CyberSomatics

Today I took dad to Cottonwood to his cardiac fitness class and then to lunch.  There was a problem with the car — a hose came loose and spilled coolant onto the engine — and we had to wait together while it was fixed.  Dad began to tell the story of his prostate cancer, and I marveled, as usual, at how the construction is modular, and each module is fitted  to its appropriate slot, like a Rubic’s Cube seeking an entropy free state.

Sometimes I feel trapped in the story because I’ve heard it so many times, but on the other hand I can’t just tell him that, because at his age he might need to repeat these stories as a way to maintain the patterning function of his brain.  He does seem to maintain a relatively sharp mind.  It’s his feeling side that’s somewhat inexperienced, having found lodgings in his wife for more than sixty-three years.  He’s 92.

I recall Don Juan telling Carlos that he needed to find the  stories from his life which have a universal application.  I am wondering about the prostate cancer story.  It seems to lack universal application, and be more locked into memory because of the simultaneity of strong emotion:  fear.  I think of other stories which seem more worth saving, such as one in which he and a friend used trotlines to recover the body of a young girl who’d drowned in the Tennessee River, while the bread was being cast on the waters by larger boats.   They brought her up and  propped her upright in the boat, a snow white corpse, while they  rowed back to shore.  They had aboard with them a minister, who behaved as if he was afraid of putting his hands on the corpse.

Ministers often play a shadow role in his stories, when they appear, though there are also good ones.  He tells of his grandfather’s funeral.  In earlier days, he and the old man walked all around their little Tennessee town together,  dad packing the tools.  While great grandfather Euton  was a master carpenter, he couldn’t read, and his schoolteacher wife would read the paper to him in the mornings while he had his coffee.  He was a man who was not trifled with for fear of the consequences.  Dad loved him fiercely, and after he retired as a surveyor, dad returned to fine woodworking.

When the old man died, according to dad’s story, the Baptist preacher was there to preach the funeral, because the women in the family belonged to that church.  Dad’s father was Scottish Presbyterian.  But great grandfather did not go to church and had no interest in going.  So the minister called this to the attention of his family, and, sadly, informed them that as he was not a member of the Baptist church, Brother Euton would not be allowed into heaven.

There was a stunned silence, broken when dad asked the bearer of these bad tidings if he could have a private word with him on the porch.   He relives,  with great satisfaction, that moment, which is the climax of the story, when he said, “If you open your mouth I’ll kick your ass all the way back to whatever rock you crawled out from under, and if you ever see me again you cross to the other side of the street.”   Dad was prone to fits of violence after he came back from combat in the Pacific theater.

The ending of the story was that he went back inside and called on a retired minister and friend of the family to speak a few words over Grandpa Euton’s remains.  He wisely opined that the old man would make it into Paradise.

I don’t know for sure which of dad’s stories have universal application.  He has to choose his stories, as I have to choose mine.  If they are universal, then they are built over an archetypal pattern, and will hold energy when the vessel is gone.  One hopes so anyway.  Don Juan said that a sorcerer is an empty man except for this collection of stories, each with an archetypal core.

Sometimes he needs to talk about mother.  When he does I can feel the pain that’s in him.  It’s the pain that caused his breathing to go wrong and left him wheezing.  He spent two nights in the hospital last week, getting breathing treatments to clear his bronchial tubes and was sent home with supplementary oxygen.  He wears a nosepiece when he’s sleeping or driving or just sitting in his recliner.  Today he seemed much improved.  Maybe he’s over the worst body shock.

A friend told me that after her mother died she felt her there, very close, but that after awhile that feeling went away.   “Enjoy it while it’s there,” she advised.   What I feel now is less intense than last week, and it is still not painful.  It is more like process.  I don’t feel a need to hold on to anything.  I just experience how different it is to be in the house when she’s not there anymore.  Dad and I relate differently, because it’s just two men hanging out together.

When mom was there I had to pay attention all the time.  If I coughed she would pounce on it as a symptom of illness, and if I was going to drive home she would try to locate by what means I would be killed on the way.   “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to rain?”

“I fully expect it to rain, and the roads will become slick and dangerous.  Normally that would be okay but I am high and my reflexes are slow.”  And I would exaggerate it until all she could do was laugh at it.  And if I stayed overnight she would fret about how many blankets I might need.  Would I be too hot or too cold?

She wanted to take care of me, still, and me an old man.  She was a mother … my mother.  As dad said, “She’s the only mother you’ve got.”   Now I have no mother but I had one when I needed one, and long afterwards.  The neighbor who helped look after her didn’t approve of my often calling my mom by her first name.   It was a way to set Ruby free, so that she could find the rest of her story.  She and a sister  close to her in age seemed to be opposites, though in some way they were very much alike.  What was on the surface in one was often hidden beneath it in the other.   My older sister said that when mom died, she saw Ruth come to get her.  She saw Ruth’s face appear in mother’s face.  It was the return of what had been lost.  What was whole and was split apart was whole again.

There’s nothing to do, really, but accept the nature of things, and remember what Satchel Page said.  Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.

I’d heard about Reverend Jenkins, who was just as often referred to as Preacher John.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention except when dad mentioned he rode his bicycle across the United States when he was in his fifties.  His wife went along the route in a camper or motor home — the details would make a more clear picture but you’ll have to settle for an abstract — and now, he is eighty … snow white hair and eyes made kind from seeing clearly.

He could see the spirit moving on the faces, some stricken, some observant, of those gathered to witness the return of the body to a hole in the ground.   There are silent watchers over the graveyard, and while some may be angels, skittering in and out of existence, one that never flies away is a backhoe.  It comes to life only when you maintain it, fuel it, and fire it up.  Then you have to develop a touch for making it an extension of your hand.   Scooping delicately beside the graveled trail through the old Pioneer Cemetery,  Preacher John gathered some dirt in his hand.  He put it on the casket and pronounced, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

He had checked with dad, first, to make sure there was no objection to his doing the closing ritual releasing dust back to dust.   Dad said, “That’s the way we always did it.  We had to lay the body on a cooling board and then dig a grave and bury it ourselves.”

You bury the body yourself so as to not let death get too far removed from the gravedigger.   Preacher John mentioned that we all have to pass this way, that he was eighty, and Ruby was eighty-eight.  Eight years behind the death on this day is Preacher John, who ritually tosses the earth onto the casket —  suspended there — above the grave.

The cemetery is small, and surrounded by a rock wall.  The two plots reserved for Ruby and George have a rock wall around them, about a foot and a half high.  The air smells fresh because it is the first clear day following a series of storms.  The sky is clear and slate blue.  The air is cool but the sun is warming it up.

Around a big black hearse there is a three man crew of funeral directors.  They are respectful and efficient, though a constant dealing with death strips it of the natural solemnity of rare events.  Death is not a rare event at the mortuary.

Around the grave there are flowers, in bunches and sprays.  Gradually the flowers will die and the containers will be thrown away.  The backhoe operator will come over and bury the casket.  And I will be at home, drinking wine, when the feelings I have held back are given permission to congregate freely.

What else was there?  And of course it was Ruby, but not old and enfeebled, looking around her in baffled wonder at those cheering her on toward nothing they could define, beyond another day like today.  It was Ruby younger and more filled with life.  I tried to explain what I was feeling, but Linda already understood it.  She lost her mother many years ago, when she was fairly young.  ”You get your mother back,” she said.  ”But the way she used to be, when she was young.”

One of my clients wrote that we all have to face death, and he asked if I am ready.  I said, “Sure; just let me use the bathroom first.”  And he wrote back he was serious, whereupon I replied so was I.   He wrote back with a quote from Woody Allen:  ”I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Amen to that.

Later in the afternoon dad wanted me to drive him over to see John Jenkins.  He wanted to give him a card with some money in it.  I knew he was needing to take care of things, stay busy with what needs to be done.  And when he’s done with the details he will open to find out what else is there.

(From “The Gates of the Forest,” by Elie Wiesel):

“the body has time; it moves slowly and prudently, step by step, in obedience to laws of gravity, but the soul brushes time and laws aside; it wants to push forward, regardless of the cost in pain, or intoxication or even madness.  that is the only way it has of raising itself to god.  on your way through life you’ll meet men who cling to reason, but reason gropes like a blind man with a white cane, stumbling over every pebble, and when it comes up against a wall it stops short, and tries to tear it down brick by brick, quite ineffectually, because an invisible hand builds it up again, higher and thicker than ever.  We on the other hand, believe in the power of faith and ecstasy, and no wall can stand against us; with our fists and our songs we bring it crashing down.  Gates do not frighten us.  because, my child, listen to this:  other people can open their eyes wide to see god but we close them.  yet these others attract darkness while while we laugh at it, until it follows rather than precedes us.”

Yesterday we drove in the rain down the main street of a one horse town.  The highway has bypassed it but there’s a business district with a grade school, cafe, a couple of trading posts,  shops where nothing is very expensive, and the little tendrils of insurance giants.  Toward the end of the main drag there’s the nicest restaurant in the valley.  It has been closed down for years so it’s just a vacant place with windows opening onto a view to the north, and San Francisco Peaks.  It used to have a bar with a band and a steakhouse.

We drove alongside the ghost of a good time,  past small houses,  to a mortuary which, dad said, had been fixed up and looked really good since the new owners took over.  The mortuary director was named Ben, and he was big enough to be half a defensive line all by himself.  He was showing us caskets, headstones, and packages.  He had just come from church, he said, and he provided his family bona fides in Camp Verde.

There really isn’t much you can do when somebody dies, other than handle it yourself, and bury the person within the time limit for non embalmed bodies, I think 24 hours, or turn it over to a funeral director.  Once it’s being handled by a funeral director it’s just a matter of choosing times and products and services:  working out the details so the director can make it work smoothly for you.

For example, Bueler showed dad the kind of stone, or brass, the Veteran’s Administration will provide for his grave, which he is quick to point out he’s in no hurry to get into.  “You see here where you can put the rank you achieved …”  He was showing how mom’s stone could be matched to it, and what would go in that space.

“I didn’t achieve much rank; I was in the guardhouse too much,” dad said.

“He was in the war,” one of my sisters offered.”

“A machine gunner,” I said, poking dad in the leg.  “A cleaner.”

The other sister said my name aloud, as if I needed to be called back from where I had ventured.  The moment passed.  But after we left and went to the local cafe for lunch, for the first time I heard him say out loud what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story.”  He’d mentioned pieces of it.  Japanese troops put ashore at the wrong place.  Somebody made a mistake about where the Japanese line was.   And they were all blissfully unaware, on the beach, in the gunsights.  And they were all mowed down by machine gun fire, until the beach was a sea of corpses.  Now dad finally stepped into the scene as an actor and not an observer, describing how they had just started at the outer edges and worked inward.

It was something new for him to own what scared him so much when he was still worried about heaven and hell.  I think he’s past that now.  He’s showing emotion openly, there in the space where Ruby is missing.  It is a space which produces surprises.  For example, my older sister irritates the hell out of me with some of her lame jokes.  But as we were driving away from the mortuary I mentioned how big Ben Bueler is.  “Nobody’s gonna give him any grief,” she said.  It was brilliant.  What in the hell was going on?  Dad finally owning what had always weighed so heavily on his mind, and — even more astonishing — Pat making a joke I found brilliant?

Back at the house, I pulled out my guitar and began to play and sing a song without being self-conscious about it.  A black cloak slipped off my shoulders and onto the floor.  There it writhed around animated by whatever dark lord it calls master, then formed itself into a small black dog which went to the front door, sat down,  and looked back as if waiting to be let out.

The doctor was slender and very black, his accent suggested he is African.  He seemed hidden behind thick glasses and his doctor’s smock.  “I know you want to have her in the hospital for three days so medicare will pay for rehabilitation,” he said.  “If I can find something that qualifies under the Medicare guidelines I will admit her.”  But he didn’t find anything.  The old woman had been unable to get out of bed or stand so she was brought to the hospital.  Now she had to be carried back home and put in diapers.  It was a week after that when we realized she’d had a heart attack.  Somehow he missed that.  And the blood infection.  He missed that as well.

“I would like to admit her, but there’s nothing I can do under the Medicare guidelines.”

He seemed a nervous little doctor, and  spoke as if he was reciting, like a telephone solicitor who is told to stay to the script and not leave any air in the conversation for questions.  On his chest there was a tight grouping of .38s from my father’s eyes.  This was the same doctor who had tried to send her home because there was nothing wrong with her awhile back.  Another doctor came in, fortunately, and swabbed her nose.  She had a particularly virulent case of flu.  Now the nervous little man with the shifting eyes was once again sending her away, but there was nobody else on duty to countermand it this time.

The old woman being shuffled around was my mother, not an unwilling participant in the death process, her health having failed steadily since a stroke left her unable to walk without a walker about five years ago.  She took physical therapy and was almost walking again when she got the flu.  As she was recovering from the flu she was left in an examining room and told she could sit on the table.  She climbed up, on to the covering of slick paper, then she slid off, badly slashing her leg on a protruding metal part.  After that she was mostly confined to a wheelchair, watching reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, or doing crossword puzzles.   “I’m just waiting to die, now,” she said, “but you can’t just make it happen.”

She died last night when no family was there.  The report was that she died peacefully, in her sleep.  My sister wondered aloud if they might have put something in the drip, like a muscle relaxant.  I had wondered the same thing.  A little valium maybe.  Just enough to ease the heart into stopping for the last time.  Maybe or maybe not, but we hope it is true that she passed peacefully, in her sleep, because that is how she wanted to go.

After my little sister arrived, we had a coffee at Starbucks, and shared our feelings of confusion and even guilt that we are not more upset by mother’s dying.  We both feel it was her time and she was ready and even eager to leave.  We are aware that others around us might find us unfeeling.  Her death is no tragedy for us, but what should be at this time.

Maybe we will feel differently later, at the funeral, when mother’s body is there, and we  have to say goodbye.  But now we both  feel curiously proud of her for living her life until it became untenable to sustain it, and then exiting in peace.  I saw what her body had become, the one that died.  It was in pain.  The lumbar spine was compressed and  her legs were in pain.   The heart was weak.  The skin was blotched and bruised from blood thinners.  Her upper back had humped outward.  The digestive system wasn’t working well.  And finally she was unable to stand, and had to wear diapers.

That was what died.

What remains is relieved of that leaky old vessel, and the spirit fills me at times with energetic memory of when she was young, and hopeful, and though she could not use  many of her gifts,  was limited by her status and gender,   she gave some of them to me for safekeeping.  She gave me a sense of joy and fun and irreverence.  I passed them along to my daughter.  What is denied in women is passed along to new generations of women.

I do not miss mother, because I do not find her missing.  If anything the escape from that broken body brought her more fully and delightfully into my awareness.  I am thinking of what my friend and client, Letticia, said on Thursday, after the doctor had called me and told me my mother was dying.  Lettie said, “I think of my dad every day, Dan.  And you know, I didn’t think of him every day when he was alive.  But now, I do.”  I started back on Friday morning.

While I was driving,  I talked to my dad and he said mom was doing better and had been talking and eating.  The crisis had passed he said, and she would be moving to a nursing home soon.  That was just four or five hours before he called me again and told me she passed away.  His voice was often overwhelmed by emotion.

Sometimes emotion comes which freezes me in time, waiting for enough composure to continue a thought.  I am in no hurry.  I will stay in that space so long as it holds me.  Interestingly, it was in that moment of knowing death had come, that life, also, asserted itself.  Linda and I spoke of the children and of the grandchildren.  We agreed that our son is amazing to us.  We both see him as having an extraordinary blend of qualities.

We spoke of each child, each grandchild, in turn, and we shared our joys and our fears as regards them.  It is a time of blessing, and one of those rare moment in which one can bless, and be blessed.  And above the blessing there is a spirit, now free.  We will ritually deal with the remains, and celebrate what is contained in a life, in its time.