Set It Down

When my wife died in late 2010, and after taking care of all the legal matters, paying the bills, arranging for her cremation, notifying Social Security, trying to exist through Thanksgiving and her memorial service that provided closure for almost everyone but me, and barely tolerating the loneliness and heartache through the Christmas and New Year holidays, the reality of her death and my new and different life crashed down upon me…and the weight was staggering.

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive it, nor did I want to. Each passing day proved to be just a little worse than the previous day. The weight of bearing the grief, the sudden aloneness, and the guilt that I might done more for her, grew each day. I wasn’t bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders. The world was going on around me…and without me. The weight of my grief, loneliness and guilt was bringing me to my knees where I’d weep uncontrollably in the privacy of my home several times a day. I began to pray that I’d simply die in my sleep so it would end.

For weeks I did nothing except exist, disappointed that I awoke in my bed day after day. The only thing that kept me going was a routine that I could follow without thinking. Late at night, just after I’d set up the coffee-maker to brew a pot of coffee at 6:00 a.m., I’d fall into bed between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. physically and emotionally exhausted. I thought of nothing as I laid in bed and suddenly it was four hours later. I’d get up, make my bed, use the bathroom, put on my sweats and head for the kitchen to pour myself a just-brewed cup of coffee. I’d open the blinds in the living room and sit staring out the window, waiting for the first light of day. Just to break the monotony, I’d shower every other morning just after my first cup of coffee. On the day I didn’t shower, I’d head to the home office, turn on my PC, open the blinds, and scroll through my emails. I’d hit Facebook, play a few games, have another cup of coffee, and fix my breakfast. After breakfast, I’d clean up the kitchen, do my dishes, pour myself another cup of coffee and sit in the living room again. On those days I showered, I’d get dressed in a fresh pair of sweats, pour myself another cup of coffee, and head for the office to my regular thing. In between coffee, my shower, breakfast and my computer, I had grief attacks that would leave me weak and drained.

The rest of the day was spent watching TV, weeping, staring at the walls, sitting at my computer, writing in my journal, fixing dinner, cleaning up after myself, and falling into bed exhausted. The following day way similar, as was the following week. It was like the movie, Groundhog Day. I’d change my sheets and do all the wash every other Saturday for something different to do. The only time I’d leave the house was to go grocery shopping, maybe fill up the gas tank on the car or truck and pick up my meds from the pharmacy. I hated leaving the safety of my house. I felt raw, as though people could tell by looking at me that I was only half of what I used to be. I wanted to be invisible so people couldn’t and wouldn’t see me because I thought they could see the jagged hole in my chest where my heart and soul were ripped from me. I felt vulnerable. I felt that people would look into my eyes and see the sad eyes bloodshot from crying and wonder what my problem was or think I was a wuss or some sort of weakling for not manning-up to my problems and carrying on.

The burden began to lighten somewhat when I began attending my bereavement group sessions. They started in February, a little over nine weeks after Lou died, and it helped immensely to be among others who were experiencing the same emotions as I, especially since two other men were in the group. I was not the lone male. Because the bereavement group sessions were once a week for two hours, I used that day, Tuesday, to run my errands. I drew strength from the group, and they helped to make it easier to face other people, and for me to “fake-it-until-you-make-it.” Though I still felt as though I was missing my soul, I began to simply smile at people in the store. I didn’t have to talk with them, I could simply smile at them. Most of them smiled back at me, especially innocent children. They couldn’t tell I was trying to cope with the loss of my wife. They couldn’t see the hole through me because my smile drew the attention away from it. It helped me hold up long enough in public to not have a personal melt-down. Baby steps, but steps none-the-less.

As time passed and the ‘official’ sessions ended, most of us decided that we weren’t ready to face the world alone after only eight weeks, so we continued to meet. For two weeks we met in a basement conference room of the St. Francis Hospital, then for two more weeks in the nearby Federal Way Library, but we couldn’t take food or drink there, so we decided to meet in a small restaurant for brunch. By that time, eight of us remained of the original twelve in the bereavement group. After twelve weeks, we were now meeting in public. One more small step.

By my birthday in April, I was beginning to feel good about myself. I could think about Lou and not cry. I could think about her and have good memories of things we did, the way she looked, our vacations, and the time we spent together. I missed her terribly, but I felt as though I was beginning to live again, and this time, I was living for myself. The burden of grief was getting lighter. There was a small down-side to this, though. There were times I felt guilty when I became conscious of having some fun and enjoying myself, even if it was something small like going to a movie with a friend. This guilt took the place of grief in that burden I was carrying, even though Lou had given me ‘permission’ to live without her. One of those memories was a conversation we had before her brain tumors began to steal her memories and motor skills. She told me that, if she should die, that she wanted me to go on living, to find someone new to love because I had too much love left in me to go to waste. I even felt guilty for remembering that conversation.

By the middle of May, a year after her tumors were discovered during a routine PET scan that caused us to cancel our vacation, I decided to go on that vacation we had planned. It was a rather bold step, I thought, but I felt the need to get away, to see new things, to go somewhere I’d not been before, and do it by myself. So I made my plans, let people know, packed my truck, and in June was on my way. The first day on the road was the worst. It was my first vacation in twenty-eight years without Lou beside me. It rained for much of that first day on the road, but I saw the most beautiful rainbow as I was coming out of the Siskiyou Mountains. I turned to Lou to comment, and all I saw was a vacant seat. She wasn’t there. I wept for the next fifty miles. By the time I reached Medford, the sun was out. I missed the exit to the Holiday Inn Express but took the next one and began to double back, but I saw a Day’s Inn near the freeway on-ramp and a classic car show in their parking lot. I stopped there and they had one room left, a suite on the top floor, so I took it. They not only gave me a discount for being a ‘single,’ I got to see a classic car show in their parking lot. The day ended well, and the trip only got better from there.

I was on the road for two weeks, making stops in Paradise, California South Lake Tahoe, California/Stateline, Nevada, through the Gold Country to San Jose, visiting with my niece and her family, my nephew and his family, and then my sister-in-law (Lou’s sister) and her family. We took side trips to Carmel and Monterey, and then I drove home. I drove 2,000 miles and took 1,400 photos on that trip. By the time I returned home, I felt like a new man, my own person, and at ease with myself. I had become confident in myself again. I didn’t have to force myself to smile at or talk to people…total strangers…anymore. My friends welcomed me back. Though I was alone, I no longer felt lonely. I no longer ached for Lou, though I missed her. I was happy for her because she was no longer in pain, and I was happy for me for the same reason!

After two weeks at home, washing the truck and my clothes, mowing the lawn, doing some weeding and tree- and shrub-trimming, and cleaning the house, I was on the road again for another two weeks. This time I went to Lakeside, Montana on Flathead Lake for Lou’s family reunion. I had not planned on going, but Lou’s two sisters had called me and urged me to go because I was the family’s ‘last link’ to her. They welcomed me as part of the family and told me they weren’t going to let me out of the family. They are my family, and I love them all! After the reunion, I had no firm plans, so I decided to poke around the area. I drove into the hills above Lakeside and saw stunning and expansive views of Flathead Lake. On a whim, and since I was so close, I drove to Kalispell and on to Glacier National Park because I’d never been there. I entered the park and decided to drive the Going to the Sun Road to Logan Pass, then continued east down to Sunrise, across the highway from St. Mary Lake. I stopped for dinner there, and on a whim, inquired about lodging at the hotel there. All their rooms were full, but the young man at the front desk checked the park’s hotels via the internet and found a vacancy at the Lake McDonald Lodge, either by good fortune or perhaps Lou had something to do with it? Regardless, I took it! I paid for it at Sunrise and then drove back across the Going to the Sun Road to Lake McDonald. When I checked in at the lodge, I found my room was in one of the Lake McDonald Lodge cabins facing the lake. It was a very good day.

The next day I had breakfast at the lodge, checked out, and decided to hike up to Avalanche Lake, then back down to Avalanche Creek before driving to and walking around Apgar Village. From there, I drove back to Lakeside on Flathead Lake. It took another week for me to get back home from there because I spent a couple of more days at Lakeside driving and hiking around the hills above Flathead Lake, then stopping in Coeur D’Alene to drive down the east side of Lake Coeur D’Alene. After entering Washington, I stopped in Moses Lake before finally driving home. Once again, I had been to places I’d never been to see things I’d never seen, and all because I wanted to. This time it was a 1,400-mile road trip with another 1,400 photos taken. I finally felt complete again.

I’d been home for a few days getting clothes and truck washed, the lawn mowed and the house vacuumed, when I realized I was living in a museum…a memorial to Lou where I was a familiar guest. It was not my house, it was our house but she wasn’t with me anymore. I wanted to make some changes to make the house mine, yet I felt guilty about it because I was somehow betraying her memory. I began small…I started on one dresser. To make it easier, I went through both her things and my things. I sorted them into three piles…keep, donate, and throw out. I kept none of her things and less than half of mine. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. I went through a smaller dresser of hers and did the same thing, and then the last dresser. The closet was next. I did the same thing there. I went to the guest bedroom and went through the closet, an armoire, and her make-up table. I filled up the bed of my pickup to the top of the canopy five times with clothing and other possessions I didn’t need five times, and took all those things to the Federal Way Multi Service Center. They didn’t sell those things, they gave them to battered women, to both men and women who had been out of the job market for one reason or another, who had been retrained in different fields, who needed nice clothing for job interviews so they could once again fend for themselves. I was glad Lou’s and my things could be used in this manner.

At first, I felt guilty that I might betray her memory. I thought I might lose part of her by giving her things away, by not holding them sacred. But what would I do with them? I couldn’t use them. They’d be going to waste, they’d be a constant reminder of what was and would never be again. I didn’t want to carry that the rest of my life. I began small, with her clothes, the clothes she loved, the clothes I remembered. It took some time, but after they were gone, I could still remember her in them, how she looked. The clothes were gone, but not the memories. The clothes didn’t make those memories, her stuff didn’t make those memories, we did and I didn’t lose them. It was reassuring, and that made going forward easier. It made giving up my own things easier, too. If I hadn’t used them or worn them in several months, they went.

Adding to some of the guilt about wanting to let Lou’s things go, I ‘met’ someone online at that time. Her name was Debbie and she responded to something I wrote in a bio that I posted on a dating website because I simply wanted some female contact. I commented back. We began to email each other, sometimes three times a day. I enjoyed receiving her emails, reading her descriptions of her family, what she liked, and how real she sounded. I wondered what it would be like to meet her in person. I was reticent about mentioning it because what would have been Lou’s and my twenty-ninth anniversary was rapidly approaching. I wondered how I would fare on that day.

Our anniversary fell on a Sunday in the middle of August, and I decided that I would stay home from church on that day because I didn’t know how I would feel or react. It took some of the pressure off me. When I awoke that Sunday morning, I laid in bed and waited to see how I felt. Aloud, I wished Lou a Happy Anniversary and waited for the sadness to wash over me. I was puzzled when it didn’t, even though I missed her. I got up, put on my sweats and went to the kitchen to brew my coffee. I spent the day remembering her and us, reminiscing about all we did together from the beginning to the very end, and thinking of all I learned from her. I was glad I decided to stay home alone that day, but that day turned out to be a celebration of remembrance instead of a day of mourning. I realized that I looked forward to each new day. I wanted to feel the wind in my face and experience my new and different life with my eyes wide open. I felt new, I still felt young, I still had things I want to do, places I wanted to go, things I wanted to see and experiences I wanted to live and feel. I knew I could…and wanted to…love again.  I was finally setting the load of grief and guilt over what was, down. I was beginning to live my life, my new and different life, as only I could, as Lou would have would have wished for me. Life was getting better every day.

The following day, Monday, after three weeks of corresponding by email, I asked Debbie if she would meet me for coffee in a safe and public place. I wasn’t sure if she would accept, but she did! It began as coffee (and tea for her) at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, turned into dinner at 7:00 p.m. two doors down, and then the restaurant was closing too soon. We spent the following Saturday together hiking around Paradise at Mt. Rainier photographing the scenery, followed by dinner at a small restaurant just outside the park entrance, and it closed too soon, also. We met for dinner the following Monday, and by Wednesday we decided that we were a couple.

Seven years later, I am so grateful for my new and different life, and my life with Debbie. I am in love for the last time in my life, and that love continues to grow daily. None of this could or would have happened had I not acknowledged my loss, accepted the invitation to my bereavement group, taken the time to grieve, to get it out, and to finally stop carrying the grief and the accompanying guilt with me without losing my memories of Lou and our twenty-eight years together. It sure didn’t hurt to have Debbie accept my invitation to meet for coffee, either!

It took a while, but I was finally able to set the grief and guilt down, walk away from it with a clear conscience and a light heart, and begin a new and wonderful life without it. I am truly blessed.

Seasons Change; So Did I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how I’ve changed.

Life After Death

Is there life after death? This is a direct question of which the answer, if asked of a Christian, would be yes. I believe, though, if this question is asked in a different context, my answer would still be yes, but one must make a choice after asking a couple of more questions:  Whose life? Whose death?

Why am I bringing this up? I am about to tell you in a round-about way. You see, every other Tuesday, I spend the afternoon Skyping from the Greater Seattle area into a grief and comfort group at the Riverside Church of New York called Matthew 5:4. It is hosted by Reverend Debra Northern, and Yvonne Broady, author of Brave in a New World: A Guide to Grieving the Loss of a Spouse, honored me by asking me to co-facilitate the group with her and Reverend Northern because she thought that dealing with grief from a man’s perspective would be helpful. We have been meeting every Tuesday afternoon since May 2016, and recently changed the schedule to every other Tuesday. Half of the group have been married for more than sixty percent of their lives and are over eighty years old. The oldest is a gentleman, who is now ninety-one and was married for two-thirds of his life. The remainder of the group, except for me, were married for over half their lives. All of us in this group, two men including me, and five ladies, including Yvonne, have one thing in common: We have lost a spouse. Except for three of us who lost our spouses between seven and eleven years ago, five have lost their spouses between one and three years ago.

Most bereavement groups limit their sessions to between eight and twelve weeks, with sessions lasting approximately two hours, one day per week. That simply boils down to eight to twelve two-hour sessions, or a total of sixteen to twenty-four hours of group participation. Does this meager amount of time help? Yes, it does–some. It helps by giving the participants tools to learn how to cope with their losses, and almost enough time to learn how to use those tools. Yet, it seems like a mere scratch to the surface of their grief because of the length of time they shared their lives with spouses or partners.

After my wife died in 2010, I decided to join a bereavement group because I simply didn’t know how to handle my grief. I couldn’t do it alone. I believe that men are “wired” differently than women, and generally, are less capable of handling the emotional stress of spousal loss. It was that way for me. I would have taken her cancer from her and suffered in her place; I’d have taken a bullet for her; I’d have wrestled God for the chance to cure her. But I couldn’t bear the pain of her loss and the ensuing loneliness, and so every night when I finally went to bed, I would pray that I would not awaken in the morning. I wanted to die because it was the only thing I thought would ease the pain. I was aware that some spouses died within weeks or months of the death of their mates, and I hoped I would be one of them. Researchers have given this phenomenon a name. It’s called the “widowhood effect.” In an article I recently read, written by Anita Creamer in February 2011 for the State Journal Register in Georgia, Dr. Barbara Gillogly, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and former chair of American River College’s gerontology department said, “Traditional gender roles play a part in the widowhood effect, too: While women seek connection, a trait that serves them well after the death of a spouse, men’s drive for independence can leave them isolated and lonely.” She also said, “It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized. Connection helps us negotiate old age. Independence does not do us well.” I guess that explains it.

I kept waking up every morning and remember feeling so disappointed because I would have to face another day of heartache, longing, anger, and the pain of my wife’s death. It was like the movie, Groundhog Day, waking up to the same stuff every day, with no end in sight. I needed help, and that’s what drove me to my bereavement group. At first, I thought I was weak for having to be in that group, but soon found safety there because I was with others who felt as I did. I finally felt comfortable in a place outside the walls of my home with other people. It helped that the group facilitator had lost her husband five years earlier than our losses. She brought us out of our protective shells and we began to talk, to pour out our hurt, our anger, our loneliness. She was the one who told us that grief takes as long as it takes, that there is no time limit on how long to grieve. She told us that it helped to talk about it, write about it in a journal, cry, and then do it all over again. She told us there was no “right way” or “wrong way” to grieve, and those who told us otherwise, as well as those who thought we spent too much time or not enough time grieving hadn’t grieved like we were. Grief was a personal and individual thing. She told us we would have bad days and better days, and that certain things…songs, something on TV, something we overheard someone say, a smell, a taste, a sound…would trigger memories and more grief. And whatever it was, it was normal. It was a new normal, because it was a different life now. It was now a life without a spouse, and it would never be the same as it once was. I learned much from her that I hope I’m paying forward.

She also told us that one day, we would notice that our “better” days would come more often, and then they’d last longer. One day, we would notice that we smiled more, hurt less, and we’d begin to have good memories that would make us smile instead of bringing tears. And then our sessions were over. Eight weeks, one day per week, two hours per that day, sixteen total hours, and we were done. Few of us were ready for that day. Eight weeks earlier we had begun with twelve people…nine women and three men. The ten of us who had lost spouses, three men and seven women, were married from twenty-eight years (me) to fifty-eight years. One lady had lost her mother, and a younger lady had lost her father. By the end of the first week, the lady who had lost her mother dropped out because she said it hurt too much to talk about it, so eleven of us remained.

As the last of our eight weekly sessions ended, our group decided we were going to continue meeting, albeit independently, on the same day at the same time, every week because we weren’t ready for our sessions to end. We still needed the support and understanding from the others. The first two weeks, we met in a conference room in the basement of the St. Francis Hospital and brought snacks and coffee. The next two weeks, we met in a conference room at the library, but weren’t allowed to eat or drink there. We finally decided to pick a friendly local restaurant, one that hosted a weekly men’s bible study group, to meet and have brunch. By this time, we were down to eight, three of us men, and five ladies. Ten months later, we were down to seven because one of the ladies lost her daughter in a SCUBA diving accident a day short of one year after she lost her husband, and she joined another bereavement group. Almost two years later, the youngest woman left because she moved closer to her job. The oldest man, the one who had been married for fifty-eight years, had to stop coming to our brunches after four-and-a-half years because of health issues. I got to visit him twice before he passed away. The oldest lady stopped coming almost five years after we began our brunches to spend more time with her fifty-year-old daughter who had a stroke. After so many years together, we had become like family to each other. Four of the original eleven still meet every Tuesday at 11:00am for brunch at the same restaurant. We have supported each other, watched each other grow and, for the most part, heal from our losses. I can see this is beginning to happen with the Matthew 5:4 group.

I have seen similarities between my original bereavement group, the Franciscan Hospice Bereavement Services group I attended over six years ago, and the Matthew 5:4 group now. First, I saw that the eight weeks of two-hour sessions every Tuesday was barely enough to begin to cope with the loss of a spouse. In the Franciscan group, we were given workbooks that outlined what to expect as we grieved, and included tools to help us express our grief. However, eight weeks’ worth of sessions was only enough to begin to learn to use those tools. Originally, the group sessions were scheduled for twelve weeks but were reduced to eight weeks because of budget issues. Though all admitted some apprehension before attending the first session, we began to look forward to our next sessions until they ended. Second, a bereavement group gives its members an emotionally safe place to be because everyone there, no matter their backgrounds, have a single thing in common: They have lost a loved one, a spouse, a mate, to death. It isn’t difficult to bond with those who share such a devastating loss. It also seemed to me that the older the people are, and the longer they’ve been married, the longer it takes to get through their grief. I have observed this with the women and men of both groups, especially those over the age of seventy. I was sixty-three when my wife passed away. It was difficult enough for me then, and I had been married for “only” twenty-eight years. That first year was, and is, horrid.

Everything during that Year of Firsts, as I called it–holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, special occasions–brought tears and a broken heart. Bad days wrought with grief, sadness, loss, anger, loneliness, aloneness, abandonment, and guilt, outnumbered any good days. The occasional “good” day was sometimes the cause of guilt about feeling halfway good because one had lost a spouse or mate. The second year can be almost as bad as the first year. Sometimes I think that older survivors feel it is too late for them to start a new and different life, though they already have. Living without that longtime spouse is a new and different life because after all the years of being with that One, the survivor is now alone and struggles to remember the person he or she was before they were married. Most survivors, no matter their ages, feel as though they are only half the person they are without their spouse until they begin to remember the whole person they once were. Sometimes older survivors really can remember that younger person they once were, but may succumb to the feeling that they are too old to start anew, don’t deserve to start anew, are too tired to start anew, don’t want to tarnish the memory of the spouse that died, or are simply not interested. Sometimes, too, I believe that telling survivors that there is no time limit on grief gives them permission to grieve until the end of their days. I also believe that wanting to heal from the loss of a spouse is a mindset, but it doesn’t ever happen when one wants it to. It happens in its own time, and only after one has acknowledged and accepted his or her grief, and has grieved.

Though the Matthew 5:4 group doesn’t have workbooks, they do have Yvonne and me. We serve as their workbooks. We try to guide them out of their protective shells to talk about their grief, how they feel, what they remember, what others have said to them, how others have treated them, what triggers their worse moments or their better moments, and what to expect. We rely on our personal journeys through grief to draw them out, to tell them what is normal now that wasn’t normal before. We try to pass on to the group, to pay forward, what we have learned through our separate bereavement groups’ guidance, and through our own personal experiences.

Another similarity I see is that almost everyone still has melancholy days. Since we’ve transitioned from sessions once a week to every other week, and they plan outings together—lunch or early dinner—during the off-week, the melancholy days seem more obvious to me since I’m not with them in New York. I know they enjoy their brunches, lunches and dinners together, but I think they may be reticent to talk about what has happened to them, what has been bothering them or how they are feeling in a more open and public atmosphere. It’s so much more difficult, and perhaps embarrassing, to shed a tear in a restaurant than it is during a regular session in a more private environment, even with those who understand and share their own loss of a loved one. They won’t judge the others for grieving, but other restaurant patrons may.

I can only hope that I’ve helped others by telling my story, sharing how I grieved, how I thought, how I felt, how painful and lonely it was, and to show them they are not alone. I want them to know they are not crazy or losing their minds for having giant mood swings, for breaking into tears over memories triggered by a song, a sound, a word, a sight, or a certain scent, for the anger they may have felt at God for letting whatever it was cause the death of their spouse, at their spouses for “leaving” them, at unthinking people who say something placating or insensitive, for wanting someone to just listen to them talk about their spouse, or for just having a bad day. I want them to know that for at least the first year, this is normal. I want them to know there is no time limit on how long they grieve, nor is there a right way or wrong way to grieve, there is just grief, and it’s okay to grieve. One must grieve to heal.

I also want them all to know there is Life after Death. In the sense that all those in the group are Christians, they know this and they know their spouses are now whole once again. But I want them to know that a new and different life is available to them after the death of their spouses. They are already living the sad and most difficult part of that different life, but that can change with time into a different and happier life for them than they are currently experiencing, and it can be with or without a significant other. It happened to Yvonne, and most certainly it has happened to me! I now thank God daily for my new and different life, for my new friends, and for the last great love in my life, Debbie. I pray the same will happen to them. I’ve only met them long distance via Skype, but after seeing them, talking with them, and getting to know them for over a year, they are now family and I love them. One day, I hope to meet them all face-to-face and hug them all!

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!