thoughts from rubber and the road

Northbound this morning I thought of you, brother. You driving southbound, in the Comet, noting to yourself that speed kills. You went south to support a friend in need; I went north, the one in need.
My first trip in the new truck, the dog you never met curled in his crate, tail over his nose, I imagined. Five short days from yet another birthday you aren’t here for, I feel the same thing I always feel when your absence rears its head. Alone. There is just no end to that, it seems. It wasn’t a speedy death I worried about this morning or really any death at all. It was everything else.
The road didn’t take me past your house, and I was glad, even though my heart still wishes I could hear you give directions one more time to “E M, like Auntie EM “ Street. I wondered if I ever would understand you and Grace, if you ever got over the hurt, and how on earth you did. I wondered what advice you would give me now, and cursed the circumstances that lead me to wish your counsel was available today. No one else has the words - that was always your job.
Sometimes, there’s peace in miles rolling under wheels, sometimes in the music I hear, or in something only found alone in a car with your thoughts, popcorn crumbs and static interrupting songs you haven’t heard in years, but like enough slow down and hope the song ends before the signal fades. I am trying to hold onto the moments of peace I found in those moments today. Recently I’ve been told my talent is in words, and my failing is in human contact. It seems my desire to write for a living falls right in line with my personal failings. I think this is a good thing to find out, but it cuts deeply.
I don’t know what I expected, ever. I only know when I don’t have it. It’s like that job interview question, “where do you want to be in five years” although I never say it, the only answer that ever rings in my head is “happy”. It’s maybe why I’m not such a great employee.
Changing everything doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. I did that once, 6 years ago, thought it made things better, today I’m not sure, and I’m not sure it will help things if I do it again but I’m going to. Last time I left the people that cared most for me behind, this time, I’m going to them. The people and places that I may never tell anything to, but their presence and their concern may just be enough. Enough to keep me from feeling like someone left a door to a cold winter open in my chest. Wind raging and stinging so cold it brings tears to my eyes. Drafts so cold as to leave me feeling like a solitary tree on an open plain, bent from its force, and unprotected.
I don’t choose to fight this one alone, unprotected is not where I want to be. Maybe I should have made friends with pain when I had the chance, when it was what kept me company night after night, day after day, but I didn’t and I won’t this time either.
On the road, I remember roll call in your class, the comment that made everyone giggle when a student wasn’t there, “absence really the strangest sort of presence”.
It’s the truest thing I know today.

My Beach Ball*

This is the chair I took from my brother's house when he died.
I don't know where he got it, or why. I know it sat just to the left of his fireplace directly across from the big chair Mark always sat in. When I would come to visit, or to drop off the dog; this is the chair I always chose to sit in to visit with Mark and anyone else who happened to be there. It's more comfortable than it appears and I always liked the creaky sounds it made when you shifted your position.

I took home to my condo in Sterling, and moved it from room to room, I used it to stand on to reach high places when I was painting. There are still paint spots of institutional white on the lowest rung. I moved it to North Carolina with me where once when I was cleaning I moved it out onto the deck and forgot it about it and it got rained on. It's a bit worse for wear these days. Yet, I cannot throw it out. These days, this chair holds pillows, mail, magazines and sometimes my feet, but I never sit in it like I did when it was in my brothers house.

I am not much of a 'things' person. I don't care if you spill things on my couch, or my clothes, or if your dog vomits in my car. These things will all clean up, for the most part, and what stains remain are just remnants of life being lived around these things. I can't quite bring myself to let go of this chair, though. I don't know if I just see him more clearly as time goes by when I look at the chair, or if I'm just being overly sentimental. Bottom line is, I don't care. It's staying. I can't/don't sit in it anymore, but I did just move it out of the corner of my living room, and I'd be happy to offer it to a friend stopping by for a visit.


*For all but one of you, the title won't make sense, for the one that does - thanks for sharing that story with me.

January 5th

Wikipedia tells me that January 5th is the 5th day of the Gregorian calendar, and that there are 360 days left in the calendar year.

Other cool things Wikipedia knows about January 5th include;

In 1757 Louis XV survived an assassination attempt
In 1759 George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis
In 1909 Colombia recognized the independence of Panama
In 1914 Ford Motor Company announced the 8 hour workday and a minimum wage of 5
bucks an hour. (Don’t spend all that in one place)
In 1940 The FCC got its first taste of FM radio (amen, brother)
In 1970 All My Children premiered
In 1993 Washington State executed a man by HANGING (yes, really in 1993)
In 1997 Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya

Also on January 5th…
Walter Mondale, Robert Duvall, Charlie Rose, Diane Keaton, Grant Young, and Marilyn Manson were born .

All in all, a not totally uncool day.
For me, it’s the day I got the phone call from the Fairfax County Police to tell me my brother had been found dead in his home.

The jack-ass I talked to on the phone that day was almost as sensitive as steel wool. After he identified himself as being a member of the “death squad” (storm-trooper anyone?) and him telling me it looked like my brother had been dead for several days and that his dog had to “forcibly removed from the home” I was ready to kick in his teeth. Just as soon as I found something to fill the gaping hole in my chest.

I remember sometime early on promising myself I wouldn’t memorialize this day. I wouldn’t remember it every year. I didn’t want to do that. Yet, every year since, starting right around thanksgiving - January 5th almost glows on my calendar. I can feel it coming, and I quietly start looking for a way to pass that day.

In 2005, Jan 5th fell on the day of my Team in Training Bon Voyage Party. We were leaving for Bermuda to run the marathon later that week, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society threw us a party. I took the whole day off from work, got a sports massage and a haircut and joined my teammates for dinner and drinks. I’d only started running the previous July – and quit smoking just 1 day before I started running. I trained all winter, running my longest distance of 18 miles on December 26th in 18 degree weather.

In 2006, my friends took me out to a place in Georgetown, called the Birdcage. There was no mention of the ‘anniversary’ not a word. They knew, of course, being the same friends that scraped me off the living room floor two years earlier, propped me up, took me to bail the from the Fairfax County Animal Shelter, and somehow kept me from driving into the nearest bridge abutment/off a bridge/into oncoming traffic. These friends cheered for me as I ran around Bermuda the year before. They were there at the finish line with tears in their eyes and water and Corona in their hands, they helped me soak my swollen blistered feet, and they bought me a post race massage. There was much to say, and they said it just by being there.

In 2007, I met some other girlfriends at Snowshoe Ski resort, it wasn’t planned, and these girlfriends had no idea about the date. I remember noting it, and thinking that Mark would have loved to hear about that weekend, the things we did, the laughs we shared, the fried green tomatoes. I remember crying all the way down the mountain at the end of the weekend wishing desperately I could call him and share the weekends stories – I remember the dull thud of realization, knowing utterly and completely that this is what I would miss the most - the inability to share the rest of my life with him.

In 2008, I packed myself and my young dog off to a dog seminar with Ivan Balabanov. One of my very favorite things about the dog sport I do is that working with the man that has won every level competition he’s entered (from local to World Championships) for the last several years is as simple as making a phone call, paying a little money and spending 9 hours in a car. So off I went. This year, I was completely aware of the date. Those people who tell you it gets easier – they are lying. I still feel the cold spot in my heart the way you feel a draft from a not fully closed window in February.
I ran to Plant City, Florida to get warm. It almost worked. I spent two days 12 hours each totally immersed in dogs and training and other people as into (read insane) their dogs as I am mine. I worked hard, I trained hard, and I had fun. Ivan made a point to tell me what a nice puppy I had and what great potential we had as a team. It was overwhelming but felt so good.

I left Plant City at 4:20 in the morning, stopping to get gas and Starbucks and then cried every bit of the 110 miles down I-4 to 95.

I am not so dense as to miss the fact that I am spending this day each year wrapped in the things and people I love. Whatever ability I have to “man up” is obliterated on this day, I am simply, in need.

I am not particularly proud of this, but I refuse to be ashamed.

The ongoing dialogue

If you look for it, there is an abundance of advice out there in the world for someone who’s recently lost a loved one. I don’t remember intentionally looking for it or reading it, but I could probably recite it if someone asked. Things like, "don’t make any big life decisions for at least the first year after the loss".

In my case, I waited one exactly one year and started making plans to move. I heard that little snippet of advice in the back of my head every time I got closer to my goal of leaving Northern Virginia. I knew ‘a year’ was intended to be an average. I knew I was probably rushing things. I didn’t care. I couldn’t live there anymore. It was too much, being there without him. Driving past the Van Dorn Street exit on 95 made me cry, every time, so did 5 Guys, and 3 buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s. I knew I’d never be able to, or even want to sit in the bleachers at Hayfield High School and watch a football game again. So I ignored the voice and kept on keeping on.

Later, I saw a grief counselor who told me I should write Mark a letter; tell him all the things I was thinking and feeling – just “anything I wanted to say”.
I never did this.

I knew if I started, there’d be no end. There was nothing unfinished between Mark and me. I loved him and he knew it. He loved me and I knew it. There weren’t any harsh words, or ruffled feathers. This should be good news. In the case of the letter writing though, it’s not. How do you write a letter to someone who you told everything to? Even when you don’t want it to, your life keeps happening. You keep meeting people, and if you’re lucky, you make some new friends.
Things keep happening in the world, things you want to talk about. Books and movies keep coming out.

It’s the worst insult. Never having a conversation with him again. Never sitting across from him in the living room, with the fire burning behind me and the dogs sleeping on either of side of him, talking about crazy, brilliant, funny, troubled high school students, or broken animals made well again, or family strife, or exchanging Monica Lewinsky limericks.

A letter? Never mind not knowing where to start, there simply would be no end.

I ran from the ghosts to North Carolina, thinking it would be better, and it was. It is. It still is. I have new people here, a home that he should have seen, a new puppy, and these are things he would have loved.

That wasn’t the worst of it though. The worst of it was when I realized I was in love. In love with a man who makes me think I’ve never been loved before. A man I can’t believe I finally met and a man I would have been proud to take home to Mark.

His opinion was always the only one that mattered. Even when I knew it wouldn’t be a favorable opinion. I took them anyway. Often, their reaction to him was the beginning of the end of it with them. They didn’t know it, but I always did.

It feels petulant to say ‘it’s not fair’. It feels juvenile to scream it.
I want to do both and I probably will.

The dogs won’t tell.

I miss you Mark.

Arrowhead

I didn’t sleep well or much last night. Around 5 I fell asleep for about 30 minutes, and had the first dream about my brother since he died. Fully awake now, the pieces are still just pieces, but dreaming of him brought this memory back. This is not sunshine and flowers friends, so if that’s why you came, move along, nothing here to see.

The year before Mark died; he went to visit the home and now private museum of his favorite author, Herman Melville. Moby Dick was Mark’s favorite story, and his favorite book to teach to his students. Every year, he promised an ‘A’ to any student in the class who could find the part in the book where Melville switches from first person to third. I’d happily share that secret with you, but I wasn’t one of his ‘A’ students.

Sitting in my brother’s house just days after his death the discussion of what to do with Mark’s ashes was settled without discussion the second Steve Clicks suggested they be scattered at Melville’s home. Some things you know are right the instant you hear them. I don’t remember Steve saying anything else that week, but I remember this as clearly as I remember what happened yesterday. Looking at it now, it feels like this is why he was there that day.

My sister Julie made the arrangements, Arrowhead is a privately funded museum, and she explained to them who Mark was and what it would mean to us to leave him there. They couldn’t have been more generous, gracious or willing to help my family ease our suffering.

We went in June.
Early June in New England is only summer during the hours of noon and 3pm, before and after those hours, it’s late winter, or at least fall, with temps falling to 40 degrees and reminding me why I live in the South.

When my family visited, one of the curators met us 90 minutes before the official opening, offering a private tour of the house /museum and then leaving us to say our goodbyes privately and scatter his ashes in the field behind Melville’s home.

All I remember of the first floor is dark wood and fireplaces, but I dutifully climbed the stairs behind my remaining family feeling the weight of things I could not measure. As we all settled into the study around the tour guide I found myself staring at the floorboards, whispering to myself under my breath to look, to see that room the way he had seen it, just a year earlier.

I lifted my head, looked across the room to Melville’s carefully staged desk and out the window behind it, to Mt. Greylock, I felt my chest tighten, and suddenly, all the oxygen was gone from the room.

That view, that room. My brother.

I turned and fled the room, headed for the stairs we had just ascended. It got better when I got outside, to the fields surrounding the house. I tried to hear my friend Eileen’s voice in my head telling me when things got difficult to focus on my breathing. By the time my family reappeared, I had control.

I remember people reading passages from favorite books, and others with a few words to say as they scattered the remains of my brother into the wind on a hillside in New England. My mom cried while she talked about the joy Mark had given her. Mark’s best friend Bob held me as I cried, watching my mom, useless and helpless against either of our pain. I carried my youngest niece down the hill her legs wrapped around my waist; she wiped away my tears and said “He shouldn’t have died when he did.” Showing me that wisdom can come from anywhere, even sad seven year old nieces. Later that evening I would help that niece move caterpillars off the sidewalk in front of the restaurant we would eat dinner in. She couldn’t live with the fact that someone might step on them. So we moved them to the grass, one by one, for an hour and a half.
It made her feel better to have an ally, and helping her made me feel better.

Back when the world was perfect.

I heard this phrase used recently, after the speaker described the experience of first real heartbreak and the utter disbelief at the way things had turned out. At the time, the phrase made me laugh a little, but since hearing it, I’ve been unable to get it out of my head.

I’ve been trying to remember what my moment of ‘back when the world was perfect’ was.

My siblings and I joked for many years that our parents divorce was the nastiest divorce in recorded history. Truthfully, though, it wasn’t the divorce that was so bad, it was the separation/reconciliation/vicious fight/separation/vicious fight/reconciliation/divorce. My dad had a violent temper, so there was never a fight that didn’t end with something needed to be replaced or repaired, walls were punched, doors kicked in, lamps thrown, and my personal favorite the night he pushed my mom backwards into a closet door and the door, my mom and my dad collapsed in a heap inside the closet. After the crash that sounded like the end of the world to my 8 year old ears, I heard my mother, calmly and reasonably ask “Well, are we going to talk about this or are you going to kill me, Roger?”

It’s a moment that has stayed with me, for sure, I remember sitting at the top of the stairs, wearing yellow pajamas and holding our golden retriever without a tail by the collar. I remember being scared and crying. Maybe when you’re 8, the world is moving too fast or maybe you don’t even think the world is perfect at that age, because the world is so small when you’re 8, and it doesn’t feel like you control anything.

I remember watching the taillights of my dad’s brown Toyota Celica as he made the left off Bing Court and onto Hayfield Road.

It’s a perfectly clear and perfectly awful memory, but it’s not the memory I’m looking for.

A few months after my brother died, I remember walking around in a grocery store I didn’t normally frequent, and being unable to find skim milk. I haven’t any real idea about why the bloody skim milk became so important, I just knew that it was, and not finding it felt like just one more thing I couldn’t do ‘right’ without Mark. I couldn’t even buy fucking milk. In that moment, I dissolved into a puddle of tears, sobs really. I’m not one for crying in public, so the combination of crying so violently, and the mortification of doing so in a grocery store, was six kinds of horrifying for me. I put down my basket and fled the store.

There was some realization then, that what was ahead was nothing like what I had imagined and nothing like what I wanted, and nothing like it was supposed to be, dammit. Now, I had to re-figure everything.

It felt like trying to solve for X without X actually being in the equation.

My ‘back when the world was perfect’ was the life I saw myself living as Mark’s baby sister. I could live with all my mistakes, my stupid decisions, the trouble my big-smart-ass-mouth got me into; if I saw it through his eyes, heard it through his ears. I could hear every fiber of my being screaming NOW WHAT?

‘Back when the world was perfect’ - I’ve turned this phrase around in my head almost non stop since I heard it. I feel it, the sadness in those words, more acutely than any I’ve heard in some time.

Is there a sense of recovery on the other side of that first real sense of loss? Is it really just never the same again?

I think I know the answer, and it makes me sadder still. I think you move past things, over things, around things, but they never really go back to the way things were... back when the world was perfect.

1, 2, 3, Jump.... No. Wait.

I was going to jump out of an airplane yesterday.

Something about the temperatures at jump altitude kept me grounded, but I was going until I got that call.

When I started making the plans I picked March 3rd as the day. It would have been brother Mark’s 51st birthday. He and I used to have dinner and call each other old on our birthdays. The last three without him have been decidedly less celebratory.

I wanted to celebrate this year.

Skydiving is not something my brother would have done. I’m fairly certain he would have found colorful ways to call me an idiot for doing it. You see, when he died I told myself I wouldn’t mark the anniversaries - I didn’t want to be one of those people that said things like “four years ago today…” yet, without fail, the day he died, his birthday, and my birthday seem to glow like heated iron off the calendar pages.

The skydiving was about me. Sometime just recently I’ve had the realization that there is cause to celebrate the life I have left ahead of me, the rest of my life, without him. That was a hard realization to swallow. Never mind that making his birthday about me made me sound like an unbelievable narcissist.

Mark was a teacher and a poet, and he was often asked to read at weddings or other important public gatherings, he had the gift of fitting profound feelings into just a few lines. Mark joked that he kept those poems brief because he wanted to get out of the church before god realized who was in his house. I don’t have his gift. I wish I did. In my life extreme emotion has always been answered with physical exertion. I think skydiving will be my poem to him about how grateful I am to have been loved by such a great man. It will be about gratitude and letting go of the bottomless pit of hurt and sadness and about hanging on to the best parts of him; the lessons he taught me about everything from Geometry to our own family history.

No, that wasn’t a tense error. I’m still going to jump.

Maybe I'll think of my own colorful ways to call myself an idiot on the way down.

Family resemblance

I spent a good part of last night reading poetry. This is not a normal occurrence for me. Poetry in general, frustrates me, it’s not something I can remotely imagine writing, or at least writing well. I was reading my brothers poetry. This is sometimes a happy exercise, where I get to remember the people and stories he told me about during or after his writing process and sometimes it’s more of an exercise in twisting the knife in my heart since he died. Last night was a little of both. I’ve decided to be okay with that. Decided that like my opinion even mattered.

This book in particular always appealed to me, the black cover and ominous title calls to my own darkness. The book is dedicated to a high school friend of his, his wife and their daughter. The wife died about 3 months after the birth of that daughter. She had apparently dismissed some discomfort for some time thinking it was normal postpartum recovery. It was stomach cancer, and quite advanced by the time she pursued it. I remember Mark telling me about Sheila and tearing up talking about his friend’s pain.

I know that friend well; he has been a great source of comfort to me since Mark’s death. It’s hard sometimes; his voice on my voice mail or name in my inbox makes me choke up, well up. I know how much Mark loved him, know that love was returned and is now shared with me. It’s hard to accept that kind of love. I find myself worried that I won’t meet with his approval and I’ll lose his presence in my life. He has no family obligation and I am afraid of loss that big, again. For the record, I didn’t handle it so well the first time.

This particular book is full of stories of loss. The title proclaiming the theme starkly, “They come for what you love.” There’s not much hope in this book. It makes me wonder about this period in his life and it frustrates me that I don’t know why the work in this book is so sad. I looked at the publishing date again to try and place that time in my life. 1998. I brought my puppy home that year. I started leaving him with Mark when I traveled. Mark’s house was well and widely known as Camp Craver - Where dogs can be dogs. Mark didn’t care if they slept on the furniture or got the floor muddy or barked at the neighbor kids or chewed on the trees in his back yard. He gave me good advice that year when I found myself involved in a wedding I believed was a mistake. He went on motorcycle rides with my boyfriend of the moment. We went to high school football games together. I met more of his friends. The math teacher that played Pink Floyd on Fridays for his students and still looked like a 'bad boy' from the late 80's; long hair and earrings included. We went to the renaissance festival and paid "the insulter" to make fun of the math teacher.

I also wonder if I’ve misinterpreted this book. There are a few places where I catch him speaking to a more general mistreatment of human beings by other human beings, e.g, “What won’t we kill in each other?” And sounding outraged at the general unfairness of the world "They invented love so they could laugh at it."

Is it that I am enough like my brother that merely being witness to the everyday shit people inflict upon each other; that seeing, hearing, or being somehow associated with things that make you flash back to being 7 stomping around in circles and screaming "It's not FAIR" revisit you when you are alone and feel the need to get it out.

I hope so.