CONTENTS

title page

acknowledgments page

copyright page

Introduction

Chapter One - ~

January 11, 1998

Chapter Two - ~

January 14, 1998

Chapter Three - ~

January 21,1998

Chapter Four - ~

Chapter Five - ~

Chapter Six - ~

Chapter Seven - ~

Chapter Eight - ~

Chapter Nine - ~

Chapter Ten - ~

Chapter Eleven - ~

Chapter Twelve - ~

Chapter Thirteen - ~

Chapter Fourteen - ~

Chapter Fifteen - ~

Chapter Sixteen - ~

Chapter Seventeen - ~

Chapter Eighteen - ~

Chapter Nineteen - ~

Chapter Twenty - ~

Chapter Twenty-One - ~

Chapter Twenty-Two - ~

Chapter Twenty-Three - ~

Epilog

Dad's memorial tale

Live your lives

Pacing with Gerry

Walking that last mile with my Dad

A Son’s Alzheimer’s Journal

Jesse Peter Bilyeu

•••

Copyright © 2017 Jesse Peter Bilyeu

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bilyeu, Jesse Peter.

Pacing with Gerry, walking that last mile with my dad.

ISBN #

Published by Words & Pixels LLC

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Acknowledgments

To my Father, from whom I learned to be a man.

To my Mother, from whom I modeled my heart.

To my son, Jared, from whom I learned to put both of those lessons to use.

Pacing with Gerry

Copyright © 2017 by Jesse Bilyeu. All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

Cover Art by Jesse Bilyeu

A Words & Pixels LLC Book

www.jessebilyeu.com

Introduction

“To a father, when a child dies, the future dies;

to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.”

- Red Auerbach

April 19, 2011

This is no broad, sweeping adventure epic. It is simply a sad, intimate portrait of two lives in transition, changing in very different ways, across a relatively short eternity of time. Two men, connected by history, experience and love, facing a silent, heartless monster - Alzheimer’s disease. One man slowly consumed by it, the other man bearing witness, virtually helpless to intervene.

I made the decision to write this book, primarily for my own emotional well-being and closure, shortly after my father’s passing. I have no idea if that will be of any value to anyone in the end but me.

The title I chose, Pacing with Gerry, is a subtle nod to Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, in cadence, if nothing else. Where Tuesdays with Morrie is a masterful account of Mitch’s visits with his former mentor, sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, on his deathbed, full of profound insights into life and the mind and heart of humanity, Pacing with Gerry is neither masterful nor profound. Mitch Albom was fortunate to make that final connection with a man of great importance in his life whose physical body was failing him but whose mind maintained its clarity and humor and personality until his final moments. My dad, however, maintained remarkable physical health, even into his 90s, but his ability to use language and ultimately, to even understand his surroundings, failed him at an alarming rate.

I decided to organize this account as a series of journal entries. There are the main chapters, written as memoirs recalled years later and, for each chapter, a lead-in quote from the journal I kept at the time of these events. Not two weeks before I got a call from my sister saying that our mother was in the hospital dying, I had started reading a book on creativity development, entitled The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. One of the techniques in the book is called ‘Morning Pages’, a  ‘stream of consciousness’ journal, jotting down whatever is in your head, spontaneously and without censoring first thing every morning. The idea being to get all the backlog of stress, regret, anger and longing out into the light of day so you can see it, deal with it and not let it fester or undercut your creative and spiritual development, from one day to the next.

As it happens, I was just at the beginning of that process when the bottom fell out of my parents’ lives… and mine with it.

The structure I settled on for Pacing with Gerry was to use some of these pages, unchanged from the moment I wrote them, as a lead-in for each of my chapters. I realized that I had more chapters than ‘journal entries’ that were relevant to them. So I decided to use song lyrics and quotes to fill out the rest and now every chapter has a ‘Morning Page’ entry or quote as a lead-in.

I am what some might classify as a ‘liberal’; although you don’t want to get me started on people who like to label people. I have lived a fairly untraditional life ( I lived in a cave in the wilderness of Maui for a couple of years when I was a young man, I was a full-time single father, I worked as a stripper in a group called ‘The Lords of Burlesque’ for several years when it was, by far, the most money I could earn while requiring the least amount of time away from my young son.) I practice yoga and meditate, I create art and write and I have a very personal and private sense of spirituality. But I promise to keep the Artsy-Fartsy, Hippie-Dippy Spiritualism stuff to a minimum, here, to avoid alienating any of the more traditional thinkers who might find themselves reading this book. We are all just people, after all. Brothers and sisters, Children of the same Creator, however we live our lives.

I made the decision to write this book shortly after Dad passed, as you will read in the ‘Morning Page’ entry that follows this introduction, but the majority of the work and all of the chapters were written in a two month period that ended on the 13th anniversary of my father’s death, April 19, 2011.

CHAPTER ONE

~

The time is here, it would seem, for my mom’s passing. I hope that I can still talk to her and look her in the eyes one last time face-to-face before she goes. As much as that would feel right to me, I don't ask that she endure even a moment more of discomfort. If she goes before I get there, at least I have spent time with her twice in the last year and she heard me say all that really needed to be said yesterday on the phone.

There is a hard rain today  –  so appropriate for the moment – the trees out my window are so beautiful in their somber and stately tones – the horses, warm and dry in their covered shelters feasting on their hay and oats – oblivious to the affairs of men, as men, for the most part, are of theirs.

If Mom passes over soon and Dad is going to have to be in some sort of full care facility, I'm going to suggest he come out to California to live out the last of his days here. I think that would be a good thing for all, he and I connect better than he does with anyone else. I understand him. I am him in many ways. We have the same body, born from the same cell as he and his father and his father – we have the same need to breathe the open air – to be out from under a roof – to touch nature and find adventure. The weather here is much better for him. He can be outside nearly any time of the year. There are many beautiful spots we can go to, even if only to sit in my car and look out.

If Mom waits for me I can talk to her before she goes. I feel she hangs on partly to honor life and partly out of fear of the unknown – perhaps it will be my gift to her to help her release that fear of death and embrace the next level – clearly she has all but left this one.

Worthy or not, I am her youngest, her baby, quite possibly nothing means as much to her now as saying our goodbyes – stay, Mom, if you have the strength, I'm on my way – go if you must, endure not a single moment’s more pain – I'll be just behind you.

Excerpt from ‘Morning Page’ entry 1/11/98

January 11, 1998

After talking with my sister, I got on the phone to book a flight for the next day. I was so broke I had no choice but to ask for the discount the airlines allow for family of the deceased to attend funerals. Significant, at half the normal price. Technically I didn’t qualify because Mom was still alive, although she might not be by the time I got there. In the course of trying to explain it all to a stranger on the phone, my voice began to crack and I knew I wouldn’t get through all this without embarrassing myself, so I hung up and called a friend with ties to the travel industry. I got through the particulars with her without too much emotion choking my words. She called back awhile later with the flight info and to say that, after checking with the hospital in Vermont, the airline agreed to the hardship discount.

My son Jared hadn’t checked in for a few days. Not exactly unusual for him, at the time. He was old enough to feel free to come and go without checking in with me, but young enough for me to worry and fret when he did. However long I would be gone, I really couldn’t afford to be gone more than a week at the most, he’d be on his own whether I liked it or not. I just hoped he’d check in before I left in the morning. Leaving my house and my clients abruptly and for who-knows-how-long was unsettling enough. Having a teenager out loose in the world with nothing more than a note on the fridge to say where I had gone, would be far worse.

I started in on a six-pack of stout in the fridge early in the afternoon. It wasn’t the beers that ran me over so much as the numerous shots of brandy I was using the beers to wash down. It caught up with me around sunset and that, plus my dark mood thinking of my mom dying in a hospital bed on the other side of the country, pretty well flattened me. I was draped across the commode when the phone rang around midnight.

I ran for the phone. In my head I ran, anyhow. In reality, I crawled on my hands and knees out of the bathroom, down the hall, across the living room to the counter where the phone was. I was groggily surprised that the phone was still ringing when I got there. I hauled myself up the arm of the sofa beside it and flopped the upper half of my body flat on the counter like a dead fish. My eyes were slits, but I found the phone and with my face still flat against the countertop, I held the phone to my head.

“ ‘Lo?” I slurred, staring at the inside of my eyelids.

“Pops?” Jared’s voice lifted my spirit a lot, but my head, not even a little bit.

“ ‘ey, bud… s’ you!”

“You okay?”

“ ’m a bit wast’d… bin drinkin’,” my voice was getting a little steadier while I spoke. I swallowed dryly and continued, “M’ mom’s dyin’. Gotta fly black east‘morrow.”

“Sorry, Pop,” then I think he said, “I’m on my way home in a few minutes.”

“Fanks, ’ll b‘ere.”

I missed the receiver the first couple of times I tried to hang up the phone. I must have stayed that way, ‘standing’ at the counter from the waist down, melted onto the countertop from the waist up, for quite a while. I stared at the sofa, 2 feet or a million miles away, I’m not quite sure. I was envisioning the Herculean effort it would take to toss my body over there, knowing that if I missed, I’d be sleeping on the floor tonight. At some point, I summoned up the energy to push off into space, landed face down on the cushions with my knees on the floor thinking: ‘close enough!’

The only thing I remember after that was Jared arranging my legs on the couch, tucking something around me and smiling at me as he went off to bed.

“Glad y’r ‘ome, blud!” I think I said, actually feeling some of the weight of concern sliding off me as I plummeted back into a deeper, dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

~

Was up late last night after having poisoned myself with alcohol – had a horrid few hours when I couldn't focus – couldn't think – couldn't walk – couldn't talk – I guess I was looking to soften the moment, but that's not the way  to do it – it never is.

No one would begrudge me such stupidity under the circumstances, but still – now I'm having to function today in this weakened state with virtually no sleep – right now I feel very shaky – hope that doesn't last all day – guess I'll just have to catch up on my rest on the bus and on the plane.

I'm both anxious for Mom to be able to hopefully let go after she sees I'm back, and apprehensive of the emotional strain of seeing her and the whole process.

I need to be very strong for everyone and right now I feel like I have barely enough energy to move around – let alone do all the stuff I've got to do today. I just hope I can regain my strength and center by the time I get there.

I had several small epiphanettes last night – though I don't know if the effect of any will remain. I can barely recall them even now. I didn't like that feeling of helplessness I had – that realization that no matter how much I tried I could barely discern up from down let alone function – I kept feeling that I was somehow connecting with the place Mom and Dad were constantly sliding in and out of.

Excerpt from ‘Morning Page’ entry 1/12/98

January 14, 1998

That first day in Vermont, after visiting with my sisters and brother-in-law, we all went to the hospital. Both our parents were there, Mom on the third floor, Pop on the fifth.

We stopped in to see Mom first. She was in and out of consciousness, as she’d been since she was admitted, apparently, and she didn’t seem to be lucid enough yet to recognize me, so we went up to Dad’s room.

There he sat, looking much the way he always looked to me. Older and smaller, the way parents look to adult children in contrast to our childhood memories of them. But otherwise, much the same strong, vibrant, vital man I’ve always looked up to. He was sitting up in a hospital bed with his left arm in a sling and evidence of elaborate bandages on his shoulder bulging from beneath the requisite hospital gown. His eyes were clear and his gaze was as sharp as ever, despite his recently turning 90 years old.

My sisters, Geri and Lynne – having seen him daily these last several months since I was last visiting from California – were sitting quietly off to the side of the room. As Pop and I talked about things, I noticed an occasional quirk in his speech, a word misused or an awkward pause when his eyes would get an odd, distant look. Other than that, the conversation seemed much the same as any I’d ever had with him. Then he said something somewhat unusual.

“What I really couldn’t understand,” Pop was saying, “was why that darned priest was crawling around on the ceiling.”

I felt an odd catch in my heart that, mercifully, I didn’t hear in my voice.

“That does seems kind of weird, Pop, I don’t know why he’d be up there either,” I said. I heard Lynn stifle a chuckle off behind me and I continued our conversation as if it were perfectly ordinary that someone might crawl around on the ceiling of a hospital room, surprised and heartened to realize I hadn’t let my shock or my heartache show in my voice or in my demeanor. I got the impression my sisters noticed this too and were on board with my approach to this surrealistic turn of events. The first of many, many surreal events to come.

Later, in conference with Pop’s doctor, I was told that he was showing classic symptoms of the onset of dementia. As is the nature, he told us, of the condition; physical and emotional trauma frequently bring on and intensify the symptoms. Apparently, the plaque buildup in his brain had first affected his sense of balance. As a result, he had fallen hard and fractured his shoulder joint. The damage wasn’t all that bad until he fell again getting out of the car at home after leaving the ER. This time he virtually crushed the socket of that same shoulder joint requiring major surgery. This was just days before Mom was hospitalized for major systemic failure. Her body was giving up.

“He has evidence of several recent fractures, you know,”  the doctor continued, “…he didn’t tell you?”

No. He didn’t tell us. Pop was always a tough old bird who didn’t like doctors or trust hospitals. He came from Oklahoma pioneer stock and was in the habit of just shaking off an injury and moving on with his life.

No. He hadn’t told anyone. I’m sure it hadn’t even occurred to him to. No more than you might mention to someone that you had stubbed your toe a month before.

“No. He didn’t tell us.”

CHAPTER THREE

~

6 AM – Haven’t written morning pages for a few days. Had one long day that covered the span of two or three days in my trip out to Vermont. Feel much better today than I have since I poisoned myself the night before I left.

Mom was a lot more comfortable and aware yesterday. She definitely knew I was there, which wasn't so obvious the first few days. She smiled, as best she could with her dentures out, a lot of the four hours or so we visited.

I wish Mom would either fade fast or be lucid enough to have a real conversation. It's very frustrating to see her trying to say things (possibly deep or important) and knowing that these are likely the last words I will hear her speak and not be able to understand her through her weariness and toothlessness. It must be so frustrating for her since she no doubt realizes from the expressions on our faces that she is not being clearly understood.

Dad is doing comparatively better – though I'm sure it's driving him as crazy to be confined to his bed as it is to know Mom was going and he can't even get down the two floors to see her. We’re all counting it a small blessing that he can't see her, fearing that Mom will be upset by it and that that, in turn, will hurt Dad even more. I haven't really discussed Mom’s  passing with Dad at all yet. It's probably bullshit not to. I guess I can't help trying to protect each of them from thoughts of the end.

I feel conflicted about wanting Mom to pass soon – feel like I'm trying to fit the end of her life into my travel agenda – feel like I'm a bad son for not feeling like I want her to last as long as possible.

I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with getting back to my life if she lingers into next week. What would I say to her when I go… knowing it almost certainly will be the last I see of her alive? Do I say something to acknowledge her dying and risk upsetting her or just act as though everything is fine? Leaving her without any type of closure.

I think the need for closure would be mine alone and I shouldn't burden her with that just to ease my heart.

Excerpt from ‘Morning Page’ entry 1/17/98

January 21,1998

Dad was recovering from his most recent shoulder surgery. They had to cut away the entire shoulder socket and replace it with a synthetic shoulder socket. It was major, but routine, surgery, so we weren’t very nervous. But any surgery on a 90-year-old is risky. The doctor said it went smoothly and the prognosis was as good as could be expected for an invasive procedure on an elderly patient.

When I visit with him we mostly just watched TV or I watch him nap. Geri and I, during our lunchtime visits, had taken to swapping off, one visiting Mom while the other went upstairs to sit with Pop. We got more visiting accomplished in the short time we had, with less chance of overstimulating either of them with more than one visitor at a time.

I couldn’t bring myself to broach the subject of Mom’s inevitable death with Dad. He hadn’t said anything about it and I just didn’t have the heart, or the courage, to be first. I kept telling myself that it’s for the better. That the truth would just complicate his recovery. But, mostly, it was just me chickening out. If he ever brought it up, I would have talked honestly about it… If not, well.

I’d been feeling trapped there, by then. I’m not much of an ‘inside’ guy, especially when I’m stressed or emotional. The temperature hadn’t been above 0° since I got there. After a couple of days staying in someone else’s home, I start feeling very antsy. Even without emotionally painful melodrama. Going into week number two of our vigil with Mom, I was climbing the walls. I’d have been pacing or riding if I could, but it was way too damn cold for that.

It’s interesting, though, how well I had retained my ability to drive on frozen, icy roads after 30 or more years in sunny California. When I drove Geri to work in the morning, it was like being in a huge bumper car arena. Everyone was driving very slowly. Everything was white, couldn’t see the pavement or centerlines or stop lines, just what looked like white-on-white ‘toboggan trails’ through the maze of Burlington’s old brick buildings and New England style homes. It took forever to get up to speed (15 to 20 mph was as fast as we could safely go in those conditions) and no one could stop or turn worth a damn. When a light turned green for you, you’d step on the gas lightly and wait patiently for the car to start moving, knowing that at least one or two cars on the cross street would be sliding through the intersection in front of you trying to stop. We all just waited for everyone else to careen to a stop and then took our turn at moving through the traffic. Every car that made a turn onto another street would inevitably fishtail back and forth a few times before the car accepted that you wanted to go this direction now. Amazingly, hitting other cars, parked or moving, was a rarity and I managed not to crash my sister’s car while I was there.

I spoke to Jared on the phone the day before and he seemed to be fine and apparently hadn’t burned down the house or gotten us evicted while I’d been gone. I felt a bit of relief, having spoken to him, but I didn’t know how long Mom would linger and I’d already been away from my teenager and my career longer than I felt comfortable. I trusted Jared, as far as any parent can trust any teen left alone for days on end, but I had almost certainly lost a client or two already. Best not to dwell on what can’t be helped. It would be what it would be, and I was needed there.

CHAPTER FOUR

~

“My heart is opening - in a way, and to an extent it never has before.

Watching a parent die could break a heart. kill it, crush it, cause it to shrink and harden.

Watching a parent die can open a heart. expand it, exploded it, cause it to grow and soften.

My heart is opening - in a way and to an extent it never has before.

Thanks...

I guess.”

-J P Bilyeu

January 28, 1998

I would’ve left for home today. It had been two weeks and I had a left a teenager home alone with no preparation. Frankly I was afraid I might come home and find my house burned to the ground, or some other poorly defined fear that tends to ricochet around inside the mind of any teenager’s parent. I had left several clients’ projects hanging when I got the call from my sister and was reasonably sure that I had lost those contracts for good. When I realized that no member of my family could get away that day to see me to the airport, and with my guilt and emptiness at the fact that, even after two weeks of waiting at my mother’s bedside, she still lingered on, I stayed one day longer.

Geri and I were parking the car. I had just picked her up at lunch, our usual time to go visit Mom, and again watch her fade slowly away. Upstairs, she was breathing her last breath.

We prepped ourselves, while riding up in the stifling elevator, for the heartache of sitting with her, as we had done daily for two weeks now. As we walked into the room, Lynne turned to us and the look on her face said it all. Geri and I turned to each other, fell into each others arms and all the carefully harnessed tears poured out.

Behind the gauzy curtain, a nurse said “would you like us to help you kiss her goodbye?” Dad’s tiny little silhouette made a small hollow sound and the silhouettes of two nurses lifted him from his wheelchair. He leaned in for what may well have been the first contact of their lips in decades, and the silhouettes carefully set him back down.

After Geri and I had a few minutes at her bedside, I squatted between the two of them, Mom and Dad, so frail, so spent. Mom looked so cold. She always got cold so easily. The logical part of my mind was embarrassed to see my hands gently tuck her covers up snug to her exposed neck, to keep her warm. I kissed her cooling forehead gently, as she once would have done at my bedside. I lowered my head to her shoulder, one hand on her cheek, the other on Dad’s knee, a conduit of compassion, perhaps, where so little had flowed between them for so very long. The boy who grew up to manhood stood stiffly aside in my head and reluctantly allowed a racking burst of sobs, powerlessly allowing the show of emotion that even my adopted machismo was unable to belittle or begrudge. Dad’s tears streamed in harmony. They both looked so small, so empty. I was five and 45 at the same moment.

Later that day my sisters and I took care of all the things that needed to be done, talked to the funeral director, went through all of moms belongings, chose the items we each wanted to keep with us as keepsakes, and made our plans for the future.

“When Dad is strong enough to travel, he should come to California,” I said to Geri, “you and Lynne have been looking after both of them for several years now, it’s my turn.”

I felt it had always been a sort of unspoken agreement between my sisters and I, if Mom outlived Dad that they would take care of Mom. They both had always been very close to Mom and done many things and had gone on trips together, it only made sense. Because of my connection with Dad, I always imagined that, if Dad outlived Mom, that it would be me taking care of him. And that’s how it played out.

CHAPTER FIVE

~

“When this stuff happens, you can either 'shut down' or 'open up'.

You just can't stay the way you were.”

- J P Bilyeu

May 20, 1998

It had been a truly miserable winter. Beginning with watching my mother die, realizing what was happening to my father, and the damned rains just wouldn’t fucking quit. It was the beginning of summer and still it was cold and wet. I’m a person who desperately needs the sun and without it I felt like I was on the edge of my ability to cope. The weight of my considerations of what I might have to deal with in looking after my father’s interests, in watching him go through whatever horrible things he was going to go through, my fear that I would fail miserably in doing my family duty, and the sheer weight of my gathering depression was threatening to do me in.

The dream started out bad. Then got worse.

I was roaming in a world that seemed to be rotting away. The ground stunk, the grass was a wet sickly mulch, the trunks of trees were gutted with rot. Everywhere I went everything was falling apart, buildings were rubble, all greenery was brown and rotting. The air stank of putrefaction and filth. I kept trying to move, kept trying to get away from all the decomposition. Everywhere I went was the same. At one point I saw some people off in the distance and rode toward them. Before I even got close enough to see the expressions on their faces I could see that their bodies were rotting, their guts exposed and nothing inside but the backside of their spines and the inside of the ribs. I shut my eyes, I turned and I ran. I continued to run until I ran out of energy entirely and as I bent, hands on knees, to catch my breath, I chanced a glance down at my own body. What I saw was a decaying corpse. I could see right through myself and bits of flesh were dangling from my ribs and falling to the ground and eroding as I looked.

I woke up soaked through with sweat. It was still dark but I had no choice, I had to get up. I threw on some pants and a shirt and hurried out into the the creeping glow of dawn, trying to catch my breath. Trying to shake off the images of my dream.

It was only two weeks before my sister and brother-in-law would bring Pop out to California, his shoulder finally recovered enough that he could travel. I never felt so overwhelmed by emotion in my life, never doubted myself more than I doubted myself then. I was fighting the guilt of not being able to take care of my own father in my own house, it being too small and with too narrow hallways and too many steps for 90-year-old man in wheelchair.  I had looked at a number of residential care facilities. I wanted him in a setting that felt like a home. Not a ‘home’ like an ‘old folks home’, but a home, like a real home, like the one he and my mother had made for us. The one I finally settled on was very intimate, a small residential house in the country where he would be one of only two residents in care. I hoped  I had made a good choice, but I had a nagging feeling that ended up to be true, that I could, and in fact would have to, eventually, do better.

My emotional energy had gotten so low, that I feared I would never get out of this state of mind. As I walked back to my cabin I saw my landlord, who has a medical practice predominantly doing hospice work with the elderly, sitting in his office which happened to be right across the driveway from my cabin on the horse ranch that he and his wife owned. I confided in my condition and he prescribed an antidepressant for me. I should tell you that I’m not at all the type that goes to drugs to solve every little medical or emotional concern. I didn’t want to take them, but I was truly desperate.

As it happened, over the next few weeks, the sun came out strong and warm and summer began to be what summer is supposed to be. With the return of the sun, my mood and my energy came up dramatically and I decided to stop taking the antidepressant before I’d even taken it for more than two or three weeks. Thank God! I hated  the way it made me feel, vacuous and hollow, disconnected. I felt like I was falling into a hell worse than the one I was already in. It didn’t take away my pain, it didn’t take away my fears. It didn’t take away my depression, it only made me feel… less. Less alive. Less human. Less real. Just replacing one god-awful feeling with another. Of the two hells… I’ll take the one that is real, thank you.

Thank God for the sun!

CHAPTER SIX

~

“Folks, as they get old, don't physically shrink

so much as their presence recedes.”

- J P Bilyeu

June 4 1998

Today was the day that my sister and brother-in-law were bringing Pop out here to California. It was finally my turn to look after him. He had recovered from his shoulder operation sufficiently enough to travel. I had found what I thought would be the perfect home to put him in, a residential care home that was actually a small house in the country with only one other resident in need of care. I refused to put him into a hospital setting. I wanted it to feel like a home, an actual home not a nursing home. The cost was reasonable, as reasonable as these things get.  Luckily for us all, Dad had saved enough money that he still had plenty of resources to cover his needs, at least for a time.

My sister and brother-in-law were going to rent a car for the days that they were going to be in California visiting, and I only had a two-seater sports car at the time anyway, so I took the bus down to San Francisco and met them at the airport. Its so agonizingly slow traveling to the airport by bus. Its an hour and a half down there by car, an hour or so longer by bus. I’m not real big on bus travel under the best of circumstances. Today, a sense of fatalism weighed down on me until I felt like I was suffocating. If I was in the car I’d have the top down, sky above and wind in my hair. If I was on my bike, I’d be even more unconfined. Here in the damn bus I can’t even open a window. I focused on my breathing, drawing slow, deep, calming breaths.

Needless to say, my emotions were all over the map while I sat in the terminal waiting for their flight. The bus was on time, but my family’s flight was late. I hadn’t brought anything to read, since I can’t read in a moving vehicle and I didn’t think I would be able to concentrate on the story anyway. The time dragged by like molasses flowing uphillI. I paced the terminal as far as I could go in one direction and then paced back the way I came. I watched people, tried to determine from the look in their eyes and the bearing of their posture what emotional state they were in. Bland boredom in most, excited determination or anticipation in others. Every so often I found a subtle hint of fear or sadness in someone’s gaze, the exhaustion of a long life of struggle or the echo of despair hovering like a wraith at someone’s shoulder. I found myself wondering what others might see in my eyes.

After an eternity of pacing, I heard the announcement that  their flight was finally at the gate. I saw my sister first and made my way over to her and gave her a big hug. When I searched the crowd of passengers coming down the hallway I almost didn’t recognize my father. I saw my brother-in-law, Scott, first. And then immediately behind him, hanging on to Scott’s belt for dear life with his good arm, shuffled my dad. He looked so tiny and frail, lost, searching around him with an overwhelmed expression in his eyes like a little child hoping desperately not to lose hold of his parent’s hand.  He was taking tiny little shuffling steps, as though he was fearful of another fall. Scott had a look of infinite patience on his face, God bless him, ignoring the concerned comments and amused expressions on the faces of the people around them. The extra hour or so they had been in the air had been really draining on them all. Pop had been restless and wanting to pace throughout the flight. Now that they were out of the confines of the plane, we were all anxious to get the luggage, rent a car and get the hell out of Dodge!

I took the wheel, since we were in my neck of the woods now, and headed out of SFO and through San Francisco. We grabbed fast food on the way up north as soon as we were over the Golden Gate Bridge and ate as we rode. We were all fed up with crowds and too tired to want to do anything but get to Santa Rosa and get them a room for the night. I stayed with them ’til they were settled, hugged them all good night. I drove the rental car home to Forestville, since I was coming right back in the morning to  have breakfast with my family and do a little sightseeing before we took Dad to his new home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

~

“He that is discontented in one place

will seldom be content in another. “

- Aesop

June 5, 1998

We brought dad to his new home today.  Dad seemed disoriented and restless. (Who wouldn’t be?)

“I’m not going to stay here in somebody else’s house!”

“It’s going to be your house now, Pop. This is where you’re going to stay. I’d let you stay at my place if I could, but it’s got too many stairs… Can’t get the chair up and down… And the hallways are too narrow too.”

“I don’t care, I’ll walk there… I don’t need a damn wheelchair.”

“Pop, you already fell and busted yourself up. You need to live somewhere that people can help you so you don’t fall again.”

“I’m going to my brother’s… I’ll live with him.”

I wasn’t going to get into the fact that my uncle Bunny, (Aubrey was his name, but for whatever reason, Bunny is the name my folks and my sisters and I all called him my whole life) who was only two years younger than Dad, was in an old folks home, too, back in Oklahoma.

“We flew you all the way out here, to be near me… That’s what we all agreed on, isn’t it?”

“I thought I was going to live with you.”

The crush of guilt that hit me, just then, smothered my voice.

“His house is too small, Dad. And you’ll break your neck on those steps.” My sister was saying.

“I’m going to Bunny’s!”

“You’ve got no way to get there, Pop. Just stay here a while and see how you like it.” That was Scott.

“I won’t like it!”

“Give it a chance, Pop.” I had recovered some. “Look, I’m going to go get some dinner with Geri and Scott. You stay here and get settled in, for now, and have some supper. I’ll come back in a while with my gear and camp out here with you tonight. Okay?”

“ …Okay, Pop?”

“I’m going to my brother’s.”

I sighed, in spite of myself, and hugged him. He leaned into me a bit, but didn’t hug me back. The look of scorn in his eyes made me sick to my stomach.

“Be back in a couple hours, Pop… You’ll still be here?”

“…Pop?”

“I’ll still be here.”

Geri and Scott hugged Dad. He gave a similar look to Geri, but hung onto Scott a while longer and smiled sadly at him as he pulled away. Scott had taken on the role of son with Dad, far more than a typical son-in-law generally does, filling a void that I left by following my dream out West. I consider Scott my brother, in truth, not merely a brother-in-law, not just the husband of my sister. God knows I never felt close to her first husband! I will always be indebted to Scott for being there when my father needed his son’s help and I wasn’t there to give it.

After we got Dad settled in, Geri and Scott and I went out and had dinner. I was so concerned that Dad would be even more confused than usual and upset, concerned about being in a new place, I came back with my sleeping bag and slept on the floor in his room with him. I felt so guilty and scared that I never really fell into a deep sleep that night. In fact, it would be weeks before I really slept. This night, any time I drifted even close to sleep I would be jolted awake by the sounds of Dad’s tossing and turning, moaning in his sleep. Dozens of times in the night he sat bolt upright in his bed gasping, whipping his head around in confusion, trying to recognize his surroundings.

“I’m right down here, Pop,” I would say. “You’re in California now, go on back to sleep, I’ll see you in the morning.” All night while he slept, he moaned and gasped in shuddering breaths and mumbled words I couldn’t make out.

Laying there, I found myself recalling the earliest memories of my dad that I could remember. One of the earliest memories I have of him I was almost five. ( “I’m four and free quarters…” I would have gladly informed anyone who asked. ) I was riding with my mom to pick Dad up at work. I was so small, the interior of our brand new ’57 Ford Fairlane seemed like a warehouse. I could just barely see over the dashboard standing on tiptoe on the front seat. Dad was an engineer at a big engineering company, the only big business in our little New England town. Half the families in town had a family member or two who worked there. I could always pick out my dad from the hundreds of people who all left work at the stroke of 5pm. Man after man would stream out, all dressed the same: jacket, white shirt and tie. One or two would have their tie loosened up, collar unbuttoned or jacket off and thrown over a shoulder, but always the tie and a long sleeve white dress shirt. Pop never wore a tie, except for rare business trips, rarely wore the requisite suit coat, whether he brought it to work or not. And always he wore a short sleeve white shirt, collar unbuttoned, with the sleeves rakishly rolled up, exposing well muscled arms. The only one out of hundreds of identical looking workers. My daddy-o… strong, handsome and proud.

I had another vivid recollection from the same time. Dad, when he was in a mood to horse around with me, would hunch up his shoulders, growl menacingly and lumber after me while I squealed in fearful delight, running for my life around our tiny house. I say ’tiny’ now, having seen it as an adult, but at the time, it seemed enormous. Ceilings as high as the sky and my dad looking so huge it amazed me that he didn’t constantly bang his head on those distant ceilings. As certain as I was that my daddy would never hurt me, still my blood ran hot and cold as I tried hopelessly to out-maneuver him.

“What are you?” I would scream out whenever he grabbed at me (always just missing me, of course,) “What are you?” It didn’t matter what kind of monster or wild animal he decided he was, I always had the same response.

“I’m a baby one! I’m a baby one!” I figured even monsters didn’t hurt their own babies… right? That was always the end of the terror… The big, bad monster would pick up his baby monster and hug and kiss him, just like a daddy should!

The first few weeks, I virtually lived at the care home with him. I’d take him out for drives in Wine Country and to the coast. I’d used some of Dad’s money to buy a vehicle I could get him in and out of easily. I looked at a lot of used minivans and settled on one whose passenger seat height was at the same level as Pop’s backside, so it would be as easy as possible for him to get in and out. I figured, even in the worst case scenario, I could lay Pop down in the back if he was feeling poorly or help him change or clean him up if he had an accident. We’d spend most of every day out and about, so Dad wouldn’t feel trapped in a strange house. I was already having huge doubts about my choice of homes. It felt so much like anybody’s home that, I feared, Dad felt like he had just invaded some stranger’s house and been left there by the only person he even knew in this part of the country.

It seemed to help, that he was with me most of the time, in or out of the house, and in time he seemed to accept being there, but he hated it. And he really didn’t get along with Joel, who owned the home and with his wife, assisted Elena with the caregiver duties.

After a few weeks of spending most of every day and some of the nights with him, I had to start weaning him of my constant presence. I was slacking off on my work and clients were, when they knew what I was dealing with, understanding enough. But they had businesses to run and I’d already lost a few of them, I couldn’t afford to lose any more. Even though my plan was to see him after dinner every other day, at least, I was frequently called over to deal with Dad at all times of the day and night when he was anxious or belligerent. It was not an auspicious start.

CHAPTER EIGHT

~

“Hold on.

Hold on to yourself,

For this is gonna hurt like hell.”

- The opening and closing lines from

‘Hold On’

By Sarah Mclachlan

June 23, 1998

It was early evening when the phone rang. It may have been my imagination, but the ring tone sounded frustrated. Tense and angry. Had to be my imagination.

“You need to get over here, right now!” The tense, frustrated, angry male voice insisted. “ We need your help with your father.”

I didn’t wait for an explanation, I never did. I just jumped on my bike and raced over. The last time I visited, a couple days before, the live-in caregiver, an old Russian woman named Elena, expressed concerns for Dad’s lack of regularity.

“10 days and no poop!” She said in a thick accent I would have found charmingly comical under any other circumstances. “This no good, Mr. Jesse.” She had tried laxatives the last few days, would continue until something changed, or else a physician would have to be called.

Today, they called me instead… because nature had finally called on Dad… with a vengeance!

The bowel movement was so massive, his blood pressure fluctuated so intensely from the sudden change in his system, it triggered a severe episode of confusion. Not understanding anything, Dad began to ‘explore’ the mysterious substance the way an infant might… by touch. After ‘painting’ the walls and floor and himself, Pop got highly agitated and suspicious. As his mind cleared slightly, he decided all the people around him had done this to him to humiliate him. He became angry and confrontational. When I got to his room he was under the covers. Still covered in his own filth, ranting and refusing to get up to get cleaned.

“Gerry, you have to let us clean you up – change your sheets,” the proprietor was insisting, his voice harsh and barely under control.

“Fuck you, assholes! Why’d you do this to me?” Dad hollered.

“Gerry, no one did this to you, we’re here to help you.”

I should probably mention that, as a kid, I never heard my dad use language any stronger than the occasional ‘hell’ or ‘damn.’ Even then, only after something like a flat tire or a stubbed toe.

“Pop,” I said, quietly stepping into his line of site. “You’re all covered in crap… You need to wash off and let Elena change your sheets.” The old woman hovered at my shoulder, her concern plain on her handsome old face, clean sheets heaped in her arms. She had just finished cleaning the worst of the mess in the bathroom.

“Gerry, go wash off poop, I fix bed, yes?”

“Why the fuck did they do this to me?” Anger was warring with tears, “what the hell did I do to them?”

“You didn’t do anything, Pop – this just happened. And we need to get you cleaned up.” Part of me was horrified; sick and embarrassed; embarrassed for myself, for this brilliant, funny, inspiring man I’ve looked up to my whole life. Part of me was practical and pragmatic. I was amazed at how calm and reasonable my voice sounded. I sure as hell didn’t feel that way!

“Come on, Pop – let’s go wash up.”

“I’m not letting that mother-fucker touch me. He’s always humiliating me. They parade me around and change my clothes right in front of all those fucking people!”

I looked all around the room, it was only the two caregivers, Dad and myself. Then it hit me. Pop wasn’t hallucinating (at least not in this) he was seeing the reflections of all of us in the mirrored closet doors. Then I noticed that two whole walls of his room were covered in mirror tiles. Through Dad’s coke-bottle glasses, he saw a vast room with several people always watching him from the shadows.

“And that fucking guy there,” he said, as he sat up, pointing, in his filthy bed, “he’s always here, always fucking looking at me!”

He was talking about his own reflection. Of course the guy was always looking at him, it was his own eyes reflected back at him, and whether through coke-bottle glasses or dementia, he didn’t recognize the old bastard across the room.

“Pop, it’s just us. The walls are mirrors. That’s just us, see.” I waved my arm and did a stupid little dance. “See, that’s just me there… and over there.”  Everyone giggled, a little nervously, for a bit. “See, that’s Elena, there and over there – and Joel too. And that old  fart in the bed. That’s just you. See!”

” Who puts stupid damn mirrors all over their damn walls, anyway?” Dad said as he squinted into the mirror. “Are you sure… it doesn’t look like me.”

“It’s you, Pop. It’s just you and me and these two. That’s all.” I was talking to Dad, but I was glaring at Joel, thinking ‘what fucking moron puts mirrors all over the walls, indeed!’

“Come on, Pop – let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Uh - uh! I’m staying right here. You can all go fuck yourselves!” He yanked the covers up tight  to his chin as he laid  back down, the way a little kid does to protect himself from the boogeyman.

“Well, Pop. It’s up to you. But I can’t just leave my father lying around it in his own filth like this, so if you won’t get up, I’ll just have to stand here until you change your mind! I’ve got nowhere I need to be.”

“You can go home, I don’t want to get up.”

“I can’t go home, Pop! You’re covered in shit!” I couldn’t help myself, I started laughing. Probably three quarters of the way to hysterical, but with an ironic gleam in my eyes, no doubt. I thought for a second, I saw the same thing reflected in Dad’s eyes.

Without another second’s hesitation Dad threw aside the covers and strode naked and determined across the room and into the bathroom, steady as an executioner on a Sunday morning.

I looked, side-long, at Joel and he left to attend to his other client, probably hiding under the covers in the next room, poor old gal. Elena had the bed stripped nearly the moment Dad got up and I followed him into the bathroom to help him shower.

The next 15 minutes constituted one of the most surrealistic moments of my life. ( Yes, even more than the previous 15. ) While Dad concentrated on keeping his balance in the shower, I stripped to my shorts and got in with him. He was covered head to toe with feces and I had to step back in my mind to handle the chore of meticulously washing every inch of my father’s 90-year-old body. He was always athletic, and except for the unavoidable wrinkles and age spots, his body was in better shape than most men 30 or 40 years younger. In fact, unable to avoid the comparison of mine to his under the circumstances, I realized his body was my body! A part of me marveled at, and the rest recoiled from, the realization that this is what my body will look like at 90, should I be so blessed ( or cursed ) to live that long. As I washed his hands, I saw that his hands were my hands. At 45, my own were just beginning to show the signs of aging. They were the same hands!

I cleaned every inch of his body and after drying him off, as he held firmly to the handrail, I helped him hit the toilet bowl while he peed. The juxtaposition of memories of doing this with my own boys when they were little, totally overwhelmed me. Although I have no clear memory of it, I couldn’t help but think of all the times he had probably done the same for me as a toddler. Life throws us some weird curves.

Pop was asleep within moments of tucking him in, all sparkling clean in fresh, clean sheets.

I kissed him on the top of his head, thanked Elena and had a brief, uncomfortable discussion with Joel about his concern that this was not going to work out.

I took a 50 mile ride home in the moonlight (I lived 7 miles away) and stopped to pace along the roadside for God knows how long, God knows how many times, letting my mind race and my heart ache.

CHAPTER NINE

~

“I will not cry for my parents.

I will live for them!”

- J P Bilyeu

June 25, 1998

The phone rang. It was Joel at the home. It almost always was.

“Your father’s very agitated. He says he’s going to his brother’s, but he’s only wearing a T-shirt and won’t let anyone help him,” Joel said, annoyance clear in his tone, “he can’t figure out how to unlock the front door, so I haven’t had to restrain him. But he’s very belligerent and he won’t sit back down. I need you to come over and calm him down.”

He was sitting  on the sofa in the front room, looking like a wild animal ready to bolt at the slightest sound, as I came in. Joel walked out to see to his other resident, Elena peeked in from the kitchen, looking worried and sad. Pop was naked except for a slightly oversized T-shirt. He had charged off while they were getting him changed and wouldn’t let anyone near him.

“They’re trying to kill me!”

“Who is, Pop?” He looked around with confused panic in his eyes, but didn’t say anything. “Who’s trying to kill you?” He just kept whipping his head around, eyes darting to every corner of the house. He looked so scared. I’d never in my entire life seen my dad look scared and it scared the shit out of me.

A thought slammed into my head unexpectedly. He’d said it less than a year ago when all of us, Mom, Pop, Geri and I were going over the paperwork for their Living Will. He had said it, lightheartedly, many times in the past as well. The subject, however it came up, was senility.

“If I ever get like that, just take me out back and shoot me!” He’d said. I only gave it half a thought, having heard it many times in my life. Having a similar reaction, myself, to the stray thought of what I would want if that ever happened to me. Hell, it’s almost anyone’s gut-level reaction to the idea of becoming a helpless vegetable. A lot of people say it. I’ve said it! We all think we mean it too, right now, young and lucid. It’s sure as hell a right and proper cowboy/pioneer/man’s man response. Even though I knew as a kid as I knew then, that I would not have the heart or the nerve to actually do it, even if it weren’t against the law. But I still took the sentiment with a grain of salt, knowing he really meant it, even though he knew that it couldn’t happen.

Now, here we were. He was ‘that way’ and his words ‘just take me out back and shoot me’ thundered in my ears. Now, here we were… and Dad was so clearly desperate not to die… I thought to myself ‘so much for that shit!’

“I’m going to my brother’s!”

“Pop, you can’t get to Oklahoma without your pants.” He looked down distractedly but didn’t really register how he looked “you don’t have any money and its way too far to walk. You have to stay in California with me and let folk take care of you.”

“I’ll hitchhike!”

“Pop, Uncle Bunny is in a rest home. He doesn’t live in his house anymore, either.” I had to take a couple of breaths to steady myself, my voice was starting to crack.

“I want to see my brother.” I don’t think he even meant to say it out loud. It was barely above a whisper.

I wanted to say, ‘we can take a flight out to see him,’ but I was afraid air travel would be too much for Dad now. So I just whispered back, “I know, Pop.”

We sat there for a very long while in silence, Dad looking forlorn and introspective. I mumbled a few random comments on world affairs or sports or something. Then, lots more silence.

“I’m not going to make it, am I?”

It was completely out of context, so it took a moment for me to re-register my thinking. Make it where? To Oklahoma? I didn’t think that was what he meant. Dad’s conversations had been getting more and more surreal for me and more and more frustrating for him. His vocabulary was crumbling daily. He was at a loss for a word or a phrase he was searching for every few sentences, at first. Early on, because I knew his speech patterns and terminology so well, I could quickly and easily fill in the gap for him on my first or second try. He’d get a relieved or triumphant look in his eyes and continue on. So long as I could follow his train of thought, it was only a little draining for me and our conversations went fairly smoothly.

Over time it got harder. Harder for Dad to find words. Harder for me to follow his lead. In time he lost words so frequently he simply used whatever word came to mind. Due to his years as an engineer, I’m assuming, Dad eventually started substituting numbers for words. Ironically, he was at his most lucid when he was pissed off.

By this time I was having as much difficulty following his conversations as Dad was having speaking to me. I’d be physically drained after even an hour of sitting with him. There were moments, though, in all the confusion of his words, fleeting moments of insight and clarity that would hit me like a brick in the face. So it took a moment for me to get what he meant:

‘I’m not going to make it, am I?’

He wasn’t really asking me, or quite looking at me. He was just coming to a sobering realization.

His mom and dad both lived to their mid-90s. As far back as I can remember, my dad would say he was going to live to be 100. It became a bit of a challenge between us. He was determined to live longer than his folks, and I was determined to live at least one year longer than him. Both of us knew that if I didn’t, well, Pop wasn’t going to be there to collect. Or me either, for that matter. But, still, it was a staple memory of my childhood.

‘I’m not going to make it, am I?’

It was a clear, solid, bitch slap of a thought to a man who’d been having  precious few clear thoughts these past several months. He wasn’t going to make it to 100. He was 90 then, just a few months away from 91.

Nope. He wasn’t gonna make 100.

I knew my eyes were dripping but I didn’t want to draw attention to it by wiping at them. He wasn’t really asking me, so we just sat quietly and I died a little with him and wished that I could take that look out of his eyes.

Nope. Not gonna make it.

CHAPTER TEN

~

Its interesting, that for all the agony and gut wrenching horror of watching Dad go through all that, it gave to me some things I would never have had otherwise.  I saw him that day I followed him around the house and yard, while he raged at aging and unseen opponents, as I had never seen him before. I couldn’t have, because that was 20 years or more before I was born. I saw him then as a young man, full of fire, daring the world to get in his way.

Over the course of the many months that I was responsible for his well-being, while his mind slowly dissolved from Alzheimer’s, I saw him, first as a proud, young man itching for a fight; then as a kid and eventually as an infant… open, trusting, and filled with wonder. I saw the way he had interacted with his friends, his work associates, the world around him. All the stages of his life that had preceded mine.

-J P Bilyeu

June 30, 1998

I got another call from the home, like every other day for the last few weeks. Dad’s caregivers were having more and more trouble with him, with his restlessness, his confusion and anger. His outbursts were frightening the other resident in the home, a quiet older woman, and her family was threatening to pull her out of the home if something didn’t change soon. I dropped everything, as usual, and raced the 7 miles from where I lived to the home.

Dad was in a state. He was pacing around his room, in spite of the fact that the Alzheimer’s had all but obliterated his sense of balance. He was spoiling for a fight.

“You want to fight with me?”

“I’m not going to fight with you, Gerry.”  Dad’s male caregiver was saying as I walked into the bedroom.

Pop turned to me with fury in his eyes, “you wanna fight with me?” He was swaying a bit on his feet as he said it, but standing miraculously tall and strong considering he is essentially confined to his wheelchair at this point in time.

“I’m not going to fight with you, Pop.” I said it with an exasperated grin and he returned the look with a sense of irony dancing across his somewhat disoriented face.

“I’m sure as hell gonna fight with somebody, God dammit!” He started walking a bit unsteadily towards the sliding glass door that led from his room to the backyard. “You wanna fight with me?” He said to the dresser. “No, well, fuck you then!” And out the door he went. I traded a quick look with his caregiver, and dashed out the door behind him.

I followed Pop for the better part of two hours that afternoon, to every corner of that backyard. I didn’t want to crowd him, so I stayed back a pace or two ready to dive in and catch him if he lost his balance and fell. He marched up to every tree, every structure, several spots on the fence, even the birds in the trees and a scrap pile full of old wood and broken furniture, begging for a fight.

“Me and my boys are gonna kick your fucking ass!” He hollered at a particularly burly pine tree in the far back corner of the property. And so it went on, comical if it weren’t so damn heartbreaking. Pop hadn’t managed to walk more than five or 10 steps without losing his balance in the last several months, and here he was charging about, like a bull in his prime, challenging everything and everyone in sight.

“Come on, somebody fuckin’ fight with me!” He screamed out across the vista at anything. At everything.

Eventually, his wandering led us back to the back porch near his room, and I suggested we go back inside. He looked right through me and began pacing mindlessly in place, with the most frighteningly vacant look in his eyes, going nowhere. I had seen these glitches in his behavior before, some sort of feedback loop in his head. He just marched in place, his legs pumping up and down as if he was jogging, seeing nothing and getting nowhere. I’d come to realize the only way to bring him out of these, was to stand just inches in front of him, bending my knees  to to be even with him, looking him straight in the eye and repeating his name until I saw some sense of recognition come back into his eyes.

“ Gerry. Gerry.” I saw a bit of focus come back into his vacant gaze. “Gerry!.. ” He looked me straight in the eyes, “Hi!” We traded grins and he stopped moving his legs, “Gerry, let’s sit down,” I repeated the words several times slowly, clearly, the whole time crouching down, bending my knees to indicate what sitting was.  “Come on, Pop, time to sit down, now.”

Pop sat,  and calmed considerably. The catharsis had drained him and he seemed somewhat more at peace, if you could possibly say such a thing. Later, after we got Dad settled back in bed, his caregiver informed me that it was time for me to find someplace else for Dad to live. The fact of the matter was I could tell this was not the right place for him. The next day I began the daunting task of looking for somewhere else for my dad to live.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

~

“One never reaches home,

but wherever friendly paths intersect

the whole world looks like home for a time.”

- Hermann Hesse

July 7, 1998

For the last week I had looked at several different places where Dad might live next. Most of them were very large, nearly hospital-like settings. All of them were ridiculously expensive. All full care homes seemed to be ridiculously expensive. Thank God Dad had his own money. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find any place that felt even remotely right for Dad.

The last place I looked at today, a large ranch style home in the country not far from the Sonoma County Airport, seemed mildly familiar to me. It was a hot and sticky summer day. As I drove down the quarter-mile dirt driveway, I realized why it seemed familiar. I had dropped off one of my clients from the paratransit van here on two or three occasions in the past. I couldn’t remember who the client was, and I had never actually gone to the front door and gone inside, so I had no idea what the place felt like. I knocked on the front door and when it opened a young woman named Janice, a heavyset black woman in her early 30s, awarded me a huge, open smile and invited me in. The house was virtually singing with the sounds of a large, happy family. As we walked into the living room, a very large black woman in her 60s, sitting on the couch, sweating slightly in her slip and bra, smiled over at me and said hello.

“Jesse, this is my mama Evelyn,” Janice mentioned as she ushered me forward to meet the older woman. “Mama started this care home when Daddy got ill ten years ago.”

“My friends just call me Evvie,” Evelyn said “we don’t stand on formality ‘round here.”

“Jesse,” I said as I took her hand, “I’m looking for a place for my father to stay, Evvie.  The place he’s in right now is just not a very good fit, I’m afraid.” I quickly recapped recent events, wanting to be upfront about Dad’s condition, realizing word might well travel from one caregiver to the next anyway. Evvie and Janice just nodded knowingly in their calm, compassionate way.

“Pardon the way I’m dressed,” Evvie said with a cherubic smile on her face, “this heat is a bit much for a big old gal like me.” She heaved herself up off the couch with a bit of effort and began to walk towards the far side of the the living room, obviously intending to show me around the place. There were several people moving about in the fringes of the house, but no one overly conspicuous to me where I was standing at the time. In all the buzz of voices around me, I heard nothing that sounded fearful or in pain or in any way suffering. Voices sounded happy, if a bit worn out, and even the occasional contentious voice had a lilting lightheartedness to it. Just then a rather large, tall black man in his 60s rolled his wheelchair into the living room, locked the wheels, and stood up with a familiar smile.

“This is my daddy, John,” said Janice from behind me, “he’s a resident here as well.”

I walked over to John, took his hand and shook it companionably. “Good to see you again, John, I thought I recognized this place when I pulled up.” It came back to me at that point that John was the client that I had brought to this place on a few occasions before. He was a kidney dialysis patient, like so many of the clients that I transported to and from the clinic, and required his wheelchair mainly just for the sickness and dizziness that he felt after his dialysis sessions. John was nearly 6 foot seven and had a huge strong hand that nearly swallowed mine up in the handshake. Everyone in that room regarded everyone  else with a compassionate and loving gaze, including myself.

This place already felt more like what I was looking for than anything that I had looked at yet. Not that the caregivers in the more hospital-like settings I had seen had been any less warm or compassionate, but these people just felt like family, this house felt like a home.  They were a family. It was a home. Their home, now open to include several other people. Just then I heard a small commotion around the corner in what, from the sound of it, must’ve been the kitchen.

“Hey, no, you can’t have another cookie… Now scoot… go get washed up for dinner!”

Instead of a dejected looking little kid sulking around the corner, there came a graying, elderly Hispanic gent in a wheelchair with a sparkle in his eye, a smug grin on his face and a couple of poorly concealed cookies in his lap. I knew then and there that I had found a new home for my dad.

CHAPTER TWELVE

~

“This old house is falling down…

‘Round my ears.”

-The opening line of

‘Dimming of the Day’

By Richard Thompson

September 12, 1998

These last two months Dad has been staying in the new care home felt right to me.  Whenever I was visiting, it always had that noisy, loving buzz of activity that accompanies a large family, a blend of laughter, TV, kitchen sounds and smells, the occasional stern command gently hollered from one room to another. I had come to befriend a few of the other residents living there and was often brought just short of tears at the gestures of kindness and concern they seemed to all show towards my dad. Dad hadn’t shown  any hint of anger or distress at his surroundings or the dozen or so other souls sharing the big ranch-style house with him, at least while I was visiting. Since I relocated him here, I’d not heard a single word of concern from his caregivers.

The peculiarities of his dementia amazed me. I would have found it intellectually fascinating had I been free of emotional involvement and regret. I had gone to an Alzheimer’s support group a couple of times, recently. I’m not really one for leaning on or exposing my inner pain to strangers ( or friends and family, for that matter ), so I didn’t continue to go for very long. Listening to the stories of others, mostly middle-aged children of afflicted parents, I was struck by how differently the condition affected different people. One group of family members, a son and two daughters, told of their mother, a distinguished, local businesswoman who had always been an honored matron of her family and pillar of the community. She still groomed herself meticulously every day, dressed impeccably and, to a casual observer, seemed no different than any other vibrant, healthy woman in her late 60s. She no longer recognized anyone from her earlier life. Not her business partner of 40 years. Not her sisters or her children or her granddaughter. She still had a flawless command of language and a bold, assertive speaking style, but no idea what year it was or where the hell she was.

In contrast, Pop, who now rarely spoke in complete sentences, substituted whatever word or number came to mind several times in any brief conversation. Pop, who was confined to a wheelchair, not out of infirmity, but because his sense of balance had deserted him completely, still knew the names of every person in every picture on his dresser. He even referred to obscure cousins of mine by name and parentage, people whose names I had long since forgotten, myself. Dementia is a strange and cruel disease in a world with far too many strange, cruel things. When I let myself dwell on it, anger and frustration always threatened to run me down like a runaway train… Me and Dad chained, helpless, to the tracks.

My visits, when the weather was fair, consisted mainly of walks up and down the long driveway, me pushing his wheelchair and Dad calling out to people unseen by me.

“What reading are you getting?” He called out, today, to a coworker only he could see. “22?” He paused briefly, as if to run numbers in his head, “okay, 22 is fine.” Turning his head in another direction, “how about you? 37? That’s no good, go put five in the… tree ground by the 42. What? Okay. That’s good!” He leaned forward abruptly in his chair, “Watch it! Blue will fall up there and donkey 30! That’s better.”

It was such an odd experience to share intimate time with Dad these days. So close and yet so far away. I could only rarely, these days, make any true connection with him verbally. The stress and strain ,from previous months, of trying to follow his trains of thought had finally reached an odd sort of calm acceptance in me. When Dad said something I recognized as being directed at me, rather than the unseen people of Dad’s imagination, I would simply say what ever came to mind. This was so similar to what seemed to be Dad’s approach to conversation, it would give me chills, and Dad would continue on as if I had said something that answered his question perfectly. It was a sad but fulfilling symmetry to these walks and talks that seemed to soothe us both, in counterpoint to the tension and frustration of our earlier visits.

And so we paced on a daily basis with me supplying all the actual walking. Dad, soothed by the constantly moving surroundings while he observed the worlds around him, chatted on amiably.

I would, frequently, sit with everyone at dinnertime, sharing in the food and conversation, helping Dad negotiate the increasingly difficult task of capturing food on his fork and guiding it into his mouth. Sometimes the overlay of memory of doing the same for my boys when they were tiny was heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. A child will learn to do all these things unaided in time, Dad would not.

I usually used the distraction of meal time to take my leave. It was easier on Dad, and, much, much easier on me. I would wipe Dad’s chin for the 40th time, kiss him on the bald spot at the top of his head, say my goodbyes and slip out feeling uncomfortably like a thief in the night… or a prisoner breaking the bonds of his chains.

Always I would stop somewhere on the way home and pace. Pace and cry. Pace and swear. Pace and detest myself. Pace until I was numb.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

~

“The soul laid bare...

All trappings of the outer man,

a lifetime in the accumulation,

gone virtually overnight.

Crumbled to a fine ash

hazing over the fragile glasslike shell,

hiding nothing.”

- J P Bilyeu

October 15, 1998

Since moving dad to the new home, the panicked phone calls were far less frequent. Non-existent actually. So when the phone rang today, I didn’t have that familiar charge of panic that I’d gotten so accustomed to in months past. Not at first, anyway. This time, it wasn’t a caregiver at the home, it was my dad’s doctor.

“Jesse, they just took your father to the hospital. Looks like pneumonia.” Then he said in his most reassuring voice, “Pneumonia has often been called the old man’s friend, you know. Frequently it is the way that the elderly finally let go. And, for what it’s worth, it’s one of the kinder ways that a person can die.”

This is it then, I thought to myself. The beginning of the end. My heart in my throat, I climbed on my bike and shot into town headed to the hospital. When I got there I found my way through the labyrinth of hallways, spoke to the nurse at the nurse’s station and navigated my way to the room number they had given me. Walking through the door, I saw my father lying there on the hospital bed awake but unfocused. I walked up to the bed slowly, so as not to surprise or shock him, and realized he had absolutely no idea I was there. His eyes were wide open, naked fear and confusion racing through them. He was moaning slightly and his head rocked desperately from side to side. His eyes flitted this way and that looking fearfully at things that I could not see. I tried not to imagine what kind of horrors he might be seeing all around him, causing such frightening looks to haunt his eyes. Being someone with such an active imagination, I couldn’t help myself.

I tried unsuccessfully for a few minutes to get his attention, calling him first by Pop or by Dad, and then finally just referring to him as Gerry, thinking that he might not have any idea who I was or even recognize my voice. I stood at his bedside and observed for as long as I could take it. When I realized that wherever Dad was, he was completely unaware of what was going on in this plane of existence, perhaps no idea I was there or even who I was, I walked out into the hall to catch my breath. I paced for a while, stopping back in by his bedside every few minutes to see if any change had come about. I couldn’t help thinking this is definitely it. Dad was on his way out and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.  A part of me was horrified, another almost joyful, the rest just numb.

I finally had the opportunity to talk with the physician that had  been on call when Dad came in. He assured me that Dad was in little or no physical discomfort, even though I could see he was obviously in a mental or emotional agony judging by the movements of his eyes and from the horrified look on his face. The doctor went on to say that there was a very good likelihood that Dad would only last another few hours or maybe a couple of days before he would finally give up and let go. Then he told me that, in the off chance that Dad pulled through, his dementia would most likely be several stages worse than when he came in.

When I left the hospital I did what I did virtually every time I spent time with my dad. I rode my motorcycle out into the country, found some majestic overlook, parked my bike and paced. Seems that’s what the men in my family do when life is kicking our ass. We pace. Something about moving, perhaps just being a moving target, makes the troubles we deal with feel somewhat less overwhelming, I guess. I would walk briskly for a mile or more in one direction, turn on my heels and walk back. As I walked past my bike I would walk another mile or so in the other direction. And then repeat. I imagined what life would be like with my dad gone. I imagined what the significance of being the oldest male in my family would be like. I imagined what Jared might go through sometime in the future when our roles were reversed. When, perhaps, it was my worn out old body lying in that bed, and my son who walked endlessly, trying to put everything into perspective.

Over the next couple of days when I visited my father at the hospital, he was never conscious enough to notice that I was there. My feelings were mixed when the doctor told me that Dad was going to pull through, that his physical condition was going to be as good as ever. As for his mind, we would just have to wait and see.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

~

Feeling embarrassed or ashamed to be seen crying, no matter how minimally, is a common phenomena among males. In spite of the fact that , intellectually, I am fully aware of the absurdity of it, I was uncomfortable with shedding  a single tear even when I was alone. Looking back, I see that that changed over the year and a half that I watched my father waste away with Alzheimer’s.

I seem to have an endless flood of tears inside me, accumulated in the days of watching Dad’s mind and personality dissolve. They leak out, a few at a time, prompted by any number of small sadnesses - passages in books, scenes in TV and movies, idle thoughts and the sufferings of others. It must be a self protection of the heart or something, to bleed it out so slowly… over so many years.

If I had let them all flow, back then, watching him fade, I'm certain I would never have stopped. It would've crippled me, and so I paced... with my body when I could, in my head, when I couldn't in reality. We're so much the same in that way, my dad and me.

- J P Bilyeu

November 20, 1998

Visiting dad at the home these past few weeks has been a bittersweet experience. Pop, for his part, has achieved a certain measure of peace. For that I am very, very grateful. For me, it is harder and harder to get over here. Daily, I ride in the direction of the home and daily I ride right by and continue on. Sometimes I will find myself back a little while later on the road to the home only to continue right by again, crushed by guilt, but even more overwhelmed by heart ache, staring blankly at the entrance to the driveway realizing I wasn’t turning in... Again.

The last time I had visited dad at the hospital before his release, I had found him sitting up in bed. Hale and hearty, seemingly as lucid as ever before in his life. My friend Janine, who ran the ranch where I lived, was with me. She was the only person who ever came with me to see my dad, not because I had asked her (I would never impose on my friends that way. Really, I didn’t want people to remember him the way he was at the end, especially his grandson), but because she had offered and she enjoyed the opportunity to ride on a bike through the wine country. I was happy for the moral support.

I was struck by his bright, friendly smile, as I walked in and knew instinctively he didn’t recognize me.

“How’re ya feelin’ today, Gerry?” I didn’t want to confuse or unsettle him by calling him Pop until I knew for sure.

“I feel great!” The smile was dazzling… innocent, like the smile of a young child. We made small talk for a while and included Janine and a nurse who’d come in to remove his IV.

I don’t remember how the conversation turned to military service, but the nurse asked, “you were in the Army, Gerry?”

Dad had been in the ROTC at college and had been a major in the last horse-drawn artillery division in the U.S. Army. His service time fell between the two world wars, so he never saw action. His military days were spent riding horses and firing cannon at antique military equipment in the Texas countryside. He told me once, when I was a kid, “when they took away our horses, it just wasn’t any fun anymore… So I resigned.” All told, he served in the Army for nearly a decade.

“Nope, never been in the Army,” Pop answered.

OK, I thought to myself, his memory is shot. Eventually, I felt I needed to ask if he knew who I was. “Do you recognize me, Gerry?”

He squinted a bit and tipped his head to the side. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you have any kids, Gerry?” I asked soberly.

“Two, boy and a girl.”

“How old?” He looked mildly amazed at the question. When he didn’t answer right away I said, “not that important. Do I look anything like your son, Gerry?”

He studied me a while, then concluded, “maybe, a little bit.”

I remembered arriving for a visit, standing at the door to the home, a few weeks before, talking with one of Dad’s caregivers, hearing Dad’s voice in the other room saying, “I know that voice!”

“Do I sound like him?”

“No,” Pop said, “you look a little like him, but you don’t sound anything like him at all.”

I looked over at Janine, on the other side of the room. Tears were coursing silently down her cheeks. It was like she supplied the tears I couldn’t let fly just then. I didn’t want to alarm Pop, and I’m not sure there was any left in me at that point, anyway.

“Well, it was good talking with you, Gerry,” the words caught in my throat a bit. “We’re going to let you get some rest now. I’ll see you again when you get home.”

“Okay,” He beamed, as untroubled as a babe at his mother’s breast, ”See ya!”

After a while, with his care givers referring to me as ‘your son’ whenever I came to visit, Dad came to accept that this stranger was, apparently, his son. But, by this point he was only responding to his name. Clearly not remembering much of anything about his life. Because his balance was completely compromised by now and his attention span was roughly equivalent to that of a toddler, he had to be restrained by a wide, soft ‘safety belt’ to his wheelchair. So he wouldn’t forget and get up, falling and breaking more bones.

The caregivers insisted on referring to me as his ‘son’ (I never bothered to restrain them) and quizzing him when I would walk in, “you know who this is, don’t you, Gerry?”

“My son!” He would repeat, grinning like a small child proud to have remembered an answer to a teacher’s question in class. It was so obvious to me, looking at that innocent expression in his eyes, that he didn’t really understand what the term meant, let alone recognize me. I continued to call him Gerry until the day he passed. He simply didn’t respond to the term ‘Dad’ anymore.

At this point Pop simply followed people around, drawn to activity, just like a puppy. To keep him from getting underfoot while they cleaned house or cooked or attended to other residents’ needs, the caretakers would lock the wheels of Dad’s chair while parking him in front of the TV. At this point Dad didn’t seem to even recognize the images on TV and when he sat there he would turn his head and look at the faces of the people in the room rather than at the TV. Pop’s balance may have been shot, and his memories and even his personality may have been lost, but he was still strong as an ox. He would simply lean as far forward in his wheelchair as he could and haul it along, sliding locked wheels along carpet and tile alike, looking like a determined old hermit crab dragging a heavy old shell around the sea floor. In the end, they just had to accept that Gerry was going to go where he wanted to go and they’d just have to adapt to it.

The blended look of anxious puppy and curious toddler in the form of a hermit crab dragging an enormous weight around broke what little was left whole in my heart. I would say my goodbyes at the end of a visit and head for the door only to look back into those pleading puppy dog eyes and innocent, hopeful smile as Dad dragged along his chair trying to follow me home. I’d have to lead him back, find someone to supervise him and try to leave again. With the same result.

God help me, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I know how pitifully pathetic I sound when I say that. Daily visits became every other day visits. Every other day visits became every few days visits. In the end, it was all I could do to visit him once a week, usually on Sunday. He needed me. I needed to be there for him. It took so much energy to screw myself up and not just weep uncontrollably every minute I was with him. If God had been standing in front of me back then I would’ve punched Him in the Face. More than a few times, pacing on the side of some country road at night, I would yell obscenities at the sky… at myself… at everything and nothing in particular. Then the day Dad had spent ‘spoiling for a fight’ in the backyard of his first care home would come startlingly clear in my mind and I would stagger to a halt, laughing and crying simultaneously.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

~

“You don't drown by falling in the water,

you drown by staying there.”

- Edwin Lewis Cole

November 26, 1998

Through all this emotionally draining experience with my dad, I had been stressing over my personal financial problems. My Junior College classes this past spring had been canceled, due to low enrollment, and now, after the summer months that had always been tight ( I don’t teach in the summer ), my reserves were gone. I had started back teaching, but my first two paychecks were barely enough for rent, let alone past due expenses.

Today I began a job driving a paratransit van. The service is an offshoot of the county transit service, catering to disabled folk in the area. I had fallen back into driving jobs in the past because, regardless of how low the pay was, I was on my own most of the day, untroubled by the scrutiny of a superior. Not to mention being, for the most part, outside, not entombed in some concrete and steel box all day long.

After a brief training period, riding shotgun with a more experienced driver, I began driving a regular route. In time I came to appreciate the symmetry of this new aspect of my life. As I became more and more emotionally exhausted from bearing witness to my dad’s decline, I found it harder and harder to maintain my daily visits. My guilt at my being such a wimp and such a poor excuse for a son was somewhat mitigated by my service to other people in need whose situations did not crush me the way that Dad’s did. I realized that I could relieve some of the guilt and emotional burden of others by helping to care for their loved ones, while others cared for mine.

I realized I would be no help to my dad at all if I had a total emotional breakdown, could no longer be in my dad’s company without my grief plain on my face for him to see or simply being overwhelmed by tears at the sight of him. I realized I wasn’t going to make it through for him if I didn’t cut myself some slack. Part of me cursed my weakness, but a more rational part kept reminding myself: we can only do the best we can do. And, somehow, I managed to strike a tenuous balance between self-loathing and reason. Between rage and compassion.

For the most part, I only remember a few of my clients during that time. People who, through their courage and humor, put me to shame. Chief among them was a 20-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis. She was young and pretty, athletic at one time. Now confined to a wheelchair and needing assistance to get around. No longer able to drive her beloved ’69 Camaro, once her reason to live, she astounded me with her upbeat view of life. She had rebuilt the car with her dad before she was old enough to drive, already needing a cane to get around. By the time she got her license, they had to set up the car with all hand controls because she had so little strength left in her legs. Now, only four years later, her arms were too unreliable to drive safely. She would wipe away a stray tear whenever she spoke of driving, her greatest passion, but otherwise seemed to treasure every bit of life left to her. I remember thinking at the time, if I were her, I’d probably just fuckin’ shoot myself!

Yet another young woman, perhaps 30, stands out in my memory even though I met her only once. She was blind, not from birth, but as the result of a head injury suffered when she was run down by a car. She had been in the produce section of a grocery store at the time. A driver had lost control of his car, she didn’t know why, and it crashed through the wall of the store pinning her under the wheels and debris.

“I’m glad it happened like that,” she said to me as we drove along, ”…an act of fate. I don’t think I could’ve lived with myself if I had done this to myself. If I had crashed my own car or something.” She had a smile so sweet and open it broke my heart to look at her.

The other was Ted. Ted was 15 or 20 years older than me. A dialysis patient, who needed to sit half a day, three times a week, while a machine sucked out and filtered his blood before returning it. A job his body no longer could do on its own. Ted had already lost both legs to diabetes, and was confined to a self powered wheelchair for mobility. Although he frequently looked like death-warmed-over as I helped him up into the van to drive him home, he always had a cheerful disposition, finally on his way home to a wife he adored. He was usually the last stop for me and we chatted amiably for long periods of time, several times a week. He had been an engineer, as had my dad, and I had begun college in an engineering program myself. He had recently taken up jewelry making in his workshop at home and I had just taken a class in jewelry making the year before to learn metalwork for my sculpture and other projects. We had a lot in common and we formed an instant bond.

The determination and good nature these people demonstrated in spite of the challenges they faced haunts me to this day. I frequently hold myself up to their standard as I reflect on my life and I always come up lacking.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

~

“Man is harder than iron,

stronger than stone

and more fragile than a rose.”

- Proverb

April 1, 1999

April fools day. It started out like any other day. I drove to the yard, got my route sheet, checked out my van for the day and went about my business.

My first pickup was Jonathan, a 20-something young man with the mental and emotional development of a 10-year-old.

“G’morning Mr. Driver!” Jonathan hollered to me, a bit louder than necessary, as he climbed aboard and waved farewell to his mom, who was seeing him off today.

“Morning, John.” I said cheerfully back. He always had such a bright grin and a sparkle in his eyes I couldn’t help but feel my dark mood lighten some. “How goes it today?”

“My mom made me a extra special lunch today. She’s so proud of me ‘cause I got me a real job!” He went on to explain how the folks at the agency who looked after him during the day and trained him for self sufficiency had gotten him hired on to stuff envelopes for a local nonprofit group at minimum wage.

“I earn my own money now, just like a grown up!” He was so excited I had to pull over several times to sit him back down and see that he fastened his seatbelt.

He was already up and grinning like the Cheshire cat and fidgeting beside my seat as I pulled up at his stop. He stumbled a little going down the steps, distracted by simultaneously waving hello to his new coworkers at the door and waving goodbye to me.

“Bye, Mr. Driver! Thanks.”

“Knock ‘em dead, John!” I called after him, cringing a bit hoping he didn’t think I’d meant it literally. But his attention was already on his new life as a self-sufficient grown up.

The day went on pretty much as it always did. My next to last pickup of the day was at the dialysis clinic, Ted was my only client there today. Nine times out of 10 Ted was pale and wasted looking after his hours hooked up to the dialysis contraption, but today he looked great, he was jovial and his eyes were clear and sharp. We talked companionably as I crossed town to the Baptist Church where the senior day care was clearing out. Robert was waiting with one of the volunteers and even seemed to have a flash of recognition when I stepped up taking him by the elbow and helping him up into the van and getting him secured in the seat behind Ted’s wheelchair. They exchanged pleasantries as we pulled out and Ted and I took up our conversation where we’d left off.

The sun had pushed through a determinedly gray overcast and I couldn’t help feeling an echo of that clearing in my own thoughts. Both Robert and Ted lived in their own homes in a senior’s housing development not more than a few blocks apart. We always stopped at Robert’s house first and it almost seemed like Robert recognized it as his stop this time. Unlike my father, Robert’s dementia had no obvious effect on his mobility or his speech, but he clearly had no idea who anyone was anymore. He had, for the most part, accepted that all these friendly strangers were there to help him and he would quietly follow the lead of first one kindly stranger and then the next, from one moment to the next, day in and day out. I walked him slowly to the front door and a woman he didn’t recognize, his distinguished looking, long-suffering wife of nearly 50 years, took his arm and led him into his home and he looked around as if he was seeing everything for the first time. She smiled sadly over at me and I at her as she closed the door, speaking calming words to the husband who no longer knew who she was. He was barely 73, far too young to have all his memories stolen from him.

On the short drive to Ted’s house we exchanged comments on how much better Robert had seemed today. As I began to turn onto Ted’s street, he was just finishing a sentence.

“It’s a shame Robert’s wife has to deal with all that alone, but he sure looked healthy and happier today than usual.”

As he finished, I heard a loud bang as something hard hit the handrail between my seat and the wheelchair area. At first I figured Ted had leaned forward, as many of my wheelchair-bound clients did when we were close to their stop, to begin unbuckling the safety straps that secured his chair, to help save me a bit of effort when we stopped and simply lost his balance, falling forward as far as his seatbelt allowed. I reached back behind me and caught hold of Ted’s shoulder making sure he didn’t come completely out of his chair. As we were only a few houses from his, I figured I’d hold him up until then and then go back to assist him.

“Hang in there, Ted, were almost at your house!” I said.

What I expected was a casual “don’t worry ‘bout me, I’ll just hang out here for a minute” or some sort of lighthearted remark like that. When all I heard was silence, I whipped the wheel to the curb, threw it into park and jumped up from my seat.

As I heaved Ted back up into his wheelchair, I saw his face was already white, his lips blue and his eyes open and hazed over as if they were glazed by frost. Even though I had taken a CPR class twice in my life, I drew a complete blank on what to do next. Here I was, alone with a dying man and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember a damn thing from those classes. I pulled a bandanna out of my back pocket and wiped Ted’s mouth (he had hung upside down for a minute or more) and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Nothing! I repeated the procedure, no color returned. No light of life returned to his eyes. I probed for a pulse. Found none.

I reached for the CB radio’s microphone, stretching as far as I could, but I couldn’t reach it while holding Ted up in his chair. I let go of Ted, dived for the mic and lunged back to catch Ted as he fell forward and heaved him back upright.

“ Route 107 to Base, I’m right in front of Ted’s house” (everyone there knew who I meant) “he’s unconscious and I’m getting no pulse, no respiration. I’ve tried mouth-to-mouth. He doesn’t respond. I don’t know what else to try!” I didn’t realize it then, but every other driver out on their route, the ten or more people back at the office and the dispatcher at the yard all heard me. Every one of them knew Ted. Every one of them froze as I said it. I didn’t know it then, but nothing like this had ever happened to any other driver in their 15 year history. Lucky me. I dropped the mic and was about to continue to resuscitate him when I saw a neighbor at the van’s door.

“Ted’s having a bit of trouble, but help is on the way,” I yelled to her but she kept on pounding on the doors frantically and didn’t seem to understand me. Figuring she couldn’t hear me through the doors, I leaned forward and cracked them open to repeat myself.The woman exploded through the opening, pushed past me and threw herself across Ted’s body sobbing his name.

In all the times I’d brought Ted home, I’d never actually seen his wife, so I didn’t recognize her at the door. What made her come outside just then to see us down the block, when she had never before even been at the door when I brought Ted home, I don’t know and wasn’t about to ask. By this time, I could hear a siren a few blocks away ( there was a fire station adjacent to the senior development, not more than a mile away.)

“Ted!” I hollered over his wife’s shoulder, “if you can hear me, hang on! The paramedics are almost here!”

I’m no expert, to make any presumptions of life or death, but I knew it was too late. I knew he was gone the second I sat him up and saw his eyes. But, I would be damned if I was going to accept that until someone who knew better told me so.

The next two hours were pretty bizarre. I was in a sort of mental and emotional fog. I sat on the curb and watched through the windows as the paramedics did all they could for Ted. Ted’s wife hopped up and down inches from the windows trying to see, hoping against hope for a miracle that wasn’t going to come. She reminded me so much of a sad little puppy jumping up and down at the back door begging to come in, I had to shake my head to clear the image from my mind. She ranged the length of the van, hopping and whimpering at first one window and then the next until I took pity on her (and myself) and went to stand next to her with my arm around her shoulders, as much to settle her frantic movements as to lend her the comfort she needed. Some of the neighbors eventually took over consoling Ted’s wife.

While I waited for the coroner’s van to come claim Ted’s body, the folks whose home I had skidded to a stop in front of invited me in to use the phone and offered me something to eat and drink. I wasn’t very hungry… my body was, but I wasn’t. I accepted a bottle of juice and made a call to the office.

“God, Jess, we were all just saying: ‘did anyone even get back to you on the radio to say that we’d called 9-1-1?’,” my boss was saying, but I barely heard him. I just wanted to let them know Ted hadn’t made it and that I couldn’t get the van back to the yard until Ted had been taken away. I thanked the folks in the kitchen and politely declined their offer that I sit inside out of the chill to wait. Even if they’d been people I knew well, I just needed to be outside in the fresh air, under an open sky.

The paramedics were nice enough to find me and reassure me that, even if they had been right there when it happened, they probably couldn’t have saved him. That I had done all anyone in my place could have done. It was just his time. It was a small kindness and I thanked them for it, though it didn’t really help all that much. To have been the only person there when a man is dying right in front of you and fail to save him… I’ll just have to live with that memory. Its more than Ted will do.

After the coroner and paramedics left, I walked along side Ted’s chair, driving it down the sidewalk and parked it in his garage. I knocked at the front door to let Ted’s widow know the chair was safely put away. I stammered out my condolences, gave her a brief hug and then headed off.

“You’re the guy that was with Ted?” Called the night dispatch guy as I dropped off the key at the yard.

“Yep.”

“Man, that really sucks!” said another worker in the room.

“Yeah it does.” I don’t think I even made eye contact with either one, I was too deep in my own thoughts to really notice.

I hadn’t really intended to quit that job, in spite of all that had happened, when I drove home that night. But, come Monday, I called the office and gave notice.

“You don’t really have to come in at all, if you don’t want to,” they said “we didn’t actually expect you would.”

So I never did.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

~

“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust

we all dance to a mysterious tune,

intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

- Albert Einstein

April 2,1999

I woke today in a profound funk. As it was Saturday and I was too restless to even sit down to eat breakfast, I jumped on my bike and rode toward the coast. I had no plans, no concrete thoughts at all really, I just had to clear my head and breathe fresh air.

I found myself stopping at my favorite stretch of rugged coastline. A beach with such raw, rocky cliffs and outcroppings in the surf that the roar of the waves crashing always scours my mind clear of thoughts, my heart clear of cares. That was a very tall order today. The climb down is dangerous and tiring, perfect for focusing my mind on the moment and nothing but. Dropping my backpack, shedding my jacket and boots, I paced the quarter-mile stretch of rock beach to the end and back several times, relishing the howl of the raging surf, the sting of wind-driven salt spray, the resonance of the impact of sea on stone through the soles of my bare feet as I paced. Nothing brings me back to myself like the ferocious beauty of nature, the timeless pulse of creation reminding me of the fleeting nature of human existence and the paltry insignificance of us all. Of our struggles, our achievements and our failures.

I had grabbed my bandana on the way out today, the one I had used to wipe down Ted’s face and mouth before my failed attempt at resuscitation. I couldn’t see myself simply washing it and putting it back in my dresser. It seemed, somehow, irreverent to cast it into the trash now that some small trace of Ted’s essence was trapped within its weave. I hadn’t really given it any thought, at the time, but I realized now, hearing the insistent voice of the sea at my back, that I should offer it up to the ocean as a quiet memorial to Ted.

I realized, looking out at the slowly calming waters, that the surf had receded some since I got there. That one huge boulder just offshore was nearly accessible from the beach as the tide drew out. The tips of reef and rock peeked up from the swirling water as waves, just then crashing around and over the jutting stone, washed back out to sea. Shortly, I would be able to make my way carefully out, leaping from crest to crest before the next surge rushed around, without getting overly wet. If I was fast. If I was very careful. If I didn’t slip and break my ass or get washed out to sea. This particular rock loomed some 50 feet or so above the cove at its peak. Like most of the rock formations there, it was shaped like a gigantic fang or claw tearing up the surface of the chaotic, swirling sea, leaning outward as if it were straining to stay upright in the face of constant winds.

While I watched and waited for the lowest tide, I continued to pace, realizing I was searching the beach for something. The bones of a tumbled-down cliff face bore traces of the rusted remains of the work of man. Reddish-brown deposits of rusted iron and steel bled forth from the earth and stone like the clotted remains of a bloody corpse. A section of railroad track, more iron oxide than iron. Portions of a vehicle, barely recognizable as such. I stubbed my foot on something and when I kicked it again in pain and frustration, it lifted upright in the sand. I realized later it was all that remained of an old motor’s cylinder. Perhaps a VW. The cast-iron fins all but dissolved into rusty clumps. The remains of the cylinder head bolts jutting up from the mass of rust like flagpoles atop a castle tower.

I was as perplexed as anyone who might have been watching me as to why I knelt beside the object, reached into my pocket and proceeded to tie the bandanna to the uppermost point of the tallest bolt remnant. Perhaps I was going to use it as a weight to toss it out into the waves. As I sat back on my haunches, the wind picked up and caught the scrap of cloth, billowing it out to become a pennant. As it snapped and flew in the breeze I came to realize what needed to be done.

I snatched the old decrepit artifact out of the sand, banner still streaming, and strode purposefully toward the sea. I didn’t wait to judge the ebb and flow of the waves. I just walked calmly toward the rock, noticing only peripherally, how the last surge washed away just as I reached the edge of the water, exposing the peaks of stone and reef leading to the jutting boulder. I leaped and skipped from one to the next barely noticing the rush of seawater and the darting of fish and crabs between the rocks. I could hear the next wave pound into the far side of the rock just before I leapt across to the nearly vertical rock face, felt handholds in the rough surface and hauled myself up as the two halves of the wave converged and collided behind me. One pant leg was wet below the knee. The other mostly dry.

I found a small ledge to set the ‘sculpture’ down while I searched out hand and footholds to use to climb up to the peak. I had begun to think of it as sculpture by now, found-art sculpture, a memorial to the engineering spirit of man and to one man, one engineer, in particular.

I crawled to the top and found a niche in the pinnacle of rock where its own considerable weight would wedge it in place, proof against the awesome forces of nature, of sea and storm alike.

I stayed up there for as long as I dared. Knowing I would be, at the very least, soaked through by the rising tide, possibly washed out to sea or dashed against unforgiving rock if I waited too long. I said my farewells to Ted, paused a moment in prayer for my dad and started down.

I had to wait a while for a storm surge of sea water to wane enough that I could see where the rocks were, hoping I didn’t break a leg jumping down onto a wet, mossy surface from this height. I berated myself for a moment for my impetuous action, climbing up there. It seemed so noble and right when I was caught up in the impulse. Oh well, I had done stupider things than this before, for less noble reasons, and managed to survive.

The surf pulled much further out than the last several times and I pushed off, landed remarkably steadily only to slip twice on the way in. In the end I had nothing more than a few scrapes and a soggy backside as I collected my backpack and hiked back up the trail to my bike.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

~

Pop is gone. And with him the last of who I used to be.

It’s sinking in, now and for a while to come, this sinking feeling. But it will be a long time before it sinks in entirely. I’m already having trouble holding my memories of Dad this last year. His frailty and confusion, his final attempt to assert his power over life, his fear and anger at what it was doing to him, and ultimately, his acceptance and inability, ultimately, to even comprehend the situation.

It took me months to begin it, weeks to finish it and several more days to get it to him, but I finally gave Dad the Buffalo stone I carved for him. A fetish. I hate that term because of the current usage of it. A symbol, is what it is. A symbol of something you believe in. Something that exists, maybe, whether you believe in it or not. I shaped it from a shard of stone left over from a sculpture I'd been working on recently. I carved from it the likeness of the Buffalo; strong, powerful and far ranging. A symbol of strength and courage. Dad came from Oklahoma and had a great appreciation for the native people of the plains.

I shaped it slowly, lovingly, over a number of days. I drilled a hole through it and put a leather thong through it so that it might hang from his neck. For weeks I kept this fetish, this thing, hanging it around my own neck, worrying it in my fingers to infuse it with my own skin oils, bringing out its luster and subtlety. This is what I give to my father to help him travel this last mile. To help him with the courage and power to let go and pass over.

I put it around his neck last week, explained to his hazy mind the significance of the stone and then to his caretaker, asking that he put it on Dad each day so long as Dad didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

I kissed Pop on the head, like always, and left.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

Goodbye, Pop.

Excerpt from ‘Morning Page’ entry 4/20/99

April 19, 1999

“Hello?” I sort of mumbled the word because I was nowhere near wide awake yet.

“It’s Forrest.” The voice surprised me. It was my landlord, at the time, and Dad’s hospice physician. “ Sorry to wake you. The home just called, your dad passed away this morning.”

“ Oh my God.” I think it came out more as a sigh or whisper than a comment. The flush of emotion that raced through me then kind of freaked me out. Sadness, relief, guilt about feeling relief. An empty realization that I was now the oldest man in my family. The elder generation. I couldn’t really process any of it at this point and I was already half dressed and climbing into my car (I didn’t trust myself on the bike this time), driving to the home to sit with Dad until the coroner came to get him.

I had felt guilty all day yesterday. It was the first Sunday I hadn’t gotten over to see Pop since I had let myself slip to a mere one visit per week. For months I had rigidly enforced the Sunday afternoon ritual, reminding myself that Dad didn’t really know what was going on around him anymore, let alone remember who I was or what day of the week it was. It was, literally, the least I could do for him. And yet, yesterday, I rode out  to see him, but just couldn’t bring myself to stop. Ungrateful brat! Useless fucking wimp! Miserable excuse for a son. I had told myself I would get over to see him tomorrow. One day, one way or another wouldn’t matter. Well, here it was, tomorrow and here I was, going over to see him, alright.

Even through the emotional haze I was lost in as I walked through the home, I couldn’t help but notice that every face I saw was as wet as my own. I remember feeling a great well of appreciation for these people, so deeply affected by the loss of a man they had known for so short a time. I felt a small but profound sense of vindication that I had, at least, finally found the best place for him to live out the end of his days. Something I had doubted so many times since Dad came to California.

As I started to enter Dad’s bedroom, Rodney, the relatively new male caregiver at the home, caught me by the arm and apologetically whispered to me, “the coroner’s office told us to prepare him by removing his clothing and laying him on the floor in preparation for their arrival. I covered him with a sheet. I’m really sorry. I didn’t want you to be shocked.” I just patted him on his solid, muscular shoulder as I walked past and tried to prepare myself  for what I would see next.

Seeing him laying there like so much discarded trash twisted my stomach and I had a little trouble breathing for a minute or two. I walked over to his side, crumbled, more than leaned, against the wall and slid slowly down ’til I was sitting on the floor beside him.

So there I sat… and ached.  I probably talked to him some, probably called him Pop for the first time since the hospital, but I couldn’t tell you so for sure. I felt split, horrified at the thought of seeing his face, and absolutely needing to see, wondering if there would be some evidence of the frame of mind he was in when he passed.  Would it be sadness, anger… confusion or pain? I tried to look and stopped, I tried again and stopped. I sat with my hand on the sheet covering his face… God knows how long. When I finally felt prepared, I lifted the sheet and looked.  The expression frozen on his face made it look as if he had just then fallen asleep having just finished hearing or telling some particularly quirky joke. A sad, funny grin caught forever in his handsome, weathered features.  I felt an overwhelming sense of calm and closure. I probably smiled. I couldn’t say for sure.

I sat there with Dad for the better part of an hour, I would guess. My mind dashed here and there from one memory to another, most blurring into a gray haze. I couldn’t help but wonder what purpose Dad might’ve had for living those last several months after his bout of pneumonia. I feel sometimes as if Dad’s spirit, after coming so close to death, stayed on earth simply to luxuriate in the glow of unconditional compassion and respect ( primarily from his caregivers) in balance of all the years of quiet animosity that was my parents’ life together. All those years, and as far as I know, perhaps they had never even talked out the issue that prompted all those years of resentment. Perhaps they did once, or even many, many times, but in that way couples sink into that, once set to odds, every conversation was pre-doomed to conflict. In that way of couples, all the hurts and fears, betrayals, real and imagined, old arguments and misunderstandings crowd to the fore – filling the heart and mind, blinding both to higher truth, until true conversation is become impossible. I suppose that is how I came to the realization, when thinking about my own search for companionship in life, that I’d always thought to myself ‘I’d rather be alone by myself than be alone with someone.’ As many long blocks of time I’ve had between romantic relationships, with all the requisite loneliness involved, I still hold that as a fundamental truth in my life and, for the most part, I do not regret it.

It was about this time that I heard the commotion created by the team that was coming to get him and bring him to the crematorium. I decide to give myself a break and not watch while they scooped him up off the floor and zipped him into a bag. I just felt I needed to spare myself that particular memory. Sometimes you just have to learn to cut yourself a little slack, let yourself off the hook. Or it might just fucking crush you!

I grabbed what few possessions Dad had in his room. I hung his Buffalo stone around my neck and let it fall inside my shirt, against my skin once again, the oils of my father's skin merged forever with the oils of my own in the flesh of this stone. I had the car today and had no reason to ever come back here, ever again. I carried the small box of clothes and toiletries and the portable TV Dad never watched out to the car through the back door where Dad’s body had been taken away just a few minutes before. I walked around to the front door and walked in for the last time. I hugged Janice and Evvie, tears still streaming down their sweet, brown faces, thanking them for their kindness. I waved goodbye to a few of the red-eyed residents I saw on the way out. I shook Rodney’s hand as he wiped at his eyes, mumbled my thanks and closed the door to my father’s life behind me.

I don’t remember the ride back home at all. As I pulled up and climbed out of the car, several sad faced people came over from the office ( everyone on the ranch had heard by now) to offer an embrace and a kind word. It sort of surprised me to be the center of so much warmth and compassion. I have a tendency to think of myself as a loner and I’d felt extremely alone over the last several months, watching my dad waste away. Not that I don’t have close friends and acquaintances, but I’ve always tried to keep my troubles to myself and, with my dad’s troubles, to shoulder it all myself in an effort to protect Dad’s privacy and his dignity. And to spare my friends and family unnecessary emotional burdens, something I probably inherited from my mom, now that I think on it. My father had left his family and home in Oklahoma to make a new life halfway across the country when he was a young man and I had done much the same. I guess I had just gotten used to the idea of making my own way alone.

I showered, put on fresh clothes and ate a quick breakfast. Jumping on my bike, I went first to the crematorium to see to Dad’s final arrangements, then straight out to the coast. It was well past dark by the time I got home. An orphan, now. The eldest male in my family. Inside, I felt like a frail, broken-down 90-year-old man still waiting for the hand of Death. And I would feel that way for a very long time.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

~

I was so tired yesterday, so exhausted. I made my attempts to get business done, but ultimately, I was so fried that I just went home and lay down on the couch and slept away the rest of the day.

When I got up, I was tired, disoriented and angry! It was a dream that woke me, a troubling dream. The kind I always seem to have when I'm hiding from life by sleeping, and telling me I slept longer than I needed to.

It was a death and dying dream, the first I've had since before the incident with Ted dying in the paratransit van with me weeks back. I was at a distance watching people on a Ferris wheel. A child fell and when I got to him I saw a bit of what I had seen in Ted's eyes as he had died, in the boy’s eyes. No one was helping the boy and he was going fast. I lifted him up and tried to carry him to help, but there were downed antenna wires or some such shit everywhere. I screamed out in anger and determination for someone to move them out of my way... But no one did. I hollered in vain 'til my voice and heart began to break and tried to push through.

This is when I woke myself up.

Then I sat in a limbo of melancholy and disorientation for some long moments. I felt trapped, suffocated and desperately alone. I showered and went out to walk in the failing light of dusk. Only the ranch critters and the magnificence of the land and sky were there to comfort me. So I visited with them all for a time and then slowly returned to the cabin.

It seems life always conspires to give me balance, of sorts, to show me the objective reality of whatever I am overwhelmed by. In this case it was the shooting in Colorado. More kids killing kids. I was driven deeper into darkness by the details, the interviews I watched on TV.

Here I am, nearly at the end of a very unproductive week, and still I'm tired. Still I'm feeling dazed and off balance... Still.

Excerpt from ‘Morning Page’ entry 4/22/99

April 25, 1999

I’ve been thinking a lot about my pop these last few days. Big surprise.

I’ve been thinking how odd it was, as close a connection as Dad and I had, that we never really spoke about ‘deep’ issues or personal feelings, that I can recall. I’m not sure if it’s just a byproduct of societal programming for men as they grow from toddler to boy to man, or a peculiarity of the times or of the rural East Coast where I grew up.

I mentioned once to my best friend David, who I grew up down the street from as kids, that even though both of us had developed an unself-conscious openness with male friends out here in California, in over 50 years of friendship he and I have never once hugged ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ yet we’ve seen each other do just that with dozens of more recent friends and even the occasional close acquaintance. Our original connection was forged back there and then, and, for whatever reason, it seems to be a subtle, but profound barrier in our natural response to each other. Weird, to think on it. He thought so too.

Well, the hugging part wasn’t so much the thing with Dad, after all, we hugged all the time when I was small. With Pop, it was just this invisible barrier that seemed to leech away my resolve, whenever I would attempt to have a ‘deep’ discussion with him. Every time I would travel back East to visit, I’d have the brave intent to sit down, or walk around, with Pop and ask him about the rift between him and Mom I had felt so intensely all my life, but never knew the cause. Ask about his life and dreams and romantic exploits as a young man. To talk about those same things in my own life. That was always my conscious intent on the way out and, always, I would fly home amazed and disgusted that I hadn’t managed to do it.

When dad was just past 80, I had the overpowering impulse that if I didn't make this connection soon, I’d lose the chance for all time.

I didn’t have much money then, I never really have, but I scraped up enough to fly Pop out to visit. This time to finally man-up and get it done. I thought, maybe, it had been the ghosts of the past, so to speak, back where I grew up that had made it so hard. Falling back into old patterns in old surroundings.

So. Here on my own adopted soil, in my new life and surroundings I would finally see it through. That was my plan, and I think I would have done it, all things being equal. But that’s not how it fell out. The first couple days it was just the usual ‘how’s the weather,’ ‘Niners are looking good this year’ kind of small talk and a lot of sightseeing, me and Pop and Jared driving around together. On our way back into the house the second evening, Pop stopped short at the corner of the car, leaned heavily against it fumbling with his hand to get a grip, like he couldn’t quite see straight, and moaned quietly. Jared, ten at the time, had already run inside the house and I took hold of Dad’s other arm, shaken to see Dad suddenly look so frail. Even though I had been half a foot taller than Dad since I was thirteen, he had never seemed small to me ’til then. His focus cleared fairly quickly and he regained his balance, but I didn’t let go of his arm quite yet. As we went together into the house, I saw his trousers were soaked.

That night he succumbed to flu-like symptoms and he moaned and talked in a restless sleep all night long. Having a small cottage, I slept on the floor and let Dad have my bed while he visited. I woke every time Dad got up and staggered to the bathroom, ready to assist him if he fell. Each time he returned to the bed, he virtually fell, as much as ran, toward the bed and just barely made it only because the distance was so short.

He was barely recovered by the time he was supposed to leave and we had had no chance to talk because he’d been asleep or near delirious the rest of his visit. I had never, in my life, seen Pop look so weak and helpless. It scared me so much, my mission to talk with him fell completely out of my head until days after he was gone.

I drove him to SFO and helped steady him as we walked through the terminal. I was as nervous letting him go on by himself, when we reached the gate and non-passengers had to say their goodbyes, as I would have been letting a small child go off alone for the first time. I was afraid he’d fall. Worried he would lose bladder control and embarrass himself. Scared shitless that this was the beginning of the end for my father.

Looking back now, I see that it was. No one realized it then and, unless Dad suspected and kept it to himself, we didn’t realize it for what it was until Mom lay dying and Dad nursed his shattered shoulder in a hospital room where a priest walked on the ceiling, a decade later.

I never did have those talks with Dad. I had hoped in vain to finally have the chance when he came out to California, but it just wasn’t possible after the symptoms had fully taken hold. So I have had to content my mind and salve my heart with the connections we made, Pop and me, pacing that final mile together. It’s not good enough… not nearly good enough, but it will suffice. I did, in the end, have some precious, if heartbreaking, insights into the young man, boy and infant Pop had once been and, in part and for a brief eternity of time, had become again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

~

The sea has been wild and magnificent, desperately alive,

both times I spread the ashes of a parent on the waters of the Northern California coast.

- J P Bilyeu

April 31, 1999

As I rode down the coast, I could see two or three guys standing out on the point, a half mile off, where the service was supposed to be held at noon. Fishermen, I could see now, as I got closer. No one would be out here for the service for a couple of hours, my friend Karen would get here first with the food and flowers and all in her car. I was on the bike. Just me and Dad’s ashes. It was nearly 10 AM and low tide would be at 10:17. I decided to cast Dad’s ashes into the surf from the same jut of rock where Ted’s ‘tower’ sat. I brought a pair of watersocs to wear today for grip on the slippery rocks.  It would really suck to break my leg or drown today, commending Pop to the sea.

One of the fishermen glanced over at me as I pulled in and got off to walk over to him. I told him we were gonna have a memorial there later, but if they were going to be fishing for a while, maybe he could help me move the old picnic table back from the ledge where they were casting their lines, over to a slight depression in the grass where the force of the wind wouldn’t be so bad. They were Mexicans, day laborers maybe, and spoke broken English, but seemed to understand me all right. Although the one who helped me move the table looked at me like I was trying to pull some kind of scam on him or something.

I gathered up my pack and hiked down the cliff and walked over toward the rock. The sea was so far out that I almost didn’t need to jump from ridge to ridge on the exposed reef and rocks except for the pockets of trapped seawater and tangles of slimy seaweed at their bases. I had to climb up on the last ridge just to get high enough to jump over to the Boulder I was climbing and land up above the undercut in the rock face that was now well over my head if I stood in the trough between. There were no handholds at all on the undercut area of the rock. I jumped across, waggled a bit like a wet dog to center the weight of my backpack and scurried up to the top. I plopped myself down at the peak next to the sculpture and it’s frantically flapping bandanna and just took in the sights and sounds of the sea, the warmth of the sun on my face and the wild, insistent press of the wind against my body.

Alive. God, it feels good to be alive. Guilt and sorrow slapped me around for a second or two… or twenty. But, God, it feels good to be alive. Amazing how often we take that for granted, asleep in the petty details of our day to day lives. Amazing. Hard to even imagine, just now, perched atop a spire of rock, humbled by the majesty of creation, sitting beside the last earthly remains of two good men, now gone to dust.

I felt dizzy with a rush of ‘spiritual insight,’ seeing, so clearly, the wheel of creation and destruction that defines life as we know it. I scooted back a bit from the sheer drop I was dangling my legs over, but the way back down, behind me, was nearly as steep, so I just braced myself in place and let the ‘vision’ wash over me, punctuated by the impact of waves against the rock face 50 feet below me.

The crisp chill of the spray and foam from the crashing waves slowly brought me back to the ‘here and now’ and my purpose for being there. I opened my pack and fished out the small urn at the bottom. I whispered a prayer, of sorts, words I honestly can no longer recall, holding the urn up to my forehead. As I twisted it open and stashed the lid so it wouldn’t blow away, I looked over at the ‘tower’ beside me and tipped a small measure of Dad’s ashes into the opening in the top. I poured out the rest into my bare hand, touching Pop one last time, and held my hand out over the precipice. The prevailing wind was coming almost straight off the ocean into my face, but it swirled fiercely as it whipped in and around all the peaks of stone in the cove and recoiled off the sheer cliff just back from the shoreline. It was only a few minutes, as I sat with eyes closed, feeling rather than thinking. I felt the wind hit me from behind, tossing my hair forward into my face and I opened my fist and felt the wind lift all trace of ash from my palm casting it out upon the sea.

I sat for a while, the tide wasn’t gonna stay out forever, then took out my one and only shot glass, from home, and a bottle of fine brandy. I drank a toast to them both and stowed the glass and bottle for the service. I took one more long, deep intake of cold, raw salt air and started down. The sea had dragged a huge load of sand in and dropped it over part of the reef, nearly covering one corner. It was a bit more of a leap to land on it, but safer than trying to jump out and down six or seven feet onto the slippery, jagged rocks. I waited for the surf to wash out, jumped and landed hard enough to put a healthy butt-print into the sand and bury my feet up to my ankles, but I hopped up and beat the next wave surge in to the shore. I wandered around on the stretch of beach for half an hour or so, then made my way back up the cliff toward the top and the old picnic table. I hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when Karen’s car pulled up and she got out and carried a vase of flowers over to the table. I noticed the fishermen talking and quickly packing up as I helped bring over the food and other stuff for the Memorial.

“So sorry,” the fellow I had asked to help me with the table said to me, “I thought you were just trying to get us to leave when you said you are having a memorial. We very sorry!” He was dipping his head in apology and backing away like I was some medieval Lord he had unintentionally insulted. They packed up their truck and raced off down the highway.

Karen set a beautiful table and had thought of just about everything we would need. By the time it was set up, most of the handful of guests I had invited had arrived. Two of my riding buddies on their bikes, Ed and Jim, who would be riding back with me later. Forrest and Chris, my landlords and Dad’s hospice physician and nurse, came out, Janine and her boyfriend Doug and two or three of the kids from the ranch with them.

The sky was clear, the sun bright, the wind was crisp and swift and the sea was wild. The point of land we were on in front of us was a 100 foot drop to the crashing waves below. After a short period of greetings, I asked everyone to settle down, out of the worst of the wind and passed around the memorial booklets I had made a few nights before. I took out a scrap of paper with notes I jotted down while I was perched up on top of the rock, earlier. Memories of my dad, points I wanted to make. I’d mentioned, for the sake of the bikers in the group, a story Dad told me when I was a kid. How his freshman college buddies would leave campus on the weekends and run down to the big city to raise hell, although he didn’t put it that way when I was little. One of the gang was from a wealthy family and he had a brand-new Indian chief, the most expensive and powerful motorcycle of its day. Four of them would ride on it, the owner sitting on the gas tank and steering from there, two guys on the seat and the fourth guy out back on the rear fender… All of them hanging on for dear life. He’d tell me how, one Sunday coming back to the Oklahoma University campus, a rich punk in a shiny new Cord blew past them and they took out off after him, caught him and left him in the dust… literally, the highways back then were not what they are today. Pop especially liked to tell how the Cord owner ranted at them when he caught up with them at a gas station on the outskirts of town.

“Are you guys out of your minds? I was doing 120 when you went past! That guy on the fender looked like he was gonna blow right the hell off.”

I lifted up the Buffalo stone I carved for Dad, I’d been wearing it constantly since I sat beside his body the morning he died, and began to tell the story of how and why I made it for him. When I reached the line, “… and that was the last time I saw him alive,” my throat tightened up, my voice cracked and, looking down at my notes, I crumpled them up saying, “well, so much for that!”

I walked over to the table and uncorked the Brandy asking someone to pour a toast for each adult and juice for each kid into paper cups after I poured one into my shot glass.

“I’m going to share a toast with you all now, then pour a single shot more for me to toast my dad alone… One last time. Pop always thought that the old Negro spiritual’s he’d hear coming from the black congregations on Sundays back in Oklahoma when he was a kid seemed like the closest to proper worship of God as any religion he knew. So I have a recording here I’m going to play between toasts that always tugs at my heart whenever I hear it.” ‘The Dimming of the Day’ written by Richard Thompson, this version recorded by The Five Blind Boys of Alabama.

I stepped out in front of the group and raised my glass.

“To our parents!… And their children.”

The group answered my toast and we all drank deeply. I walked back to the table, hit the play button and sat at the bench with my back to my friends and the wind in my face looking out past the waves into eternity. The song played and a trickle of tears dried instantly on my cheeks in the raging wind. As the last note echoed away I heard someone stop the player before the next song began. I stood up and turned, lifted the framed portrait of Pop I had as a centerpiece on the table. “Bye, Pop,” I whispered, kissed his forehead one last time and set it back down. I lifted my shot glass and downed it in a swallow. I turned back toward the sea, took three long determined strides right to the brink and hurled the shot glass as far out toward the distant horizon as I could. I stood there, taking one long, deep breath as I tracked its trajectory and exhaled as a tiny ring of foam burst upward, scattered in the wind and faded without a trace.

I turned on my heel, gazed at the small group of damp-eyed witnesses.

“And we’re done!” I declared, “Thank you all so much for coming.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

~

“We are all just dust,

waiting to be…

Again.”

- J P Bilyeu

August 1, 1999

It had been a long flight out, three days ago. I hadn’t been to Oklahoma since the summer I turned 19 and drove out to California with a college buddy in an old $300 Ford van. We had popped in on my uncle Bunny and his family on the way through, grabbing a meal, a place to crash and a shower in the way of young men on the move. This trip couldn’t have been more different.

“Just cremate me and spread my ashes across the Oklahoma territories…” Dad had said two years before when the four of us were getting Mom and Pop’s wills in order in Vermont. No specifics, no detailed instruction. Not from my dad. Short and sweet, straight to the point, that was Gerry. I didn’t bother to ask back then with all the emotion and paperwork involved that day. But now, descending into Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers World Airport, I was pretty well obsessing over it. I had spent a while online, battling sluggish dial-up speed, living out in the sticks, researching ‘Oklahoma territories’ only to glaze over from the non-specific runaround I got. On the flight out I had racked my brain for details of Dad’s life here that I remembered from childhood. Places that had meaning for him.

I called my cousin Joyce, Bunny’s adopted daughter, after I got situated into a motel in Tulsa. We went over to see Bunny at the home and my knees almost gave out when I walked into his room. He and Dad always had a family resemblance, but to me, Dad was Dad and Uncle Bunny was Uncle Bunny. No way I would ever confuse the two. But here sat Pop, just the way he looked those last few months of his life. Same sweet, old, confused face. Same body, now so small and tired looking. Same spark of mischief in his eye when he realized the conversation going on around him was about him, like a little kid waiting for the grown-ups to stop talking and let him go out and play.

After we left I felt like I hadn’t let out the gasp of breath I had taken when I saw Bunny until just that moment. I remembered Joyce talking to her dad about me. The dazzling grin that lit his features when she said “you remember Gerry’s boy!” It broke my heart to see, now in one brother, what I saw in the other months before. The strength of their connection even in the face of faltering memory, Dad’s determination to see his brother even if he had to walk all the way from California to Oklahoma in nothing but his T-shirt, barefoot and bare-assed. As far as I remember, they hadn’t seen each other since they buried their mom 30 or more years before. The entire time we visited, though not long, I barely heard a word anyone said, even myself. I just kept looking at Pop and Bunny superimposed on each other and finally realized that I had just simply been enjoying the feeling of seeing Dad alive and spirited again, a much better ‘last look’ memory than the one I had of waiting with him for the coroner the day he died.

That night I had dinner with Joyce and her husband, a local minister. I had separated out Pop’s ashes so that I could get a portion to my family back East for their Memorial. I kept a portion for scattering near me in California. I had a portion with me to spread across Oklahoma. I also placed a small portion in a small silver urn for Bunny. I wasn’t sure how it would go over, them being possibly much more conservative than I am, but I set out to do it, so I just came out and asked them. I asked if they would consider burying Bunny’s portion of his brother’s ashes with Bunny, when the time came. We decided, well, they decided, not to tell Bunny his brother was gone… He really didn’t have much time left either… Why pain him with this.They assured me they would do as I asked, that they knew it was something Bunny would want, even though he would never know. The brothers would be together again, in the end.

It turned out that they we’re as open minded, in spite of what may have been major philosophical differences between us, as my parents had raised me to be. No one, in my family, had ever sat me down as a child with a formal pronouncement of ‘the meaning of life’ or of a ‘family philosophy’ or any such grand statement. What I learned from them, I learned by observation and osmosis. Mom, who could be very strongly opinionated, was always willing to hear me out and we had many, many passionate discussions through the years about life and people, general and specific. We kids were always encouraged to form our own opinions and to speak our minds and with my mom, especially, I always did, pulling no punches. In later years, I came to regret some of my more brutally honest statements, realizing how difficult they were for Mom to hear. After I became a parent, I routinely called Mom up from across the country to apologize for something or other I said or did as kid or as an idealistic young man. Usually after I had seen something similar in my son’s actions or speech, seeing it now from the perspective of a parent. Mom and I always acknowledged the validity of the other’s argument and more often than not, ended our discussions with ‘OK, OK… I’m not gonna change your mind and you’re not gonna change mine… so lets move on to another topic.’ Dad taught me, by his own opinions, to try, always, to see the other side(s) of any point of view, of every incident or faith. Mom often complained that Dad would take the opposite side of any issue just to piss her off, but I saw that it was just his nature to try to understand all sides of all situations and I have tried to take that approach to life as much as I possibly can. As a result, I have learned to look at life, listen to people’s opinion and beliefs, regard the overall concepts of religions and social policies with an open mind. Watch and feel for the things that ring true to me in each of them, notice the similarities among them all and give credit to, and live by, those ideals that seem to be most universal to mankind.

Joyce was able to give me the addresses of some of the places I knew meant something to Dad. That night in the motel I had plotted  them all out on a map and, come morning, began my ‘memorial tour’ of Oklahoma.

I had rented a convertible for the journey. Partly because I can’t stand driving around in a metal box, anytime. But mostly it was because, along with scattering traces of Pop’s ashes at specific places from his early life, I would literally ‘spread his ashes across the Oklahoma territories’ by periodically taking a pinch in my fingers, as I drove across Oklahoma on Route 66, vintage rock ’n roll blasting on the radio, and lifting my hand up into the winds and letting it go.

My first stop was the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. As I walked in the direction of the football stadium, where he played ball for the Sooners, I saw a pond not far from it. The rock walls and benches were clearly old enough to testify that it would have been there in Pop’s day, and would have been a popular hangout. So I spread a trace of him there and sat and soaked up the place a while, imagining him sitting with friends, joking around and flirting with the gals.

Later I snuck into the stadium and worked my way up into the top bleachers behind one End Zone. I cast a trace to the wind up there and just sat and imagined all the games and practices and general horsing around Dad would have been a part of back then. Young, handsome, athletic and brilliant. A hell-raiser… A Scorpio. A very different man than the 50-ish father I knew from my childhood. Now I was nearly 50-ish and a very different man than I used to be.

‘What the hell,’ I thought… As a notion came to me. There were only a couple of people around, an athlete ‘running’ the bleachers, just now going in to shower up and a groundskeeper way down the other end. Feeling a bit like a kid again, I sprinted down the steps, hoping I didn’t break my freakin’ neck on the way down, ran out to the 50 yard line, knelt down and poured out a bit of ash at the very center of the field. I looked up to the press stand, thinking about the camera positions for football game coverage and smiled to think that any time from this day on that I see a Sooners home game on TV, I’ll see Dad’s spirit out here on the 50 yard line.

“Hey, you!”

“Sorry, wrong turn!” I hollered back to the groundskeeper, without bothering to look to see where he was, as I trotted towards the exit.

I looked for, and finally found the ROTC building, knowing that an important part of Dad’s college days revolved around this building. I discreetly sprinkled a bit around me as I sat on a bench in the common area out front and then went back to the car, resuming my trip.

I found the cemetery where Pop and Bunny’s parents were buried, thanks to my cousin, and made a tiny sign of the cross on each of the adjacent plots out of ashes. Dad wasn’t a believer, but his parents were… I felt they would have appreciated it. It just felt right. I found the town my Aunt Viva had lived in but had no idea where she may have been buried. I settled for a rustic spot at the shore of a duck pond on the edge of Ponca City, where Pop’s sister had made her home and raised her family.

The only other place of significance I could come up with was a reservoir where we had vacationed when I was 10. My grandfather had just passed and my grandmother was not going to be around much longer. They had been married nearly 80 years. So the whole family took a road trip out to Oklahoma. Looking back on it, now, I realize that my grandmother was succumbing to senility then. I remember she vehemently refused to believe that my sister Geri was her granddaughter (Geri had developed a womanly figure early, a very womanly figure. She was 14 then.) “ That’s not my granddaughter,” she kept saying, “that’s a grown woman!” At ten, I didn’t really remember her from the trips out to Oklahoma we took when I was tiny, and her confusion and contentiousness frightened me. It is my only clear memory of Dad’s mom, I have no clear recollection of his father.

I had no idea where the reservoir might be or what it was called, but there was only one large reservoir shown on the map. There was an Indian reservation near it and I remembered hearing stories of how the dam had flooded an ancient Indian village. It had really pissed off the local tribes, but that wasn’t something that I heard much about back then when I was a kid. When I got there, yesterday, it was obvious that it was, in fact, the same place. So I found a tranquil spot and released a bit more of Pop there and watched the sun set before I drove off to find a motel for the night.

I had covered, roughly, three quarters of the state in one day. Or at least, by the time I got back to Oklahoma City today to catch my flight in the afternoon. I felt a lot more at peace, now that I had done all that I had set out to do. Soon I could let go and move on with my life, but I had a nagging itch I couldn’t shake. ‘Just spread my ashes across the Oklahoma territories’ he had said. I went everywhere I knew that meant anything at all to Pop. I let fly a pinch of ash every few miles as I covered most of the state. Still one corner of Oklahoma hadn’t been covered. Really there was nothing but rural countryside out there and no point of significance to Dad anywhere that I knew of. But still, it nagged at me. Made me feel like I didn’t quite do what he had asked. They were starting to board the plane and, since I didn’t see any need to stand in line or sit on the plane any longer than necessary, I hung back and read through an airline brochure left on the seat next to me.

I was taking advantage of the chance to see an old friend in Salt Lake City on the way back home and the flightpath pictured in the graphic I was looking at went right over the part of the state I hadn’t gotten to. So, as I walked down the boarding ramp, I discreetly caught a pinch of ash out of the container in my pack and as we all bottled up a bit at the hatch of the 747, I reached over and rubbed the ash on the plane’s fuselage. Even if only on a molecular scale, Dad’s ashes would spread over the last of the Oklahoma territories.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

~

“I lowered my head to her shoulder,

one hand on her cheek, the other on Dad’s knee,

a conduit of compassion, perhaps,

where so little had flowed between them for so very long.“

Excerpt from:  January 28, 1998

June 19, 2000    Father’s Day Eve

My whole life I’ve had an ache at the base of my heart, soft and shadowed, hard to see or feel, but causing me hurt every minute of my life. The quiet  animosity with which my parents regarded each other every day. Never violent, rarely loud or angry, but always there.

At the end Mom had seemed to revel in the ability to guiltlessly let her feelings flow. It was a gift for her, and an anguish for Dad. I hated to see it, I hated to see how it made Dad feel. I knew it was cleansing for Mom and said nothing to her about it. Feeling it necessary. She felt her whole life she had to do good and never, ever, ever, anything wrong. She exuded that sense of guilt in the background of everything she said and did my entire life.  We, my sisters and I, discovered in time some, if not all the reasons for these problems between them, but only in those last couple of years of their lives. Things that happened to her in her childhood, pain and guilt inflicted on her by the actions and attitudes of her parents, that she fought against for the rest of her entire life. The particulars are not important at this time, only that she let herself release all her pent up frustration and anger at Dad freely in the last few years.

I suppose it has a great deal to do with this distance between them, that I ended up spreading a token of my Mom’s ashes at one point on the coast, and a year and a half later when Dad died, spread his ashes in a different spot a few miles down the coastline. It seemed natural to me at the time because my mother had been here once before and found Jenner to be one of the most beautiful spots she’d ever seen. It reminded her of New England. The spot that I spread Dad’s ashes was one that I found particularly sacred for myself. It’s rugged and raw rock formations seemed to me to be a place that would have intrigued my father as much as it has always intrigued me.

As Father’s Day approached the year after Dad died, I felt an overwhelming need to make some small gesture towards repairing that gap between my parents. I brought a small token of my father’s ashes from my altar to the spot where I spread my mother’s ashes and as I did, these words found their way out of my mouth.

“And with death let the differences between you be washed away.”

His ashes swept from my hand into the wind as the sea rushed up, crashing all around , encircling me in a crown of its foam. I looked up just then and there passed, so close they seemed just beyond arms reach, a pair of ancient-looking pelicans skimming the waves. Beyond them, a pair of cormorants dove into the sea. Further out still, yet one lone sea lion surfaced and heaved up onto an outcropping to sun. When I whispered, more or less to myself, “where is your mate?” another sea lion broke the surface and swam over to the other. The ceremony, if you could call it that, felt complete.

It felt better. Not ‘all better’ by any stretch of the imagination… but, better.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

~

“Eulogies are like babies.

They're more pleasurable to create

than to deliver.”

- Bob Blazich

April 27, 1999

This Saturday is going to be Dad’s memorial. I sent a portion of Dad's ashes back to my sisters in Vermont. We arranged to hold memorial services on both coasts simultaneously, noon out here and 3 PM back east. They were preparing to plant a tree in Dad's honor and place his ashes there. I would be scattering the portion of ashes I had at the coast, from the same rock where Ted's humble memorial sculpture stood. They would have a small, simple ceremony that suited their beliefs and I would do the same out here. Dad, like myself, had no faith in organized religions. To each his own, but he, like myself, felt the relationship of a person to their Creator to be too personal, too intimate and mysterious to be defined by anyone or any group for anyone else. I remember him often saying, when I was a kid, that if anyone got it right it was probably the poor, black congregations he remembered, growing up in Oklahoma. Singing and dancing with their whole being, celebrating their Savior’s life and example, His love and compassion, unafraid to let their joy and gratitude show to all the world.

Sitting on the deck, this morning, watching the horses running and grazing, preparing to eat my breakfast, I was trying to organize my thoughts about what I might say at Dad's memorial on Saturday. As I gazed out over the pasture, I realized I was 'hearing' a tale in my head. I was so lost in the story, it was so clear in my mind it was as if someone was there on the deck telling it to me, that I let my breakfast go ice cold and untouched by the time it was done.

I went in, warmed my plate all back up and went back out onto the deck. As I began to eat, I realized I was making that same rookie mistake I see so often in my graphic design students. Thinking that a great idea, because it is so clear and strong when it first comes to you, will return to mind just as strong and clear later when you get around to working on it. But it never does.

“Stop what you're doing,” I always preach to new students, “as quickly as you can safely do it, and get it down on paper. It will never be this obvious again!”

Here I sat back out on the deck, food cooling, searching my memory for the first line. I heard it again and, again I listened in my head to the entire tale all the way through, amazed that it all just poured back out intact. 'Shit!' I thought, to myself. I still hadn't written it down, didn't have paper or pen at hand. 'Shit, shit, shit, shit,' I huffed under my breath as I ran into the house, rifling through every drawer looking for something to write on and to write with. 'Shit, shit, shit, shit!’ It took way longer than it should have for an instructor who warns students to 'never be more than arms reach from pen and paper!' Found one. Found the other and dashed back out onto the deck, shoved aside my poor, re-chilled eggs and poised the pen while I searched for that opening line again. To my utter amazement it came obediently back to the fore of my mind and I wrote it down, quickly, sloppily, but accurately. Identical to the first two times.

Ultimately, I decided to use it in Dad's memorial book (that I cranked out overnight and hand assembled into 40 copies – 20 overnighted to Vermont and 20 for guests out here) rather than read it at the Memorial. I decided to write a few notes to myself of memories of Pop and simply speak spontaneously about him at the memorial. It would suit him better, and me too, for that matter.

The tale has since found its way into a novel I'm working on, spoken in the final moments of life by a character suffering from dementia. That character, you may have guessed, is based, to no small part, on my dad.

Epilog

“The weeks and months immediately after Dad’s passing were a void,

much like sitting alone in a movie theater

after the ending of a long and particularly unsettling film.”

-J P Bilyeu

I feel like I’m supposed to put some happy, shiny summation to all of this. Tie it all up in a pretty little bow,… spit out some Grand Profundity or two… but I can’t, for the life of me, imagine what the hell that might be.

What can I possibly say that hasn’t been said a thousand times over by men and women far wiser and more glib than I am.

I could say ‘don’t try to shoulder it all yourself, like I did, let those of your friends and family who support you do just that.’ I could say ‘if you do take it all on yourself… Stay alert to the warning signs of your own sanity. Cut yourself some slack, don’t beat yourself up so much for your failures. We can only do the best we can do, and you are useless to others if you let yourself over-stress and become an emotional basket case.’

I will say this. Get what ever support you can. If it embarrasses you or makes you feel uncomfortable or weak to look for or ask for help… Tough!… Get over it! You’re going to need all the support you can get and that’s how a family… and a civilization for that matter, survives. We all lean on and hold up one another. It’s the Big Plan, after all. Life is a downhill plummet without it.

I had every intention to do just that, at the beginning, and I’ve got dozens of journal entries to remind me of it. But, in the end I didn’t ask for or find  enough of the support I needed and I paid the price in stress and guilt. The ghost of it haunts me still to this day. And the worst part of it is that I wasn’t there for Dad as much as I could have been… should have been, especially at the end.

You don’t get that back.

I could say all of that, but it probably won’t matter. It’s not like we don’t all know it already… Not like we haven’t all heard it all before. From others. From ourselves. In the writings of of the Great Poets and the ramblings of the insane and the downcast. We’ve all heard it all. We all know it all. But knowing it all doesn’t necessarily keep it from happening. In the end, we will do what we will do. And we will second guess ourselves and beat ourselves up over this and that. It’s just the way of things.

Life sucks sometimes. Really sucks!… sometimes. Life keeps on going and it’ll just run you right the hell over if you don’t move along with it. If, in the end, we can say we did more good in our time than harm… we have little to regret. The bad news is: there’s no way to know that for certain. The good news is: well,… the same news.

In having nothing more profound than that to say, I am just gonna leave you with the story of ‘the Beings of Life’ I wrote down that Saturday on my deck, contemplating the passing of my Dad.  The "Legend of the Beings of Life” closed out Dad's memorial booklet and I think I'll use it to close out this book as well.

Legend of the Beings of Life

Before time was Time... when all that was, was potential... there was the mind of the Creator. Infinite Awareness... with only the Everlasting Void to know. And so it was Decided... and in that instant made so. Beings of Life would be... and so they were!

Knowing only Eternity, the Creator gave to them Life Eternal. For eons they lived, these Beings of Life, and loved and reveled in the wonder of Life. .. and it was good.

Alas, but in the Creator’s Innocence, a most dreadful thought was overlooked. In the vastness of time, all things would become known, all sensations felt, all experiences lived and shared, all goals achieved, all creativity expressed... and indeed it became so.

Then fell a Darkness, the ultimate insult in the face of the Creator’s wondrous Gift. Life no longer held meaning! Gone was all trace of wonder. Gone was the vast sea of Passion, the azure depths of Unconditional Love. Gone compassion and caring. Interest, intrigue, adventure... all gone!

Remaining only was the Horror and Grief that was the Heart of the Creator. In Heartache and Fury a blinding Light burst forth and the Emptiness was gone... and with it, the Beings of Life.

Only then, in the ache of Grief and Solitude, did the Creator come to understand... Life is for naught without its end! Only in the shadow of Death can the Light of Life be embraced. Only within the impermanence of mortal existence can the wonders of Life, the great and the small of it, gain permanence and value.

And so it was that the Creator brought forth again the Beings of Life and gave to them the most precious of Gifts... Transition and Change... and most of all an Ending. And in that instant it was so...and is so to this day.

“Live your Lives,” said the Creator, “Live them well and deeply. Dread not its end, for it is this alone that gives all else its splendor. Live it, share it and, in its fullness, give it up with Courage and Joy... for many others shall follow you on your path.”

Live your Lives

Live them Well and Deeply