Loose Leaf Notes

The following was published in the Floyd Press on May 1, 2008.

Rosemary Wyman’s business, New Day, has been providing home health care and support to individuals and their families since 2005. The business is a natural extension of a life long interest of Wyman’s.

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always say a nurse,” Wyman, a tomboy who grew up in New York, said. “The only reason I played with dolls was to use them as patients,” she added.

Wyman and her family moved to Floyd from Charlotte, North Carolina in 1999. She and her husband, Walter Charnley, have been parents to eight in a blended family that Wyman refers to as, “his, mine, and ours.”

Certified in hospice and as a palliative nurse assistant, Wyman has extensive experience with end of life care and has been educating others about this life passage. She’s worked for Good Samaritan Hospice in Roanoke and has done fill-in work at The Beulah Hospice House in Dublin. Although she’s provided care to a number of Alzheimer patients – including her own father – and has a special interest in the needs of the aging population, not all her clients are elderly. Last year Wyman provided care for two young women with terminal illnesses.

Tom Vangunten, who lost his wife, Laura, to cancer last fall thinks the contribution Wyman makes is “invaluable.” Like Wyman, he believes people would benefit from more education and preparation for end of life.

“We don’t prepare for death. I can’t believe I got to be forty-nine and didn’t know a thing about this. I think grief and loss should be taught in school along with Driver’s Ed and how to balance your check book,” he said.

Vangunten, who is now a single parent to his and his wife’s two young sons, explains how the support Wyman offered was for the whole family. “For people dealing with terminal illness, it affects everyone in your family. It’s helpful if you have someone who can guide you through it. What Rosemary did was invaluable. She coordinated with doctors and other care givers, and provided the personal. What ever needed to be done – if someone needed a hug – she stepped-up,” he said.

Many families dealing with the terminal illness of a loved one need more support than the one or two hours a day a hospice worker provides. New Day can offer what Wyman refers to as “hospice support.” While she gives direct care to clients – which might include bathing, wound dressing, and assisting with pain management – much of Wyman’s work is more subtle than that. Her presence often has a calming effect because she accepts people from where they are and can approach each new situation without family history, she says. “Sometimes things not being addressed can be addressed easier with someone outside the family. I like to go in like a breath of fresh air.”

Not all of Wyman’s clients are dealing with a terminal illness. Riner resident, Betty Bowman has a handicap that inhibits her balance and mobility. Wyman visits her one day a week to clean, organize, assist with personal care and grooming, and whatever else Bowman needs.

“She takes me to the doctor and the grocery store,” Bowman said. When asked if Wyman helps with cooking, Bowman explained that since her mother died four years ago she’s been heating up frozen dinners in the microwave for herself; although she did remember a delicious bean salad that Wyman prepared from a recipe Bowman provided.

“Cleaning and cooking equal care. Whatever makes someone feel better is care,” Wyman said, recalling a day she spent washing one client’s entire knick knack collection. “Sometimes people feel better when their homes are clean and their lives are organized,” she added.

Since the inception of New Day, Wyman has worked with approximately twenty clients. Some have been referred to her by other agencies, but most come by word of mouth. Although she provides services considered typical in her field, sometimes her work involves the unusual and requires some on the spot problem solving.

On one such occasion, she was flown to NY to transport a local family’s elderly aunt, who had broken an ankle and was in rehab, back to Floyd. Upon arriving in New York and after locating the woman’s apartment, Wyman packed a month’s worth of whatever she thought the woman might need. She then negotiated the transport, first with rehab staff, and then with overzealous airport security, all the while reassuring the woman – who didn’t know Wyman – that everything was okay. Her short term memory was failing but “she had a great sense of humor,” Wyman remembered.

Support for care givers is an important component of Wyman’s work. In 2004, after being approached by Our Lady of the Valley, an assisted Living and Nursing Care facility in Roanoke, Wyman presented an “Intuitive Emotional Clearing” workshop for care givers that involved guiding them through the use of creative outlets, such as music, art, and movement. Wyman has also facilitated the formation of a “Share the Care” circle in Floyd, based on the book of the same name. She says when she first saw the book, which outlines a step-by-step model for organizing group care for someone ill, she knew it was “the wave of the future.”

Another aspect of the educational side of Wyman’s work played out when she participated in a day long event called “Successful Elder Care,” hosted by the Social Justice Committee of the Lutheran Churches of Floyd. She had planned to share a presentation about home assessment for people with limitations, something she and her husband do together, but ended up talking about Alzheimer care when another workshop leader who was scheduled to do that was unable to attend. Wyman remembers a fellow-presenter at the event who cited a Virginia Tech study on the growing needs of the aging population. “It was sobering,” she remarked.

Following her involvement in the Zion Lutheran Church day of resource sharing, Wyman embarked on a new venture, “End of Life Development,” with the intention of building on the educational outreach aspect of her work. Immediate plans include the formation of an advisory board made up of various professionals, social workers, doctors, clergy, and nurses – to determine what the greatest needs are for the aging population, she says. She also envisions workshops on how to manage progressive care, advance medical directives, and to set up proxy care for decision making. “Plans should be made before we are in crisis,” she said.

Last month Wyman received non-profit status as a subsidy of the Community Educational Resource Cooperative (CERC) for “End of Life Development,” along with a small seed grant. This support will be instrumental in assisting her educational initiatives in the community. It will also be helpful in allowing her do what she does best: easing the discomfort and grief of others and making it more viable for individuals at the end of life to remain home with their loved ones. “I consider every day spent at home a success. And sometimes you have to count these successes in days,” Wyman says. ~ Colleen Redman

Posted by Colleen at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Joe took the day off to study for his upcoming counselor’s licensure test. I had just returned from a morning Scrabble game, the one where Mara complimented my lime green shirt and I explained how I had pulled all the little rhinestones off after I bought it at thrift shop. She and Rosemary, whose dining room table we were playing on, laughed at the thought of me wearing anything with rhinestones.

Now, back on my own front porch, illuminated by forsythia light, I pulled a book from the stack that Mara had lent me. I opened her autographed copy of Claudia Emerson’s “Late Wife” and began to read.

The air bubble that choked and then popped in my throat caused tears to fall from my eyes as I read the poem called “Riding Glove.” While unloading groceries from the trunk of the car that once belonged to her husband’s wife who had died of cancer, she found the dead woman’s glove. It floated up from underneath the shifting junk – a crippled umbrella, the jack, ragged maps, Emerson wrote … It still remembered her hand, the creases where her fingers had bent to hold the wheel, the turn of her palm, smaller than mine.

The description of the glove made me think about my brother Danny’s shoes in my closet. I took them from his Houston apartment after he died. Now I wanted to put them on, wear them around the house, and let my bare feet plop around inside them, like a little girl wearing her father’s shoes. But then I remembered how stiff and un-scuffed they were, how cut short their use was.

There was nothing else to do but return it – let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water … C.E.

I thought about my brother Jim’s royal blue Nike sweat shirt, the one he left in my house when he and Danny visited me in the summer of 2001, just three weeks before Jim was killed in a metal milling machine accident and less than two months before Dan would die from liver failure. To the sound of my neighbor’s distant and incessant hammering on the new garage he's building, I wondered if Jim was ever cold during the last three weeks of his life without his sweatshirt. I wondered where the one little stain on the front of it came from.

The sweatshirt is too big for me and I don’t want to see Joe wearing it. I can’t imagine giving or throwing it away, so I just stuff it deeper into the limbo of the back of my closet, next to Danny's shoes. 4/10/08

Posted by Colleen at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Death is associated with murder or disease, pain and dread. What would it be like if we didn’t die? Would we appreciate the time we have and use our life well? Existentialists think death is what gives life meaning. Susun Weed says that sometimes death is the cure. My friend Alex Wind, who died in 2006, said, “Don’t think of me as dead; think of me as making room for someone else to be born, like someone made room for me.”

When I was a girl I used to lie in bed at night worry about the unknown, of growing up and being expected to find a stranger to marry and start a new family. Why would I need a new family, I would think, when I was happy with the family I already had? Lately, I find myself pondering this other unknown and asking a similar question. And I’ve noticed that I have more sympathy cards in my greeting card stockpile than I have birthday cards now.

Post Note: The poetics of Porch Vacations are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Taking my bath at night with the lights dimmed low, I notice that the veins in my hands have started to become dark and raised like my father’s were. When my house clothes get that rumpled lived-in look and I forget to brush my hair because I’m immersed in a project, I feel his undomesticated nature within me. I got my love of rhyme, giving people nicknames, and breaking out in song from him. I don’t whistle or like cashews as much as he did. I don’t yell as loud as he did, or fall asleep stretched out in chair. But I do like to tell stories and make people laugh the way he did. I got his impish Irish nature, his mix of being shy but outgoing, his pronounced way of pronouncing words, and his habit of choking up easily at both sad and happy occasions. Every time I stoop over the stove and sip homemade soup from a big spoon, I’m reminded of him doing that. He was always doctoring soup and wanted everyone who came into the kitchen to taste it.

When I pick up a magnifying glass to read the small print on CD liner notes or a vitamin bottle, I think of my dad. His eyesight was bad in the last twenty years of his life and he had magnifying glasses all over the house. The one I use now used to be his. Am I becoming more like him each day, I wonder?

My dad often said, “I’m the king of my castle.” I’m a homebody too. He liked the music of his generation, the way I like the music of mine. He was sentimental, and whenever he sang songs from the 40’s, he did it with emotion. When he sang, “You always hurt the ones you love, the ones you shouldn’t hurt at all,” we knew it was his way of apologizing. He whistled and snapped his fingers when he danced the jitterbug.

Whenever I come across a photo that didn’t come out right and I’m tempted to throw it away, I remember that my dad kept a stack of photos no one wanted in the drawer by his kitchen chair. I got the biggest kick out of him saving the pictures that anyone else would have throw away. They weren’t complimentary to anyone. (In fact he probably could have used a few to bribe others with.)

My dad was the king of his castle and a bit court jester too. He wasn’t tall in statue. (Ditto that for me.) But his sense of humor was big and mostly off beat. I inherited some of that from him, but he was the real master of it. I miss his playful ways.

~ Robert Redman: March 1924 – November 2005. Read my WVTF Radio tribute to my dad HERE. Eulogizing My Father is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

I don’t go to the graveyard to feel the spirits of my loved ones. I dance. Through sustained dance I can forget my self. And if I dance long enough I sometimes come up against the veil between worlds. Sometimes I dance myself scared.

I like to turn up the music and dance in the living room by myself. Not long after my brothers, Jim and Dan, died, I did this until I felt transparent and Jim and Dan’s presence loomed so large in the room that it startled me. I had to sleep with the light on that night.

Yesterday when I danced in my living room I thought about my father. Four months before he died, he was breaking a sweat, dancing the jitterbug at one of his grandchildren’s wedding. When he danced with my mom, he snapped his fingers, and his lips would purse like he was huffing and puffing, but he was really just whistling along. It was obvious watching him that he had all the hippest 1940’s moves.

The baby of eleven, my dad outlived all his siblings and most of his peers. He and my mother were the last of the jitterbuggers at family weddings. She, who has outlived him, all his siblings, and her two younger brothers, has lost her dance partner of 60 years.

As I’m dancing, I’m wondering, how long before my dance steps look antiquated? Will they translate to the next generations? Will my kids play a song for me and Joe to dance to at their children’s weddings? Will they stand around and watch the show?

I’m thinking about Jim dancing at the Surf Ballroom in his mohair sweater and the pressed pants he paid me a quarter to iron, and Danny who swayed to music with his eyes closed and a soulful look on his face. Thinking about my brother Joey dancing makes me smile. He needs such a big space to strut around. And like me, my three sisters all love to dance. When we get together, we get up on the first song and don’t sit down until the last. But I wonder how long our dancing tradition will survive? And who will be the last dancer?

“It’s wanting more that’s going to send me to my knees.” Gravity by John Meyer, the song I was dancing to when this post came to mind.

Posted by Colleen at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I was putting on mascara in the bathroom mirror when Joe called out from the kitchen to ask me where something was. “Ah nunno,” I mumbled back to him, trying not to break my concentration.

The act of mumbling caused me to immediately remember my brother Danny’s last words, three hours before he died. With his consent, the nurse on duty had taken off his life support. “Ihm awright,” he was barely able to say.

But he wasn’t alright. He was dying. How could he say he alright?

He tried to say something else, but it came out in an undecipherable garble. It didn’t seem to matter too much at the time. He had told us he was alright. We were beyond needing language.

But now I find myself wondering. What else was he trying to say? Did we miss something? What did he want to tell us that he couldn’t?

It’s been six years since Dan died and I think I’m wondering what he was trying to say because Im craving to hear what he thinks and to hear his voice again. With Dan, the past is all I have to puzzle together because there is no present day conversation and no future to plan or imagine.

Post note: Read an excerpt titled The White Feather from The Jim and Dan Stories about losing Dan HERE. Other samples from the book are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Last night while watching The News Hour, I couldn’t take my eyes off Ray Suarez, a PBS senior correspondent. At first I didn’t know why I was drawn to look at him so intently and why I felt soothed when I did. Then I realized that if I shifted my eyes slightly -- the way I do when I look at computer generated magic art or try to see a variation of an illusion -- I could make Ray Suarez look like my brother Danny.

I found myself imagining that Dan had moved out west, started a new life, and had become Ray Suarez. It was a stretch to see Dan under Ray Suarez’s beard, but the hairline was the same and the features similar. I was enjoying fleeting glimpses of what it would be like to see my brother Dan alive again. I was marveling at how well he was doing in his new life, interviewing people on TV, when I became aware of the game I was playing.

But really, is it any stranger that Danny may exist somewhere in an afterlife than it is to think he is Ray Suarez?

Post Note: I had imagined that Ray came from Los Angeles, but in reality he’s from New York and lives in Washington, D.C. His ethnic background is Puerto Rican. More about losing Dan HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

It’s a yearly class on grief and loss for counseling students, taught by Radford University Professor Alan Forrest. The curriculum includes reading Tuesdays with Morrie and The Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote about losing my two brothers a month apart in 2001. The students, usually about twenty or so, watch a video of Morrie being interviewed by Ted Koppel, and also get to meet me in person for one of their classes.

It begins with all eyes on me, which after being a guest four times in the last four years I’m starting to get used to. I broke the ice this time by reading my writer’s blog bio – Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research. 'Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?' was my first published piece at the age of eleven. The bio caused the group to erupt into laughter, which is always a good thing, especially considering our primary subject matter was death.

I generally spend anywhere from a half hour to an hour talking about how the book came about, what it was like to write it, and what has happened since. My husband, Joe, who took Alan’s class when he was a counseling student, has accompanied me to each class, giving support and adding comments that help me stay on track. He pulls up my webpage and blog on the classroom screen. I pass out photos, tell stories, and usually read one of my essays on death and a poem or two.

My favorite part of the class is when it’s opened up for discussion. I’m always surprised by how thoughtful the student’s questions and comments are, and I find myself thinking about them for days after the class is over.

The only male, besides Alan and Joe, and one of the few older students posed the first question. It was a variation of one I had heard before:

“I almost felt like I was violating your privacy when reading the book. How were you able to share such a personal story?” he asked.

I explained that it is an intimate story about a family's loss, told from one family member’s perspective. But it was also a universal story.

“Death is real and one of the most important subjects there is, but one that hardly anyone talks about,” I said. I also explained that I was shy at first about sharing my story, but the book unfolded in steps that I and other family members were comfortable with.

Someone usually wants to know how my process sorting out my beliefs about an afterlife is going. Discussions about family dynamics are always explored, because ultimately the book is a story about family and love.

This most recent class had a very special feature. My friend Mara and her ten year old daughter Kyla attended. Mara and I are both poets and Scrabble enthusiasts who also share a grief bond. Not only is she a reoccurring character on my blog, but she appears in my book on more than one occasion. She lost her husband, Cory, two weeks before my first brother died, and we supported each other from a place of knowing acute grief in the aftermath of the deaths.

After the class break Mara and Kyla read from the booklet they co-wrote five years ago. When Mara discovered there were no books available geared for young children that would explain death in a realistic way, she helped Kayla tell the story in her own words, using photos to illustrate them. Kyla may have gotten even more questions than I did. My favorite was when a woman asked what she told her friends about her dad. Kayla answered that she had to get to know them and trust them before she could tell them that her dad was dead. Mara, who has a grief counseling relationship with Alan, read some of her poems about death. Some comic relief by way of poetry was also offered.

A bond is created by sharing a sensitive and emotionally charged subject so openly. After the class people hug, share more of their own stories, and ask me to sign books. Even the ones who were utterly quiet during the three hour class come up to me to thank me for sharing.

Post Notes: You can read an excerpt of Alan’s review of my book HERE, excerpts from The Jim and Dan Stories in which Mara is mentioned are HERE, and a post about last year’s class HERE. That's me, Mara, and Kyla (standing) in the photo taken at the class break. For all my posts on grief and loss go HERE and scroll down.

Posted by Colleen at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

It ain't the heart, or the lungs, or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the one that hurts. – poet, Sekou Sundiata

It takes energy to hold a sharp focus on the memory of a loved one who has died. It’s like holding an arm wrestling position; after a while you get tired and have to give in. Giving in can be a relief, but it also has its own compounding sadness. As you return to your everyday life and memories start to blur, so does the piercing clarity that comes from living on edge, so close to death. Your loved one left you, and now it feels like you are leaving them.

When my brothers Jim and Dan died six years ago, my life was turned around. It was the first time I had experienced the death of an immediate family member. I was surprised by the strength of the sibling bonds between my brothers, me, and my remaining seven siblings and caught off guard by the intensity of grief I felt. It wasn’t just the heartbreak of losing Jim and Dan as adults. Because I knew them as children, I grieved for the loss of that part of them as well. I referred to mourning them as being in the trenches of grief’s front line. In what would become a book about my brothers’ lives and deaths, I wrote about being in a hole: Maybe the way an animal goes off alone to heal, I go down – into a mine, an archaeological dig, the shadow of the valley of death. Once tripped into the hole, I wasn’t in a hurry to come out, at least not empty handed. If I couldn’t bring my brothers back I at least wanted to mine some meaning from their untimely deaths.

The hole I wrote about could also be viewed as a metaphor for the deepening that was being carved out in me, as though more room was being made for me to hold more. Although the edges of the hole have softened over time, the span of it seems to have widened to include other past and future losses; the loss of my youth, my sons as children, the anticipation of losing physical abilities and beauty that seem destined to come with aging.

Losing my brothers showed me that death absolutely will happen. So, in vulnerable moments I play out other death scenarios. When my husband, Joe, goes out of town, as he did last week, and I’m alone in the house, I find myself ruminating on death. I remember the woman in town who lost her husband last year. My eyes well up with tears when I think of her because it’s been obvious how much she loved her husband, as I do mine. Is pain the price we pay for truly loving someone? If so, why do we let ourselves love so deeply? Do we even have a choice? The pain of losing someone close seems unimaginable from a distance, but when it is your pain and your reality there’s no alternative but to feel it.

So what would my life be like without Joe? Where and how would I live? He comes from Maryland, I’m from Massachusetts, and although we’re both happy where we live, neither of us wants to be buried in the local cemetery here in Virginia. So where will our dead bodies go? Cremation? He wouldn't care, but I wouldn’t be able to bear to look at a container full of his ashes. The thought of scattering his remains into obscurity leaves me cold. And I’ve not let go of the idea that a grave in a cemetery gives the dead and those who loved them a sense of belonging, a place in common, a concrete marker.

Such are the thoughts and questions that come with grief survival. The immediate wound that a death exacts eventually heals, but scars and fault lines remain. Once a grief fault line becomes apparent, it can grow. I don’t know whether my playing out death scenarios is an exercise in preparation, self-torture, or a byproduct of the trauma of watching one brother die before my eyes and imagining the other brother being violently crushed to death.

Yesterday was so hot, at midday I went to my bedroom, lied down, and let the fan blow on me. In the restful quiet that followed, I was struck by an uncomfortable feeling. As If I had rolled across something sharp, I remembered that my father was dead. When he died two years ago, four years after Jim and Dan, I grieved freely, but I didn’t have the heart or the energy to inhabit the hole again. It was too big, and having been there so recently, there seemed no point to further explore it.

But now, standing at its precipice, looking down, a flush of anxiety washed over me. For a few seconds, I was a child again, abandoned, unprotected, without a father.

Every death chinks away at my identity because my identity is intrinsically tied to those I love. But maybe life is designed to do that, so that when it comes my time to leave this world, my ego-self will have receded enough that I can finally let go of it all. Even so, the sting of not having a father, the fading memories of my childhood with my brothers, and the certainty of eventually losing others that I love, makes me want to splash cold water on my face.

Post Notes: James Michael Redman – November 22, 1946 – July 25, 2001. Daniel Mark Redman – October 7, 1951 – August 29, 2001. Entries on last year’s anniversary of Jim and Dan’s deaths are HERE and HERE. Photos of all nine Redmans HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

The Irish look within and see behind – know the heart and read the mind ~ written on a plaque in my father’s bedroom

Turns out my dad had the best room in the house. In the past when I visited him and my mom I slept in the small third floor attic bedroom that could double for a sauna on hot summer nights. Now that he’s gone, my mother has set me up in his room on the second floor. Not only is it cool and breezy because of the windows cross ventilation, but I recently discovered that I can pick up free wireless from the bed. The digital scale I used to slip in his room to weigh myself on is here. So is the best morning meditation chair. But I miss his suspenders and sweater that used to be draped across the back of it. His shoes are not on the floor by the chair waiting for him to put them on.

The patterns in the wood furniture that dates back to when my parents were newlyweds stir childhood memories as I look at them now. When I was a girl the dresser and bureau held adult mysteries, and sometimes I would peek into that world. The pictures on the walls are familiar. Mostly they're photographs that tell my father’s life story. The one above the bed hung in our living room for years when my siblings and I were growing up. It's a seascape with a big rock on the shoreline that we used to think was a giant horseshoe crab.

Cassette tapes of big band music and songs from the 40’s are still on a bedside bookcase. Their melodies used to play softly in the background, but now they are only memories. There’s no clutter, and the simple things I associated with my father – bottles of Vicks vapor rub, eye drops, and vitamins – are gone. The Chinese medicine balls that I gave him as a gift many years ago are still here in their blue satin container. I find myself staring at them and remembering his hands as he twirled them. They rang like a bell as they clanged together.

When I first arrived for my weeklong vacation I noticed that my father’s scent was gone from the room. But now I'm not so sure. Sometimes when I take a deep breath I think I can sense a faint hint of it.

Posted by Colleen at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When my brothers, Jim and Dan, died in 2001, I was shattered awake to the reality of death. As I struggled to penetrate its mystery, I allowed myself to grieve long and deeply. One of the ways I immersed myself in actively mourning Jim and Dan was to write a book about their lives and deaths, growing up together in an Irish Catholic family of eleven, and the first six months of the grief process.

When my father died four years later, although I grieved, I protected myself against the full weight of the loss. Although losing him ushered in a period of self-analysis and therapy, when it came to feeling the reality of my father being literally gone, I hardened myself. It felt good to be somewhat in control of my feelings. I had grieved Jim and Dan intensely and the outcome remained the same. They were gone. I didn’t have the heart to do it again that way.

I don’t remember much about Father’s Day last year, the first one without my father. But this year, I kept finding myself in front of racks of Father’s Day in shops, grocery stores, and gas stations. I guess my denial had caught up with me because the realization that I didn’t have a father anymore seemed strange and shocking to me.

I wrote in The Jim and Dan Stories that after my brothers died a part of them lived on in me and that I looked at the world differently, through the eyes that they no longer had. Jim's interest in weather, sky watching, and photography was transferred to me and other family members. Dan’s generosity inspired me to be more generous in his name. His love of music made me appreciate it even more than I already did. I knew soon after my brothers died the ways their lives expressed themselves through me. It took me longer to recognize how my father lives on in me.

I’ve always loved birds, but my interest in them this past year has heightened. It’s the first year that I’ve kept our birdfeeder consistently filled and have made a real effort to identify them by color and song.

The last time my mother and father visited me in Virginia was the spring of 2005. An early riser and all day napper, my dad would wake up at the crack of dawn, make coffee, and take it on the porch where he sat and watched the birds. At his home in the South Shore of Boston, Massachusetts, he had a favorite chair on his porch where he watched them from as they perched on the electrical wires in front of his three story house. He claimed to have seen some exotic ones, but it was hard to tell with my dad. He was as a big a kidder as he was a napper.

When I bird watch, I do it for my dad, the way I listen to music for my brother Dan, the way I watch the sky and snap pictures for Jim. As I mentally check off the new ones I’m able to identify, it’s like being in conversation with my dad. I had imagined he would sit on my porch and do some more bird watching with me. If my mother died first, maybe he could come and live with me, I once thought.

But there’s another way my dad lives in me. I used to make fun of at his rumpled appearance as he went about the house doing house projects. Mostly he’d spend time in his video room where he had several TV’s, VCR's, and a table that looked like an artist’s station. He liked to copy videos to give to his kids and grandkids and design his own covers for them. Sticky with tape and printer ink, it wasn’t unusual for his pants to have marks where he wiped his hands. If it wasn’t for my mother periodically collecting his clothes for the washer, they would have been worse.

I laughed at my dad’s lived-in appearance, the way I used to laugh at my brother Jimmy’s weather photos. Besides taking ones of storms, ocean waves, and clouds in the sky, he loved to capture the oddities of life, scenes that hardly ever had people in them. “I don’t like pictures without people in them," I told him. But now I have developed an eye for the unusual and out-of-place. More than half the pictures I take have no people in them.

Watching the birds in my lived-in house clothes, garden dirt stained on fingers that are holding a mug of tea, I feel my dad living in me. When I start getting older and doze off like he used to, it might be hard to tell who was who.

Post notes: The above photo is of a tribute collage my son Josh did. To read more about my father’s and my connection with birds, read The Black Feather, HERE.. It's about a transpersonal experience I had related to his death, written and posted last year at this same time. Right now I’m on my way to my hometown in Massachusetts. It will be my first extended time home without my father there. Posting here should continue but will likely be erratic. If I miss Thirteen Thursday you can go HERE. Scroll down and read one from the past.

Posted by Colleen at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

With a blanket spread out on May’s green grass, my husband and I are finally idle. Balanced in between Friday and Sunday, in between household chores and calls to take care the body, we extract the essence of the moment. As the breeze pollinates me with the scent of spring flowers, he tells me about a beautiful dream he had. In it he sees his dead father. Tears well up in his eyes. “Oh, the sad mystery,” I say. “There’s such a bittersweet beauty to anything that makes us remember our soul.”

I stroke his black crow hair and hover over him like a hummingbird writing in my notebook, as he drifts off to sleep. I resist the urge to get busy working in the garden. So I listen. Every sound is amplified; the whish of wind, the flap of notebook paper, the shrill trill, chirp, and tweet of birds. The birds are busy for me.

“Doing nothing expands time. It’s all right here,” I write in my notebook. ~ 5/19/07

Posted by Colleen at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Four days before this past Christmas, I went to my friend Alex’s memorial service. She died on December 17th after a three-and-a-half year battle with eye melanoma, and after living for two years longer than her doctors expected. A large hoop with ribbons dangling from it dazzled in the sunny doorway of the Glade Church, in Blacksburg, where Alex had been an active member and where the memorial service took place. The minister spoke from the pulpit wearing a vestment adorned with butterflies. A large round mosaic that Alex had made with the word JOY in the center hung above the altar instead of the traditional crucifixion cross.

Sitting in the pew beside my close friend Alwyn, taking in the scene, I understood how Alex, a feminist and artist, had been drawn to the church, described in a hand-out as “a caring faith community, open and affirming in the free church tradition where worship and diversity is celebrated.”

Alwyn, who first met Alex through their mutual animal rights activisim, squeezed my hand during the eulogy as the minister was sharing Alex’s thoughts on death. Because she knew she was facing a premature death, Alex prepared the words she wanted to leave us all with. “Don’t think of me as dead,” the minister related Alex saying, “Think of me as making room for someone else to be born, like someone made room for me.” I reached up to my neck and ran my fingertips along the turquoise and jade gemstone necklace that Alex had made and gifted to me.

She was a realistic and brave person who rarely spoke about the toll that fighting cancer had on her. So when her husband, Paul, read her most recent poem about her struggle, Alwyn and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes. The poem, “The Balance Gets Tipped,” begins: I had not known which way to yearn … Was I to move toward life … Or towards death?

Paul continued reading … This morning I knew certainly … I curled my toes like a ballerina … I shook off the pain, sweat and shallow breathing of the night … I got a look in my eye … Like a horse that is going to bolt … While brushing my teeth … I took a few dance steps … Ready to fight for my life … I descended down the stairs … bent on breakfast. Alex was not the type to brood for too long. She was upbeat and always interested in learning what life had to teach.

After the church service, everyone adjoined to a room for refreshments. There, while nibbling on cheese and crackers, I counted a dozen other necklaces that Alex had made hanging from the necks of other women. I asked about the hoop of ribbons, and Paul explained that Alex, always the artist, had requested the last week of her life that an array of colorful scarves be draped around her bedside, the bed she was confined to in the study of her home where family, friends, and hospice volunteers gathered to visit and care for her. She died before her wish could be fulfilled, so friends made something beautiful they knew she would approve of to hang in the church. On the ribbons people wrote their last words to Alex, along with blessings and condolences for her family.

Before leaving the church that day Paul and I promised each other that we would put together a booklet of Alex’s poetry in time for an art show the following month in her honor. I agreed to type the poems and email them back to Paul so that he and Alex’s daughter could print and bind them.

A few weeks later, I received from Paul two notebooks full of Alex’s handwritten poetry. Many of the older poems had appeared in the Museletter, a Floyd community forum, and I was familiar with them. I was particularly interested in the ones written in the last few years of her life that I hadn’t read because I was hoping to get some insight into how she managed to cope with the fight she endured.

I am permanently shut out of the pool of human normalcy … where most people splash unconsciously … All my joy in seeing this creation … is pinned on my one remaining eye … She revealed in a poem titled, “One Eye Shy.”

As she went on to describe how easy it was to lose her eye, in and out of surgery in a couple of hours, but how hard it was to get used to, I wondered why I never really looked at her prosthetic eye as we sat across from each other playing Scrabble. She seemed whole and not disabled to me.

I was newly shocked thirty times a day … By my halved vision … And the possibility of recurrence … It was like ogling the sword of Damocles … Inside the building … Wherever I moved … It followed … she wrote.

Choosing which poems to include in the collection and then typing them felt like being in Alex’s presence. Like her paintings, sculpture, and fiber art, her poetry strikes a balance between reverence and playfulness and inspires me to strive to do the same. With titles that include “How I Got on My High Horse and Never Got Off,” and “A Mother Daughter Memo,” her poems highlight the sense of humor she had, her love of animals, nature, and family.

In a poem called “A Poet of 20 Carats,” Alex’s description of a poet’s words as rare diamonds is reminiscent of the poetic ability that she possessed herself.

Ready to dazzle … Priceless, yet within reach … Formed under pressure … and …Bequeathed to the next generation, her poems are like those diamonds, and like the gemstone nuggets she used in the jewelry she made. Created to stand the test of time, Alex’s words radiate out, inviting others to enjoy their value and the insightful impressions they make.

Note that appeared in the most recent Museletter along with one of Alex’s poems : Alex was a past sister member of Floyd Woman’s Circle community. She passed away December 17th 2006 after a brave 3 ½ year battle with cancer. A Memorial Art Show featuring her multi-media art and the art of others is currently showing at the church she belonged to, the Glade Church in Blacksburg through March 25th. A booklet of Alex’s poetry is available for sale in Floyd at the New Mountain Mercantile, the proceeds of which will go to the Church Building Fund. You can also make a donation to the church fund in Alex’s name at 1600 Glade Rd, Blacksburg, VA 24060 or contact Colleen for a copy at credman@swva.net.

Posted by Colleen at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Dear Goddess of the spreading starry skies … whose shawl is the northern lights … and whose shoes are the polar ice floes …. Lead us ever in circles … Don’t stop dancing with us … Should disastrous death try to cut in … like an asteroid tapping on your shoulder … keep whirling … We don’t mind if our toes get stepped on … We’re having the time of our lives … ~ Excerpt from “A Line to the Goddess,” a poem by Alex Wind.

My friend and Scrabble partner Alex, who died this past December of eye melanoma, was an only child; a daughter who had one daughter of her own, and one granddaughter. Alex was revolutionized in the presence of a Black Madonna with Child on a trip to Poland in the 1990’s, and she incorporated the experience in her art. For her Master’s in Fine Arts Thesis, she sculpted a life-size Black Madonna with child, which was on display at the opening of her memorial art show this past weekend at the Glade Church in Blacksburg.

My Floyd friends, Katherine and Jayn, who have studied with the Machi (female shamans) of Chile, opened the show with a kultrun drumming and a four directions blessing. Alex’s husband, Paul, and I read selections of her poetry from the poetry booklet we worked on together, and then the chapel floor was opened up for the sharing of Alex stories, which highlighted her sense of humor, her love of animals, family, and art.

Even though Alex’s relationship with her own mother was less than ideal, the bonds between mother and child were an ongoing theme in her life and her art. The last thing I did before leaving the art show was to give Alex’s daughter, Chandra, a big hug. I whispered in her ear a reminder that her mother was as close as the very DNA she carries inside her body.

But I understand that Chandra is not likely to be comforted by the thought of such things at this early stage in her grieving. I remember after my brothers Jim and Dan died whenever someone would make a comment about them being “in a better place,” I’d think, “Where? Can you show me?” Even though I wasn’t convinced they were in a better place, I appreciated every effort, no matter how awkward, that each person made to acknowledge the loss I felt. Their caring intention transcended any words that were used.

In the end, I was the one who was comforted but what I said to Chandra, because of what she said to me in return. After acknowledging that she still feels inconsolable, she said, “I’ve been so much more aware of and thankful for my daughter since losing my mother.”

I know Alex would be comforted to know that the love she had for her daughter will be passed on, and that her granddaughter, who seems to have inherited her grandmother’s artistic flair, will be cherished.

Photos: 1. Alex’s Black Madonna and Child sculpture. 2. One in a series of Black Madonna collage prints that Alex did and which are now on show at the Glade Church in Blacksburg. 3. Colleen, Katherine, and Jayn at Alex’s Memorial Art show.

Posted by Colleen at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I haven’t listened to my John Mellencamp CD with the song “Your Life is Now” on it since right after my brother Danny died in 2001. One of my favorite last good memories of Dan was dancing to this 1998 CD with him and my sister Kathy. It was during a family Labor Day cook-out in Massachusetts, and Kathy, Dan, and I left the outdoor party to play this new CD that Dan had brought with him from Houston, where he lived then. Somebody was filming with a camcorder as we danced and sang loudly along with the songs in Kathy’s living room.

Dan especially liked the song about John’s hooligan sons, probably because he was one himself when he was a kid. Well I got two circus clowns here who like to fight … They got one black eye and a bloody nose … They are the hoodlums of my third wife … Whatever I say they will oppose …

I liked “Your Life is Now,” and as I sang it I felt like I was singing it for Dan. He wasn’t sick yet, but somehow we all knew that he was vulnerable and wanted him to take better care of himself. See the moon roll across the stars … See the seasons turn like a heart … Your father's days are lost to you … This is your time here to do what you will do … Your life is now …

When the wound of loss is new and wide open you tend to live close to it. You probe it and try to purge it by looking at old photo albums and watching videos of your missed loved one. Hearing their voice one last time before you have to store it away is especially important. Soon after Dan died I wanted nothing more than to see images of him and my brother Jim, who died just one month before Dan. I wanted to hear their voices and remember everything I could about them.

That kind of active grieving doesn’t last. There comes a time when you don’t want to look long or listen too closely. You want quieter and less frequent memories. You protect yourself.

It’s been 5 years since I witnessed my brother Danny die. Today I pulled out the John Mellencamp CD and listened to “Your Life is Now.” At one time it was my favorite song to dance to. I was warmed up, had already been dancing. I wondered if I could handle it.

When I was five years old, my brother Danny, who was four, went to Florida with our grandparents for the summer, but he stayed longer than that. For most of that period, from my point of view, it was “out of sight out of mind” when it came to him. But one day I found his shoes in a closet and the memory of him suddenly overwhelmed me. I carried his shoes around with me all that day and cried inconsolably. I can still remember how it felt, a vague awakening, like the jarring and blurring of past and future memories. A dress rehearsal for what was to come?

In this undiscovered moment … Lift your head up above the crowd … We could shake this world … If you would only show us how … Your life is now … Within the first few notes of the song I knew how the rest would go.

The pain is as immediate as it ever was. I’m five years old again and my brother is gone. I’m Inconsolable.

Post note: My brother Dan and John Mellencamp share the same exact birthday, October 7th 1951. Some say they look alike. I can’t seem to post photos of my brothers here, but you can go to my website for photos of Jim and Dan HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

The sadness is already there; the crying just lets it out.
~ Colleen - from the Jim and Dan Stories.

I read through tears from the July copy of the Time magazine that my husband brought home from the eye doctor’s office. The cover, which read “How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are” by Jeffery Kluger, got his attention, and although we both come from families of 9 children, he brought the magazine home for me.

When I lost my brothers, Jim and Dan, in 2001, I experienced firsthand how powerful the bond between siblings can be. I also learned how far off the radar sibling loss is in our culture. The feelings of loss I and my other siblings felt at losing two of us were overwhelming. Nothing in our culture had prepared us or validated the extent to which we grieved, as if we had indeed lost a part of ourselves.

I’ve been trying to understand the unfathomable depth of blood ties that rose up in me and my family members when Jim and Dan died. In looking closer at the sibling relationship, I realized that siblings who have the same mother and father are closer biologically than any other relationship. The only way to be closer is to be a twin. ~ The Jim and Dan Stories

Most everyone agrees that we are shaped by the genes we inherit and our early childhood environment. The latter mostly focuses on parenting, but it’s siblings who largely socialize each other (for good and for bad).

I couldn’t even look at the look-alike sibling faces in the Time article without crying. Through tears I read:

“From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators, and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride. They teach us how to resolve conflict and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we will ever know who truly qualify as partners for life. “Siblings,” says family sociologist Katherine Conger of the University of California, “are with us for the whole journey …”

Or so we hope.

“Full-blown childhood crises may forge even stronger lifelong links…” I read on, nodding my head. The bad memories I shared with Jim and Dan, mostly related to our father’s WWII Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and his struggles with alcoholism, have proven to be just as bonding as the good memories, if not more so, and I feel the pains that my brothers endured in life as if they were my own.

Reading that scientists are finally validating just how formative sibling relationships are, reminds me of how I felt when the Center for Disease Control finally gave a name to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, something I have struggled with since before it had a name. Putting a name to what I had didn’t lead to a cure, just as new findings on the power of sibling bonds won’t bring my brothers back.

What it brings is more understanding, which can act as a salve to suffering. Understanding is what allows those of us who grieve to feel less invisible.

Note to my friends who have no siblings: There’s a sidebar, “Only Doesn’t Mean Lonely” included in the magazine article, “The New Science of Siblings,” citing research by social psychologist Toni Fablo that debunks the belief some hold that only children are not as well adjusted as those who have siblings. Read more HERE.

Photos Taken in 1997 at a Labor Day cook-out: 1. My brothers, Joey, Dan, Jim, Bob, and John. 2. My sisters: Kathy, Sherry, Colleen, and Trish.

Posted by Colleen at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

The last time I played Scrabble with Alex it was late October. I don’t remember who won, but I do remember that she was out of breath from just sitting and playing and that by the time I was getting ready to leave she had already retired to the couch and had hooked herself up with some oxygen.

Because of her cancer, her doctors didn’t expect her to live past last Christmas. But it was last year at Christmastime when she drove out to Floyd to meet me for a game. The ornament she made for me sat in a shiny sliver gift bag on the Café Del Sol table while we played.

Not only did Alex prove her doctors wrong by still being alive last Christmas, but in the months that followed she traveled to Iceland and to Greece with her husband. She read my book, The Jim and Dan Stories, even though I warned her that, considering her state of health, it would probably be rough for her to read, especially the passages describing how I watched my brother Dan die of from liver failure.

She loved the book, got her Glade Church book club to read it, and invited me to talk to the group. The night the group met, I snapped a photo of Alex under the mosaic she made that hangs above the altar. The mosaic, which spelled out JOY, was built with shards of pottery that had been accidentally broken and was initially part of an art show at the church called “Strong in the Broken Places.”

A few weeks ago, I got word that Alex was in the hospital. When I called her hospital room, she was upbeat and so I joked, “So Alex, what are you going to be doing for the rest of the day?”

“I just played Scrabble with Paul (her husband). He beat me and I’m still a little mad about that,” she answered, making me laugh.

She was only in the hospital for a couple of days. The IV fluids and nutrition she received helped her feel better. “I’m in the early stages of liver failure,” she told me bluntly before we hung up.

A week later, Alex was home, stretched out on a bed in her living room, when I and another friend went to visit. She looked dramatically different from when I had seen her in October. Because her face was drawn, her features were sharply defined, making her beauty strangely more obvious. Her doctor didn’t think she could withstand anymore treatment, she told me.

I knew I probably wouldn’t be playing Scrabble with Alex again, but I thought I would get to visit her again, at least one more time. This past Sunday, her husband sent out a group email: Today we mourn the passing of our companion, friend, Wife, Mother and Grandmother, Alex, who died this morning after a courageous fight with cancer which lasted nearly three and one half years. Alex was a special woman who loved life, who cared deeply for her family, who respected animals, especially horses, and who fought injustice in the world. She will be missed by all.

Sitting on the porch this morning, while jotting these words down in my notebook, the wind stirred up. I put my pen down and listened, remembering that Alex’s last name was Wind. Closing my eyes, I let myself feel the world without her in it and tried to understand the mystery of that reality.

Posted by Colleen at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)

The last few weeks of my brothers' lives played out like the conclusion of a dramatic Hollywood script, a plot with a twist. The road trip they took, two weeks before the first death, became the beginning of a larger journey, the one in which they would both leave this world. ~ excerpt from the back cover of The Jim and Dan Stories

Rick, from Verb-ops, read “The Jim and Dan Stories” (the book I wrote about my brothers’ deaths) in Paris while on assignment for his job this past summer. That’s the short answer as to how the book came to be there.

Rick is an artist and was sketching at Les Deux Magots on the Bloulvard Saint Germain, “thus the eraser and glass of Sancerre,” when he snapped the above photo of “The Jim and Dan Stories,” lying on the café table. Now I am eating lunch at my kitchen table studying the photo and sketching these words that I hope will explain how I feel when I look at it.

The café table looks like a runway on which Jim and Dan, who both died in 2001, have landed in their other-world form. They have no arms and legs, no need to eat (even in Paris). Their surreal existence is now dependent on others. The couple in the background calmly eating are unaware of the book, as if it doesn’t exist. Are they real? Are they living their lives still, as I type? How do I know? Where did last summer go? Have Jim and Dan’s lives been erased?

When I sent Rick’s photo to the Love-Link, our family group e-mail that we started when Dan was sick, my sister Sherry responded by saying, “Jim and Dan seem to be traveling more than us.” Are they living an alternate reality somewhere? What are the chances? What do we know? After 5 years my family and I are still trying to figure it out.

Post Note: So far as I know, books have been Germany, Norway, Nova Scotia, and Alaska. Where else are they destined to go, I wonder?

Posted by Colleen at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

After completing “The Jim and Dan Stories,” my writing didn’t abruptly stop, but the book had its own rhythm and timing and there came a point when the story was told. I continued to take notes and some stories came like aftershocks, too late to be included in the book. Soon, I put “The Jim and Dan Stories” aside and moved onto other things. The war in Iraq was gearing up at the time, and I had a lot to say about that, and so I let myself be consumed with writing political commentaries. I wrote a couple of small poems and went to my writer’s workshop, where I mostly gave feedback on other people’s writing.

“The Jim and Dan Stories” was published a year later using local resources. A few months after that when I was in my hometown of Hull, Massachusetts, I was interviewed by Susan, the editor of the Hull Times newspaper, about the book. I remember looking out from her large picture window onto the bay. It was a bright sunny day and a sailboat was going by. She was asking me some typical questions and taking down notes in a small notepad. Towards the end of the interview, she posed a question that caught me off guard. “What’s next?” she asked pointedly and put down her pen.

Writing a book is a bit like having a baby. There’s a point of conception, a gestation period, followed by hard labor and lots of aftercare. After you’ve had a baby, or have written a book, you feel pretty accomplished (having followed through with it) but you also don’t want to think about another one, at least not right away.

“I can’t imagine another story as compelling as what happened to my brothers and how it played out,” I eventually answered. Maybe I would put a book of poetry together (which I did), I suggested.

Back at home in Virginia, I wrote an update for my webpage about the trip. I began taking notes about my experiences following the book’s publication and the feedback I was getting. Even so, I felt uninspired, less alive than I did while I was writing the book, and as though I was a writer laid-off from my job. At that time, my muse was a lingering presence that manifested as a sense of weighty tension.

Three weeks after I returned home from Hull, the tension finally broke when Susan emailed me my first look at the newly published interview. In it she wrote, “The Jim and Dan Stories reads like a writer’s diary, a keenly observed, anecdotal account of small-town life nearly a half-century ago in Hull, and today in Floyd, Virginia …”

Susan’s descriptive naming of my style of writing was like getting permission to do more of it. Her words to me in the week that followed, as we struck up an e-mail conversation, were an encouraging validation as well. She said:

I don't think you need tragedy to find an audience for your work. Yours is an authentic voice and, whatever the subject matter, if you market the piece correctly, it will find an audience.

A downpour of writing soon ensued.

Posted by Colleen at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Remember when you were a kid and you made an ugly face and someone told you that you better watch out because your face could get stuck that way?

I recently came across the following description of grief in my journal: Grief is like the heat it takes to soften metal. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it will re-shape you. I think you have to want for it to re-shape you into something positive and valuable; otherwise it will only leave you hardened, stuck in a shape you will have to live with.

The writing I did after my brothers, Jim and Dan, died 5 years ago became the book “The Jim and Dan Stories.” Writing it was a form of active grieving and an attempt to shape something constructive out of loss.

Considering that Jim and Dan both worked in metal shops, I think my description is particularly fitting.

Dan would have been 55 today.

Posted by Colleen at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Death is a season rather than a single date. I hadn’t been home from the last funeral for even a week when the terrorist attacks on the U.S. took place--September 11, 2001. Two towers came down, one right after the other like my brothers did, killing over 3,000 innocent people. Now the whole country was in grief. Maybe I wouldn’t stick out so, like a sore thumb. From The Jim and Dan Stories.

The 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. is also the 5th anniversary of my brothers' deaths. My brother Dan, who was suffering with a liver illness, planned a road trip with our older brother Jim (a.k.a. "the weatherman"), thinking in the back of his mind that it might be a last chance for them to spend time together. They traveled from our hometown of Hull, Massachusetts, where Jim still lived, down the east coast, before heading back to Houston, where Dan lived and where Jim would fly home from. They went to a baseball game together, gambled in Atlantic City, saw the Vietnam War Memorial, and visited me in Virginia. It was Jim's first time visiting me and the first time he had been out of Massachusetts since he was in the Army during Vietnam and stationed in Korea. Two weeks after Jim returned from the trip, he died unexpectedly and tragically in a machine shop accident.

Dan missed Jim’s wake because he was too sick to attend, but he pulled himself together to make the funeral. My mother and I helped dress him that morning. Dan knew in his heart that as he watched his brother’s funeral, he was seeing what his own would be like. He died a month later in a hospital in Houston. My sister Kathy, sister-in-law Jeanne, and I were with him when he took his last breath.

It was my niece Chrissie, my only other family member who also lives in Virginia, who called on September 11th to tell me what had happened and to tell me to turn on the TV. I didn’t want to watch. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to see more death. And then it hit me. And then it sunk in.

The following is another excerpt from the Jim and Dan Stories:

Jim had his teeth cleaned a couple of days before he died. He left a “things to do” list on his night stand table. At Dan’s apartment, The Houston Chronicles piled up at the front door. The messages on his answering machine piled up too.

“There are a couple of the World Trade Center buildings before they came down, taken from the highway. Can you believe it?!” my mother asked.

Posted by Colleen at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

When someone close to you dies, you begin to look at life through the eyes they no longer have, or you find yourself doing things they loved to do because they no longer can. When I hear music that I know my brother Danny would have liked, I close my eyes and let it sink in, listening for him. I write checks to the Red Cross or give money to the panhandling homeless, because I know Dan, who died in 2001, did and would still if he was here.

My brother Jim was a weather buff who kept detailed daily weather records, photographed and videotaped storms, and volunteered at the Blue Hill Weather Observatory giving tours. Since he died, a month before Dan, I watch the sky more closely. When I see a particularly outstanding cloud formation, I want him to see it too, and I remember the story one of Jim’s colleagues at the BHO told about how Jim first fell in love with cloud watching. He was under one of his junk-box cars, fixing something, and complaining about it when he realized that he could watch the clouds from that position. From that day on he was hooked.

Today I ate a fresh garden tomato for my dad, who died this past November. It was a Big Boy, salted to perfection, just the way he would have liked it. I had practically eaten the whole thing before I realized what I was doing … enjoying it for him. It was sweet, plump, and red, like my dad, whose name was Robert Redman. I remember him sitting in his favorite kitchen chair by the red gingham curtained window, eating with gusto and smacking his toothless mouth. “Don’t you want one of these delicious tomatoes?” he asked me last summer when I was visiting him and my mom. He actually had gotten up at that point and was holding one under my nose in an attempt to entice me. I knew he was trying to pawn it off on me because there were others where it came from, in the patio, in the pantry, getting over-ripe. The boy in him, who grew up during the Great Depression, didn’t want it to go to waste.

“No, I’m not hungry,” I told him.

Today I ate a tomato for my dad. It’s the first summer he’s not here to eat his own.

Post note: You can read the WVTF radio essay I wrote about my dad HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

My sisters and I have an unusual family trait. We remember events by what clothes we were wearing at the time. On the day my brother Dan’s doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston told me that Dan would not likely recover from the liver disease he was battling, I was wearing a short dungaree skirt, a white tee shirt and a matching dungaree jacket. My hair was pinned up, and I had my favorite leather sandals on.

The doctor, who was wearing a white lab coat, spoke in an English accent, which gave his announcement a sense of formality and made the distance between his reality and mine seem more dramatic. A woman was with him, also in a white lab coat, holding a box of tissue. We were in the Intensive Care Unit, next to Dan’s room, and nurses in green scrub suits were walking by us.

I was trying to figure out where I could go to get away from what he was telling me. I wondered why he hadn’t taken me to a private room to tell me such devastating news. Dan only had a 2% chance of living … they weren’t going to perform liver transplant surgery with those odds, he said. The words 2% were the equivalent of a death sentence, but he spoke them as though he were giving me the fat content of a carton of milk.

If I was home I would have gone to my bedroom, shut the door and thrown myself on my bed. I wanted to hide my face in a pillow, but it seemed that the doctor and the woman with him were waiting for me to ask questions. They both stood silent, looking at me. I didn’t know how I was still standing because my legs felt like they were made of weak cardboard. I felt like I was holding up a body that I had ceased to inhabit. “Is that all you have to offer me, a box of Kleenex?” I was thinking. She held it out towards me like a box of candy, but I felt sick. “How could Dan be too well to be transplant priority one week and then too sick to withstand the surgery the next?” I was thinking.

I wanted to run, but I didn’t know where to go. Eventually, I found myself in one of the hospital bathroom stalls, where I locked the door and cried. I felt like a teenager back in high school when a bathroom stall was the only place we could get any privacy. We would go there if we had bad menstrual cramps, or to sneak a few puffs of a cigarette. But the innocence of those days was lost to me now.

The weight of what the doctor had told me was too heavy for me to bear alone. I was the only family member in Houston with Dan at the time. I thought about the phone calls I would have to make to the rest of my family. I worried about how I would get back to Dan’s apartment that night. Driving in Houston traffic terrified me, and I had no confidence in anything now.

Dan didn’t have the luxury of time, and so neither did I. I didn’t stay in the bathroom for long. I fumbled as I called my sister Kathy on a hospital phone, telling her that she had to come to Houston immediately because I needed her.

Once I knew that what I said to Kathy had sunk in and that she was on her way, we said goodbye and I hung up the phone. It was clear what to do next, the only thing I could, the thing I had done for a week before and would do for one week more; sit by my brother Danny in his hospital bed and just be there.

Post Notes: These are the countdown weeks leading to the anniversary of my brother Danny’s death 5 years ago. I recently came across the above as a sketched draft meant for “The Jim and Dan Stories." Touching into the nerve that is exposed this time of year, I was able to finally finish it. The photo is a page from one of my collage journals (a photo of Dan is on the second page in the right hand corner). To read more about the summer my family lost Dan, and our brother Jim a month before, go to my website HERE, or click on the Loose Leaf category sidebar "Losing a Loved One."

Posted by Colleen at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Joe paddled his kayak back to the house to get sunscreen. I was alone in the middle of the canal, drifting for a moment in my kayak when the realization hit me: It was 5 years ago on the same day that my brother Jimmy died. Like a wound scarred over is tough, I resisted the urge to soften, to dwell on his death and missing him because I’ve done so much of that in the past. It’s painful and doesn’t lead anywhere.
“Look at me now in a kayak, Jim,” I said to myself. Because he was an avid weather and nature enthusiast,