Releasing the Ghosts

  

Exalted by Finijo

Another year draws to a close and I find myself reflecting. This year has been an ode to the acceptance of loss. There is no point in grieving what you do not have, but at times it is difficult to process that people who were in your life are now not. My brother died New Year's Eve 2012. I spent much of this year traveling back and forth to another state to deal with his estate and his business and to try to help his sons learn to live their new lives - without him. I doubt my success in that endeavor, but it was not for want of trying.

Now I am in the process of releasing several longtime friendships from my heart. Friendships that, truth be told, became one sided. For much too long, I have tried to hold up both ends all the while wishing that they would someday own their side once again. I thought I could hold on forever, but the weight became a burden that I no longer wish to carry. 2014 will be the year that I embrace endings, even when I don't desire them.

Choosing to let go is freeing me from the expectation that ghosts will provide comfort and support. Ghosts are memories, and while memories can create a wistful smile, they are not companions in the world. Even though they are transparent, easily seen through, their weight is heavy and cumbersome.

To all of my ghosts: I am grateful to have known you, to have learned from you, and to love you still. Now please be free, be happy, and perhaps we will meet again in the next life as friends.

Mementos

Mementos by Finijo

Mementos are often odd things that mean nothing to those they do not belong to. Little pieces of our memories in physical form. Lovely little pieces of personal ephemera destined for the bin when we are no longer around to cherish them.

Preparation

 Winter is fast approaching and I am trying to prepare for the end of the year and get ready for a new, hopefully less stressful year. I have no reason to believe that it will (as it should) be anything less than the new beginning I desire. I have that itchy urge to travel welling up in me and I hope to make another trip abroad next year. I have one foot in the dream of exploration and another one stuck in the thick mud of responsibility.

I don't begrudge my responsibilities, because much of the best of my life is born out of the experiences I have with family and friends. I do wish to be lighter and not carry as much stuff and perhaps not as many people through this world with me, though. Our venture into selling items on line to make some extra money has run into the snag of taking up more room in the house than I am willing to give and taking more time to post the items than Marilyn is able to spare, so tonight I will pack all of it into bags and start dropping them off at Goodwill and The Salvation Army. 

The best laid plans...

Fire

A Wisp of Smoke by Luke Freeman

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/lukefreeman/8184301974/

It is one of those days when I feel like my brain is on fire. There are thousands of thoughts and ideas like mini pulsars shooting through my grey matter, but none of them is really sticking. On a day like today I know I should be getting so much done, and I try, but it's never enough. My thoughts are like wisps of smoke that float up and out of my reach. Trying to catch them is futile, so I settle for watching them drift up and away.

On Death And Dying

Cactus Flower by Finijo

This has been an odd year. My brother, David, died the morning of New Year's Day and as much as I have tried to keep that from coloring my year, it seems to have seeped into so much of my life. I travel back to Arkansas every couple of months to check on his sons and his business, but both the sons and the business struggle without his guidance. On my darker days I feel like a very poor substitute and wonder if I am being of any help at all. The youngest son is learning to live at a new level of responsibility, and most of the time seems like he is thriving. He is trying his hardest to master a business that took his father a lifetime to build. There is no time for the steep learning curve that he faces if he is to keep the business going through the lean winter that is too quickly approaching. My brother's oldest son is in prison and has two years to serve. He seems to have adapted well to prison life, but I am not seeing anything his his personality, speech, or actions that allow me to believe that he has changed in any kind of meaningful way for the better since his incarceration eight years ago. When he is released in two years, he will own half of the business and he shows no interest in learning about what is happening with the business or in working in the business during his furloughs every few months. Each visit or phone call from him leaves me feeling more anxious than the last, but each visit to Arkansas includes a visit with him to try to clear a path for him to work with his brother, instead of against him. They are not close, because the older son is a bully and does whatever he can to undermine his brother. I think the most unsettling thing about the visits with him is his attempt to act like he has changed. The ring of insincerity is loud, but he has a smugness to him that makes me think he truly believes that he has us all fooled. I love them both, and hope that my worst fears will not be realized when he is released. In the mean time, we work at trying to keep the business going and I work at building up the younger son to have the confidence to face his brother when he gets out.

While trying to deal with all that my brother left undone, I was blindsided by a diagnosis of  diabetes (type 2) in April and two weeks ago I was told that I have "a mass in my kidney". I was diagnosed with Lupus in 1996 and although I have been in remission since 1999, I have flares and have to deal with the kidney disease it caused. A couple of weeks before the doctor told me that I have diabetes, we were informed by the medical examiner that my brother also had diabetes. He was diagnosed in 2007 and chose to never treat it or even to tell us about it. The medical examiner also told us that he had 4-5 heart attacks, which he likely did not feel because he did not treat the diabetes. I am in limbo about the mass until they figure out the next step to try to determine if it is a cyst or cancer. My health setbacks this year are troubling me.

My relationship with death is complicated. I am age 47, with lupus, diabetes, and kidney disease. My mother died when she was 35 of MS, my father when he was 45 of stroke/heart attack, my older sister at age 52 of cancer, my brother at 58 from a stroke. I feel like I cheated death so many times in my life, and now I feel it licking at my heels again. I am not so much afraid of dying, but I feel like I have so much left to do. The thought of leaving my sister and youngest nephew in the same predicament as my brother's sons is the worst thing I can imagine.

So, I am trying to be as healthy as I can. My diet has changed drastically and weight is falling off of me, faster than expected. So fast, that my doctor informed me that the weight loss "threw my kidneys into a state of shock." I lost 10% of the 35% kidney function I had, but I am slowly rebuilding it and it is almost back to normal - if you can call 35% normal. I spend spare time these days working on "getting my affairs in order." I put together my "death file" containing all of the important information about insurance, retirement funds, etc.., so that it will be easily accessible. I try to stay in contact with the friends I have that live far away, or that live close by and I don't get to see as often as I feel I should. I alternate between bursts of energy to do what must be done and an almost paralyzing inertia that keeps me from getting anything done. My art and writing have gone by the wayside this year. I don't want them to, but I don't seem to have the energy or the desire to work at them except in fits and starts. 

It seems maudlin to write all of this out, but this morning I felt like I would burst without releasing these thoughts. Better now, so it's time to do something useful...

Laden

Loquat by Patty Browning

It is a lovely gray morning. Cool air coming through the screen door and the birds are chirping away. My loquat tree is heavily laden with green fruit that will soon ripen into tart little golden orbs, a metaphor for my life right now. The heavy burden on my branches is soon to be a bountiful harvest, but the rain must come to wash away the detritus and nourish the fruit.

Today I mainline British mysteries on Roku as I try to organize a life that feels like it is splitting at the seams. My monkey mind swings from the vine of one thought to the vine of the next and I am all over the place, but never actually arriving at my destination. Lists are made when I think of what I think I need to do, then I start another list and then  another, but very few things are being crossed off, and my lists continue to grow. I am scattered about like my thoughts. Raking up my to do lists in vain while they swirl around me like windblown piles of leaves.

In spite of all of the clutter in my mind and in my house, I see an end to the disarray. A gift bequeathed, but not deserved, is on the horizon. The relief the gift brings is tempered by the guilt that a survivor feels when they would decline rather than pay the price of an incomplete life.

I wish it would rain.

I Wish

I Wish... by Finijo

I was 21 when I moved into my first apartment and attending college. My next door neighbor was a middle aged woman from West Virginia named Patty, and she looked after me like I was her own daughter. Patty and I would stay up late and watch Arsenio Hall or sit out on the balcony in our nightgowns and drink tea and eat the homemade chocolate chip cookies she made. Most days, Patty babysat her 8 year old grandson, Dave, and I began tutoring him when I found out that he could not read and did not even know the alphabet. When we started, he would fight me and say, "This is boring. You can't make me do this." I responded by making him run the stairs while his grandmother and I counted the laps he did. When I say I made him run the stairs, the truth is that Patty threatened to tell his grandfather when he got home if he didn't obey. Dave begrudgingly did what he was told. Pretty soon he knew the alphabet and after that he didn't have to run the stairs very often. A couple of years later, the family moved back to West Virginia and I have only seen Patty a few times over the last 20 or so years, but we talk on the phone and exchange letters and it always feels like we are back up on the balcony with our tea and no time has passed at all. I talked to Patty this past Christmas and Dave happened to be there, so we talked for the first time since he left Texas. He reminded me of all of the stairs I made him run and how he appreciated that I made him learn to read. It was strange to have this grown man telling me that I changed his life when he was a kid, but we talked about old times and had a good laugh.

Tonight I got a call from a mutual friend and my first instinct when I realized who was calling, was that Patty was either ill or she had died. I was wrong. Dave died of an overdose today. Two David's have passed out of my life in as many months leaving me feeling tired and sad.

Inappropriate Laughter

Today I laughed at one of my clients until I cried. It was uncontrollable laughter, the kind of laughter that causes you to stop breathing and your face to turn colors. 

It all started when he told me that his girlfriend's cat got out yesterday and hasn't come back and he is very upset about it. I asked how his girlfriend is taking it and he said, "She's alright. It's not exactly my fault that it happened... well it is, but it isn't." I asked him to explain and this is what he says:

Well, my dog got sick. He got diarrhea and I didn't realize it until I pulled the covers over my head while I was sleeping. (I am trying to stifle the laughter at this point, because I know this is going to be an awful/terrible/wonderfully funny story) You see, I pulled the covers over my head while I was sleeping and didn't know that my dog was sick and had defecated on the sheets. (By now I am laughing in his face, but he just kept telling me the story). I ended up with feces in my hair, my ears, my nose and my mouth. (My tears are starting and I am waving at him trying to get him to stop talking, but he just keeps going) That's when I started to vomit. I couldn't stop throwing up. It was a helluva mess. I had to shower twice just to get it all off me. (I think I had a small stroke after he said that). So after I was clean, I had to clean it all up. Did I tell you that my apartment is kind of a dump? Well it is, and the smell of feces and vomit was everywhere, so I opened the window to air the place out. Because my place is a dump, the screen was loose and the cat must have pushed it open and got out through the window.  

When I finally got myself together, I apologized repeatedly. It really isn't professional to laugh at the patients. He accepted my apology and said, "It's OK, my girlfriend keeps laughing at me, too." 

True story.

Existence

Buddha Eyes by Finijo

Existential thought of the day: We all need someone to witness our existence. 

It is not enough to be alive, although that is something quite extraordinary. We need to be known, to have people or at least one person know who we are, to verify that we do in fact exist. 

I remember watching a movie when I was a kid that reinforced this idea for me, even though I was so young, I couldn't possibly have understood why they impacted me so profoundly. The film, Cipher in the Snow, was an after school movie and depicted a boy going through his school day without anyone speaking to him. He rides the school bus home and is noticed by nobody and as he steps off the bus, he takes a few steps and then falls into the snow and dies. The rest of the film is spent with a teacher who is supposed to be the boy's favorite teacher (even though he never really noticed the boy in his class) tries to understand who the boy was by talking to his classmates, and he comes to realize that the boy's parents divorced and he has no friends. The teacher concludes that nobody really knew the boy and that he was a "cipher in the snow" and died because nobody loved him. He died without a witness. 

I've been working on my family genealogy for about ten years off and on now. I wonder sometimes why this quest is important to me. It's not like having the information will make a difference in my life. I will live and die regardless of whether I find more information about all of those who came before me. It occurred to me tonight that for me, genealogy is a way to bear witness for ancestors and relatives who lived and died before I was ever conceived. My grandmother gave me the family tree to work on when I was 14 and I don't think I looked at it as more than a curiosity until she died in 2003. When she died, it was like the quest to know her relatives and family burned through me. With each new discovery, I felt like I was a little closer to her and understood her life just a little bit better.  My brother David told me that searching for information about ancestors was 'living in the past." He never really understood. Today Marilyn took a call from the coroner who did David's autopsy. Preliminary results are in and it turns out that David had been diagnosed with diabetes in 2007 and never treated it. He also had "multiple heart attacks." I thought he might have had heart trouble five or six years ago, but when I asked him about the heart tests that I saw paperwork for on the dining room table, he lied to me and said "It was just a check up." He was in denial about so many things and I loved my brother, but he could lie as easily as tell you the truth and even though you knew he could do it, he almost always fooled you. Part of me wants to muster up a little bit of anger about his deception, but I think I am just too sad about the fact that he felt like he had to deceive everyone. 

Haunted

Hibiscus Black and White by Finijo

I chanted this morning at the kaikan and got to have tea with a good friend and I feel great. Having some time alone with my friend after what feels like forever was really nice. It gave me the chance to talk about David and realize that I am doing much better. Talking about him feels like keeping part of him alive and with me. He was a workaholic and could not sit still for anything. He yelled at his workers constantly to "Get back to work!" His son, Robert and I worked on how his headstone would read and agreed on:

David West

November 25,1953 - December 31, 2012

Loving father, brother, and friend. 

I"m only laying here because I have to.

Get back to work!

He would appreciate that his wicked sense of humor could make people laugh who come to visit him and who come to visit others. Now I am off to celebrate Marilyn's birthday with some Vietnamese food and have a good time in the realm of the living with my family. I was excited to get the following tweet:

Chuck Palahniuk retweeted   Cecil Angeline Turla @TurlaCecil @_FullyBooked @chuckpalahniuk Awesome news is awesome! Stoked! #Haunted t.co/qOp9yHUW 10:39 AM - 02 Feb 13  Reply  Retweet  Favorite

Just Ink 2

Mandalascape by Finijo

Last night I had a great time at the Just Ink 2 show. I didn't sell a thing, but the atmosphere was buzzing, and the art was inspiring. So much creativity in one room, and at the risk of sounding like a New Age dork, so much positive energy from all of the artists and the people who were there to see and buy art. I had a very late dinner with my East End Studio Gallery peeps and enjoyed laughter and good company and conversation.

This morning, I went outside to feed the birds a bag of outdated corn tortillas and the weather was so perfect that I took a barefoot stroll through my yard to see what survived the winter. My fig tree is still chugging along as is my pomelo tree and I expect to have them fruiting nicely in about 2-4 years. On the other side of the yard my orange tree has rallied and my lime tree is going strong, but I think my lemon tree has given up. I will have to replace it this spring. While checking my lemon tree, I noticed a fresh harvest of pecans had blown into my yard from my neighbors huge pecan tree, so I filled the bag that held the tortillas in and came back in with about 5 lbs. of wonderful, fresh and free pecans. 

 Today I will create.  

Shame on Applebee's

While I no longer wait tables, I support that hard working and underpaid part of the American workforce. Unless you have done that work, you cannot imagine how much of a toll it can take on your body and your spirit. 

I just posted the following on my Facebook and I am hoping that it will strike a chord with others who will also express their displeasure with Applebee's.

I waited tables while I was in college and the thought of Applebee's firing the waitress really ticked me off. It's hard work for less than minimum wage and I support the waitress' right to express herself. She didn't post name of the pastor, but she did post the pastor's shameful behavior. This is the e-mail that I sent to Applebee's informing them that I will not support a company that does not support its employees.

I am writing to tell Applebee's of my disgust with your company's decision to dismiss the server for posting the receipt of the pastor who refused to tip and used religious tithing as the excuse. Shame on the pastor and shame on your company for allowing that dismissal. There are hundreds of thousands of servers and former servers who know what it means to work for less than minimum wage and rely on their tips to survive, and I am among them. The work is hard and at times hazardous, and although we expect to be stiffed from time to time because people are cheap or even dissatisfied with service, being insulted and having the cheapskate customer hide behind religion as the reason is despicable. Firing the server for posting the receipt on line without posting any identifying information about the customer is beneath contempt and cowardly of the manager. I expect a company to stand up for its hard working employees, and knowing that Applebee's does not feel the need to support their servers will keep me from eating at your restaurant in the future. Shame on Applebee's for not speaking out on behalf of the server and her first amendment rights. There are a lot of chain restaurants (TGI Friday's, Black Eyed Pea, Ruby Tuesday's, etc...) that serve similar food at similar prices that can benefit from my business.

I will be posting this letter on Facebook in the hope that there are others who will support the server your company betrayed.

Sincerely,

Karen West

Applebee’s fires waitress who posted receipt from pastor complaining about auto-tip

news.yahoo.com

An Applebee's waitress who posted a receipt with a note from a pastor complaining about the 

Responsibility

Murky by Finijo

I got up this morning before Connor and sad, but true, I will let him sleep until he wakes up on his own (about 2:00 PM, if I am lucky), just so I can have the house to myself. Marilyn is in Conroe, so it feels like it's just me as I sit here typing away and listening to the churning of the clothes in the dryer. I feel like I am returning slowly to center. David's death is a fact that sinks in more and more each day, so now the only thing that throws my equilibrium off are the calls from my nephew in Little Rock as he has minor melt downs about his brother's rants from prison. Both of them are very easily worked up as they push each other's buttons incessantly. They tend to go from baseline to critical at the smallest hint of a slight from one to the other and the only thing that matters to them in the midst of this is to be right while the other is wrong. I don't operate that way. My critical state is when I weep (sometimes wail) alone in my car. I have difficulty with the Jerry Springer-esque lobbing of threats and the futility of pissing contests to try to "win" an argument. I know part of my job over the next two years is to try to help these two brothers to either find a way to love each like brothers should, or to teach them to co-exist peacefully so that they can run the business. Neither of them has come to terms with the fact that because their father died without a will, they are equal partners in the success or the failure of the business he left to them. One of them is stepping up to be responsible and the other is stunted by his incarceration and seems to think he won the lottery, rather than inheriting a business with all of the responsibilities that it entails. The beautiful house they now own together can either be a place of peaceful cohabitation or it can be their own personal hell. I have to remind myself that if I don't succeed, it will not truly be a failure, since I have no control at all over how they behave. I can only lead by example if they are paying attention and if they want to be lead and if they don't and they squander the gift their father left them, then ultimately, that is their path. Not being disappointed in them or myself will be more than difficult, so I will try to focus on the positives as I reconnect with them both.

As I write about their drama, it is dawning on me that I am pretty stressed out about the situation. I have been having vivid strange dreams and they are all about me being responsible for some situation or some big project and not staying on top of the details. On the plus side, I am also dreaming about art and getting some ideas for pieces I would like to attempt. I think venting via blog will help me to process all of the things I am struggling with at the moment, at least I hope so.

Borrowed Time

Prayer for the Living by Finijo

Perhaps it is the combination of the New Year passing and David's death, but I am thinking more and more that I am on borrowed time. Grandma's life tells me that there is no way of knowing when your life will ebb away, but the Magic 8 Ball in my head keeps coming up "outlook not so good," when I think about the time I have left in this life to accomplish the things I want to do.  It's not exactly depressing, but I am re-evaluating what is important to me right now, and that isn't always as easy as it sounds.  

David Carroll West

I wrote to a friend that it is strange to think that I am in this world without my older brother and sister. They were always constants in my life and now there is a void where there presence once was. Even knowing they were a state away, they were still tangible and I knew that if I had a bad day or just needed to hear their voices, I could call them. It was an eight hour drive, but I knew that there was a hug and a smile from them just eight hours a way. 

We always assumed that losing Linda would be the hardest thing in the world, but somehow this loss seems more difficult. She had been so ill and become so debilitated by cancer that there was a small comfort in knowing that her years of fighting were over. David's illness began a little over a year ago and we thought he would be around for at least a few more years. I told him once that I thought he must have cockroach DNA, because he seemed indestructible. I think because we were so emotionally close to Linda our entire lives, but David had been so distant to us through his drug years, that his death is hitting us so very hard. I only became close to David after Linda's death, like a second string player whose chosen to play after the star player is out of the game. Slowly we built a relationship after he got sober and we became closer still in the last few years. His illness changed our relationship drastically after we went to care for him last Christmas. I don't think that he really knew we loved him until he got sick, and that saddens me greatly.

There was an ice storm in Little Rock just before we arrived. We witnessed the devastation it caused as we drove up I-30 and saw so many trees cracked and broken by the weight of the ice. David owned David's Tree Service in Little Rock, and he loved a good ice storm. He was not ghoulish about the devastation, but he knew that his phone would be ringing off the hook during a season that was normally not a busy time for his business. An ice storm was the chance to help people and to keep his crew working and earning money to support their families, and if the damage was extensive, they would be working for many weeks throughout the winter months.

While in Little Rock making the arrangements for David's funeral, I carried his phone and fielded calls from customers and from friends. Each call was wrenching and fascinating. Every single call was a window into his life that had not previously been open and those glimpses into how he impacted so many people over so many years breaks my heart and gives me great joy. I was shocked at how many of his customers broke down and cried while telling me what a great man he was and how much he had helped them over the years. They all spoke of his sense of humor and what an excellent service he provided. Most of them had something to say about the way he drove his crew to work to his exact specifications. I took a call Saturday evening, after the funeral was over and we were settling into our grief. The call was from Herman the German who called to tell David he was driving a truck through a place that David always wanted to visit, but never got the chance. Immediately I said, "You are in the Redwood Forest," and he replied that he was. He was very sad at the news that David died the morning of New Year's Eve. He said in his German accent, "I want to tell my story of how I met David." He recounted to me that he had just arrived in America in 1993 and was hitch hiking, and David was the first person to pick him up. He said, "He gave me a ride and he gave me a job." He talked of working for David and learning the tree business, and how eventually he was able to start his own tree company. "I had that company for 5 years and it was very successful, but I didn't like it." He sold his business and went traveling to "Ireland, Canada, and Maui." He wound up back in Little Rock last year and called David and told him, "I am back and I am going to drive trucks, but my job does not start for three months, can I work for you?" and David hired him back and they spend a lot of time together during those three months. Herman said he would continue to talk to David, because he thinks that they can hear you, even after they are dead. I don't know that they can't, so I hope he does and that it comforts him as it will comfort me to know that he remains in the thoughts of so many people.

David was a warm and funny man much of the time, but I never envied anyone who worked for him, especially his sons. His perfectionism on the job and his inability to communicate a directive without bellowing drove his boys away from the business he built for them. They both grew up steeped in the tree business, but neither son could work for my brother, and I understand too well why. His death has left the business to them and to my happy surprise they want to honor their father by keeping the company alive. David had a partner in his business, Orin, who has been in the tree business at least as long as David was. They were friends in their youth and worked together off and on over the years. Both David and Orin had similar work ethics, but their leadership styles differed dramatically and I think that under his tutelage my nephews may flourish, and in time even grow the business. I know that David would be proud of them for trying. I am proud of them for not taking the easy route and trying to succeed in the business their father taught them.

New Year's Eve

We found out this morning that our brother, David, died. In spite of his recent health problems, this was a surprise. He was not always the soundest of mind, but he was the soundest of body in our sibling group. It is more than strange to think that there are now only two of us left, stranger still to wonder at how much time we do or do not have left, given our brother and sister passing before reaching the age of 60. 

As New Year's Eves go, this one is not one of my better, but it is certainly the one I will be likely to remember for the rest of my life. We travel by car tomorrow to Little Rock and will drive the gray distance with a heaviness in our hearts that holds all of the trips back for sickness and death that we have made over the years. It occurred to me tonight that we always looked forward to our trips to Little Rock throughout our childhood and even into our early 30's, but then things started to change. Our sister, Linda, got cancer and married a horrid man while in a diminished mental state. Linda died, then our grandmother died, but not before countless trips to visit her in a nursing home. After Grandma died, we actually began to enjoy visiting David, which was no small feat as he was a difficult man, to say the least. Our relationship with him, which was strained and even distant through most of our lives seemed to develop into something deeper and with more respect than it had before. Visiting him last Christmas when he was sick and needed help to care for himself was a tipping point. He had promised to visit us, but he became very ill and  While the trip was more than difficult for us, he finally realized that he had two sisters who truly loved him, even when he felt he was unlovable. He wanted very much to visit this year, but his health failed him again and he spend much time in and out of the VA hospital in Little Rock over the last few months. We really thought he would heal up again and we would go see him in March. His sudden death this morning put an end to that plan. 

I am glad we had the last year and that he finally knew he was loved and that he had family that would be there for him in any circumstance. I wish he had more than just one year of that knowledge. I wish also that he had found happiness in his life. 

Happy New Year, David. We love you and are proud of the man you were able to become, and we are going to miss you more than you ever imagined was possible.