Tag: death

The first anniversary of my mother’s death

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m.

I realized that, while my mother’s death naturally made me very sad, and especially that “adult orphan” thing weirded me out, there were some things that mitigated the pain somewhat.

To recap: my “baby” sister called me at work on Friday, January 28 to tell me our mother, Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, had gone to the ER with a severe headache. It was latter determined that she had had a “brain bleed”; I don’t think I understood that terminology until I got down to the hospital. What Mom had was a stroke; there are two kinds, one which constricts the blood, and the other, less common, but more problematic, where there’s too much blood.

I figured that I needed to go down by train because flying was too expensive. I remember getting a “sick or bereavement rate” when I flew down to Charlotte, NC before my father died, but it was hardly helpful. Since I didn’t know when I’d return, taking the train to Charlotte seemed to be the best plan.

I was initially planning on leaving on Tuesday, but when I saw the forecast for a massive snowstorm, which did arrive, I knew I needed to leave on Monday. I called work on Monday morning from the train station to tell them I wouldn’t be in for several days.

Tuesday, my sisters and I spent the day in the hospital, and my sisters tell me that she was doing much better, giving a couple of one-word answers.

Wednesday morning, she had a Cheyne-Stokes breathing episode that sounded terribly distressing, but apparently was not, at least for her. I talked with my doctor about this last month when I was feeling unwell. She notes that hospice nurses are good at bringing comfort to the family, but that sometimes, hospital nurses forget that, when death is near, they still need to try to make the family feel OK. My doc theorized that perhaps they gave my mom a bit of morphine to control the sounds, for my benefit.

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m. I was told to call my sisters before I was told that fact; very odd. When my sisters arrived, they thought she was only sleeping before I had a chance to tell them otherwise.

I was having this electronic conversation with my blogger buddy Arthur recently about the euphemisms for death. He doesn’t much like them, and I’m inclined to agree. But, in my mom’s case, I understand why they say that someone “passed away.”

It so happened that I wrote a blog item that posted on Wednesday, though I had written it on Saturday, Take the Train to Charlotte. All the posts prior to 2:05 pm EST indicated hope for my mom’s recovery. But somewhere around 2:12, I started getting condolences. Denise, the ABC Wednesday diva, had IMed me at some point after we got home from the hospital around noon, to ask how my mom was doing, so of course, I told her. The outpouring of support I got from people I had never met was astonishing. Jaquandor and Arthur both wrote posts about my mom and me.

I was intrigued by one comment to a brief post I wrote the day after she died, describing my account as “dispassionate”. I suppose that was true; it was a coping mechanism.

So it was tough, but it was made palatable by folks from work and church, and by friends I’ve known in person, but also from a whole lot of people I have never met. My friends Jason and DeeDee placed a small obit in my mom’s hometown paper in Binghamton, NY, which was the first time some of her friends and relatives heard about her death. I read the comments from various posts I wrote during the month, and they make me (past and present tense) both weepy, but at the same time, comforted. The aforementioned Denise sent flowers to our house; it is amazing how well flowers from England held up.

Oh, some mundane stuff: got $561 from my mother’s Social Security in December, as did my sisters; not quite clear exactly why. That’ll help with paying off some of the debt I incurred for the funeral and Charlotte newspaper obit.

Avery

An old person dies, and one is burying the past. When a young person dies, one is burying the future.

I’m at my allergist’s office a week ago Monday morning, waiting the requisite 30 minutes after my injection, when I see this story on the TV news about a 21-month-old boy “found dead in a Troy apartment Saturday night. Officials say… Avery James Cahn was left unattended by his caretaker, who police found and brought in for questioning, but was later released.”

My wife and I attended the funeral last Thursday. I go because I KNOW this child. Not well, to be sure, but I’ve seen his hands, not quite tall enough for the snack table, still manage to steal a handful of cookies after church. And I know his mom, again not well, but I’ve heard her read the morning Scripture or the prayers of the people or watched her usher in people; she joined the church not that long ago.

But mostly my wife and I go for our friend Mary, who is the paternal grandmother, a very good friend, who I called when I was on a long train ride to Charlotte, NC after my mom had a stroke last year. And I go for her son, the baby’s uncle, who is turning into a fine, and talented, young man.

The noon service is delayed a few minutes, with the organist continuing to vamp. Was it the difficulty of the day? Or was it the reporter from some local media organization who was turned away by police, as I later find out?

These two men from the funeral home wheel out an it-must-be-a-too-small casket and bring it to the front of the sanctuary.

I won’t/can’t go into the whole service, except to say it was nice, under the circumstances. But it was tough; as someone said, an old person dies, and one is burying the past. When a young person dies, one is burying the future.

The Lydster, Part 90: Talking about Tragedy

There’s the broader question of explaining the news when there is so much distortion of the facts by some outlets.

It’s been relatively easy to talk to my daughter about individual deaths, such as my mother’s earlier this year. She understands that my father, and my wife’s older brother, died before she was born, and has only photos by which to identify them, and that was helpful in the discussion.

But how does one explain the assassination attempt of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a shooting in which six people were killed, including the pictured nine-year-old girl – not that much older than she is – whose last name was Green, no less? The natural desire is to protect her from such news, and I don’t think she caught the initial story. But there have been plenty of follow-ups, and I know she’s heard at least bits and pieces of those. What does one say? That there are bad people out there? Crazy people out there?

Then there’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Of course, the event took place before she was born, but all of the recollections are hard to miss. And those guys are even more difficult to explain. Does this show up in the school curriculum yet? And if so, what does IT say about those events of a decade ago?

(And there’s the broader question of explaining the news when there is so much distortion of the facts by some outlets.)

I went to lunch with a friend of mine who’s around 30 who has decided not to have any children because the world’s just too scary. If the maternal instinct strikes, she’ll adopt, taking care of someone who’s already on the planet anyway. I must admit that I understand her wariness. The environmental and economic troubles alone are sources of concern.

Ultimately, as it turned out, we watched the evening news – the three of us – on September 11 this year. Not sure how much of it she got. Still, my girl is rather resilient; I’ll keep trying to figure out a way to explain the world to her, somehow. Even when the question is “Why”? Why did people fly planes into buildings? Why do we need to remember?

Book Review: The Orphaned Adult

One of the most interesting things about the book The Orphaned Adult is the very notion that adults, when they lose both of their parents, do fall into a largely unexamined class of people. After all, as the author, Alexander Levy noted, “Parental loss is not the province of an unfortunate few. It is the ultimate equal-opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not predeceasing their parents.” So the dearth of literature he found prior to writing this book, published in 1999, is not at all surprising.

The book is an amalgam of stores of Levy’s patients and his own loss of both parents, and how it changed all involved. I’ve written elsewhere about my favorite story in the book.

Early on, he challenges the notion of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross tidy five stages of grief, while recognizing that the structure served a purpose at a time when many avoided the topic of death and grief altogether. As I’ve noticed myself, grief is nonlinear. And grief, Levy argues, is good; “by illuminating life’s impermanence, grief alerts us to pursue those important goals that we otherwise tend to postpone in the naive belief that our time is enduring.” In fact, he suggests that there are serious hazards in avoiding grief, and offers ways to express it.

The death of both parents changes the “I am” sentences of one’s life, from being your parents’ son or daughter to “I am an orphan.” Yet Levy talks about the ongoing relationships with parents after they die, and how one’s relationships with others can change as well.

Recommended for those who have lost both parents or who are involved with people who have. I have suggested the book to a guy at church who lost his second parent, his mother, about two months after I lost mine.

 

D is for Dad’s Death

Les Green was the first black registered auctioneer in the state of North Carolina.

Rescuing a bird

Hmm. I said to myself, “Self, do I really want to do this?” I had a whole ‘nother blog post planned for today. but it IS the anniversary of the death of my father, Les Green. Moreover, it’s the 10th anniversary this very day. You know how those round numbers often hold special significance.

Top picture: Oui, c’est moi de l’enfant.

I wrote about the circumstances of his death five years ago. Here’s the peculiar thing: I misremembered the date that he told us he had prostate cancer! I wrote that he informed us in January 1998, when in fact it was January 1997, during the same trip we had the conversation about spanking.

How could I forget that detail? Easy: as I said before, he was SO cavalier about it. It was as though he were discussing twisting his ankle. No big deal.

And I suppose maybe that’s what he thought. As the Mayo Clinic put it, “Prostate cancer that is detected early — when it’s still confined to the prostate gland — has a better chance of successful treatment.”

In many ways, my dad was pretty remarkable. He graduated from high school – barely, by all accounts – went into the Army in 1945 and 1946. Eventually, he had a number of different jobs, from florist and sign painter to a vice-president of a large construction company. He was rather the epitome of the “self-made man.”

He also played guitar, largely self-taught, and sang. He billed himself locally (Binghamton, NY) as the “Lonesome and Lonely Traveller”. He described himself as a “singer of folk songs”, rather than as a “folk singer”, because his repertoire was not limited to the one genre. Eventually, my sister Leslie and I performed with him as the Green Family Singers for a time.


My back, my dad to the left, at my Grandma Williams’ funeral.

One insight into my father’s behavior involves cigarette smoking. For years, he smoked Winstons; he used to send my sister Leslie and me to O’Leary’s, the store at the corner, to buy them. When I was a teenager, he developed emphysema
and quit smoking. When the disease went away, he returned to smoking, to my transparent dismay. Then a few years later, he just stopped smoking. But he said that he didn’t quit; he preferred the notion that he just didn’t happen to have one for almost 30 years.

Did I ever tell you how my parents met? He delivered flowers as a teenager, and he was supposed to make a delivery to 13 Maple Avenue, but went instead to 13 Maple Street, on the opposite side of town. Apparently, my mother was smitten by this guy bringing flowers, even if they weren’t for her, and he was likewise taken by her.

When he made waffles, he made a big production about how to suss out their doneness. He told tall tales about cooking for George Washington and other historical figures. Whatever leftovers were in the fridge he could turn into a quite delicious concoction he called “gouly-goop”, undoubtedly a variation on the word goulash, though I don’t think I knew that at the time.

My father was very much involved in the civil rights movement in the area. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., there was violence in a lot of American cities, but not in Binghamton, in no small part because my father helped keep the peace.

Les Green was gregarious and personable, but not always at home, which is probably why I ended sending him a pair of letters. Still, I believe that it made things much better between us afterward.

My father always had a plan to get rich. Some of his ideas were workable. Did you know that Les Green was the first black registered auctioneer in the state of North Carolina? But he had, by my mother’s estimation, about 39 different businesses from the time he moved to North Carolina until the time he died in 2000, selling everything from prepaid phone cards to home alarm systems, many of them arguably pyramid schemes. All of his kids rolled their eyes when he signed all three of us – at $700 a pop! – to be distributors of one of his products, without our knowledge. He was lousy at keeping track of money.

He kept asking me – I’m smart, I work at a Small Business Development Center – to find him a way to get rich quickly via the Internet. I kept telling him that he ought to go to his local SBDC, so THEY could tell him the deficiencies of his more quixotic plans.

Probably the best time I ever had with my father, certainly, as an adult, was when I went to the ASBDC conference in Savannah, GA in the fall of 1998. He drove down from Charlotte, NC, and just hung out around town with me and three of my female colleagues, with whom he shamelessly flirted, as was his wont.


At Carol’s and my wedding reception, May 1999. Dad did the floral arrangements.

We have a small tribe, and his death made me the alpha male. Heck, with the exception of my niece’s husband, the ONLY male, and has been an interesting evolution in my life. My sisters often send me Father’s Day cards, which initially took me by surprise.

His death at the age of 73, now a decade ago, sometimes seems surreal. I’m STILL looking for an audiotape that my father made a few months before he died where he claimed that he was going to explain to the family what was going on with him, a dialogue with his doctor. I heard a snippet of it when I was down in Charlotte a month after he died, I set it aside, and then it disappeared.


I’m sure this was disjointed and rambling, but such was the relationship I had with my father. I should mention, though, that I love and miss my dad.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

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