meant a lot to him. We could tell he was beginning to tire, so we stood up to say our good-byes. Mike said his first and then it was my turn. Jim looked at me through serious, droopy eyes as I took his hand and he said, “You know, I think the thing I want the most is for people to remember me.” I held his hand and said to him, “If people continue to tell stories about you that bring smiles to their faces, you will live forever in their hearts. Besides, you’ve got Mike and me and your family and friends. You will always be remembered.” He thought about that for a few seconds, then gave my hand a squeeze and smiled. “I guess that’s true, Bob,” he said. “Thanks for coming to visit me.” I told him it was my pleasure and my honor. He was closing his eyes as we left.

Mike and I tried to visit Jim once more, but I had doctor’s appointments the days that Mike wanted to go. He visited Jim alone on Friday, October 14. Jim was very weak, so Mike only stayed about half an hour. He called me afterward and asked if I wanted to visit Jim the following week. I told him yes. He also told me Jim said he was ready to go. He knew no miracle was going to happen, but he said he was okay with that. It was just a matter of time. Mike called me on Friday night, October 21 to tell me that he called the hospice house and was told that Jim had passed away quietly with his wife at his side the Monday before, October 17. On October 25, he sent me a copy of the memorial announcement and I said I would be there.

Jim’s memorial was last Saturday, November 5 in Gig Harbor. I went alone, as Debbie had to work some overtime. When I arrived, I saw Mike and his wife, Dee, and we entered together. Once inside the facility, I saw Jim’s wife, Suzie, and said hello to her. She remembered me and thanked me for coming to celebrate Jim’s life. I told her it was my honor. I also saw several other people I knew, mostly furniture reps I worked with when I worked at the commercial furnishings dealerships before I retired. It was nice to see them again, but as I wandered through the crowd, I listened to snippets of conversations, and occasionally I’d eavesdrop on a story about Jim. When his close friends spoke about him and shared stories about him, I’d watch their faces. They were almost always smiling as they reminisced about an incident that meant something to them. I knew Jim would be pleased.

Traffic was horrid on the way home. I spent an hour mired in traffic stopped on I-5 at the on-ramp from Highway 16 and the Tacoma City Center exit. I turned up the radio and sang along with a few songs, but mostly thought about Jim’s memorial. Yes, I believe he would be pleased because I was right…he was remembered because people had smiled when they told stories about him. He will live forever in their hearts…and mine.

Affirmations

The following day, Sunday, was somewhat different. I was feeling a bit subdued because of the day before and the finality of losing one more friend to cancer, but I went to church an hour early so I could set up the sound system because my pastor asked if I would do ‘special music’ for two confirmands, Anna and Marshall. Pastor Jan wanted me to sing, “Wade in the Water” while I accompanied myself on the guitar. I had contacted Casie, our music director and pianist extraordinaire, and she said she would love to accompany me and my guitar. I was grateful she accepted my request. We set up the sound system and I got my acoustic/electric Gibson plugged in and working, and we ran through the song a couple of times. I prayed that God would let me sing well to His glory and for the confirmands and congregation…and then I let it go. His will be done.

In the Lutheran church, as in many Christian churches, it is called Confirmation, a “public profession of faith prepared for by long and careful instruction.” Last Sunday at church it was called Affirmation, as in “affirmation of one’s baptism into the faith.” I was going to sing, “Wade in the Water” for the affirmations of their baptisms. Pastor Jan thought it would be most fitting. I thought it was, too. I was honored she wanted me to sing it however the spirit moved me.

It was also the Sunday before Veterans Day and immediately before the service was to begin, we veterans were asked to stand so we could be recognized and thanked for our service to our country. It has always surprised and touched me that our pastor would do this in church when I still have such vivid memories of being spat at and called a baby-killer in the Oakland airport when I first returned from Vietnam all those years ago. Remembrances of my time in Vietnam and the faces of my Band of Brothers flashed across my mind. Some old wounds are long to heal.

The opening prayers were said, the praise team was called upon for two songs, Breathe and Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone), then pastor gave her sermon. As the sermon ended, she prayed and ended the prayer with (to paraphrase), “…and silence the voices within us that ask us to be perfect…” After her sermon, she called upon me for the special music. I barely had time to get nervous. I picked up my guitar, said another quick prayer that God would let me sing to His glory, and without thinking spoke into the microphone, “I have silenced the voices in me that ask me to be perfect.” Sometimes I surprise myself…this was one of those times. I think that may have gotten a few smiles, but I wasn’t sure. No matter. I took a deep breath and began. It took exactly one line before I was totally immersed in the music and singing my prayers to my Lord. I can tell when that happens and it always amazes me. As I’m singing, it’s like I’m not…I feel myself singing but I hear someone else’s voice. And then I was finished. I took another deep breath and thanked God for letting me sing to His glory. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t expect the reaction of the congregation…they applauded. It stunned me and sort of awakened me. All I could do was bow my head and thank the Lord it touched them as I sat down. I was exhausted.

I have been blessed to be a small part of many people’s lives, and even more blessed that they have been part of my life. This journey through life is everything to me. It’s taught me things, especially how to learn from my experiences, how to be appreciative and grateful for what I have and for what I’ve seen, for all the people I’ve known, and all the things I’ve gone through…good and bad…because those things have brought beauty, knowledge and empathy to me, taught me how to treat others, and it’s all taught me how to give back. Most of all, though, I am grateful and blessed for the love I’ve received, and the love left in me to give back and pay forward. Thanks be to God for a special weekend!