Endings and Beginnings

It's Midnight and I can hear the fireworks going off.  Lars, surprisingly, is sleeping in the blue chair to my right, the one that sits by the south facing windows, his head and shoulder resting comfortably against the sage green throw pillow.  I'm sitting on the sofa with my laptop resting on my thighs.  When I look at Larry he is surrounded by an aura of such serenity and peace that it takes my breath away.  Such innocence and vulnerability.
Larry is a leaner, always has been.  I have a picture of him sleeping with his brother and sister when he was a kitten, maybe two months old.  His brother, mostly white with just a touch of gray at his forehead, is stretched out length ways on their parents sofa.  Sylvia is curled up in the corner, her feet and nose nestled into the back of her brothers hind legs.  Lars is curled up at the other end, his face tucked under his brother's chin, his arms and feet stretched along his brothers face, his right shoulder resting against his brothers chest.  Larry is the same way with me.  He has to be leaning on me if he can.  Whenever we snuggle he rests against some part of me; sleeping against my ankle, my thigh, or nestled in the the crook of my left arm, his arms stretched across my chest.  Whenever we lay on the floor together he leans his shoulder against my forearm resting his chin on the back of my hand.  The intimacies of moments much like now as I sit here looking at him.
I had such moments with Crook.  And with Sylvia before him.  I cherished those moments as much as I these now.  They are what feed my soul.  I cherish those shared intimacies I have with my friends and family too.  The quiet lunches and dinners.  The raucous parties of Lotteria or Poker with my friends dogs, Coco and Maggie May, running around and through our legs chasing each other and barking as they play with such wild abandon.   I cherish the Opera and the Symphony, phone calls with friends over my morning coffee, and the ones I use to have with my Dad.  Of me leaning on them, resting my spirit, being held or holding them as we engage.  I had that with my Dad, of me leaning on him or him on me, sharing our fears and joys or just aimlessly chatting about nothing for an hour.  I miss my Three PM calls with my Dad.  Even now I still have my eye on the dashboard clock whenever I am running errands, timing them so  I would get home before Three.  Then I remember Dad is gone just as my morning cuddles by the south facing window are with Crook.  Of us resting in the sun on those summer days, falling asleep albeit briefly.  Endings can be so brutal when we lose someone so quickly.  I was in shock for days, weeks, after losing Sylvia.  During her last morning she was chasing her brother around the living room only to be dead seven hours later, wrapped in a towel, laying on the examination table in that cold lifeless room.  So it seems with my Dad.  Living a vibrant and full life one day, gone three weeks later.
This year has been one of many endings; losing Dad and Crook only months apart, the changes to my health which ended the relative settledness of my physical landscape; of completing the fourth revision of my novel I Am an Old Soul, a deeply personal project of nine years.  In many ways I suppose I have been naive about some things.  I thought that if I continued to manage Crook's diabetes, something that I was told I was doing well, he would be with me until he was Twenty.  I thought during my calls to my Dad that he would always just be there with me, his timeless energy living on.  When I shared with him in April the changing landscape of my health he said, "you're not planning on leaving me are you?"  Neither of us could have known that it would be he that was to leave, in just four short months.  Being naive I guess is not an altogether bad thing.  Naivete can have its merits as well as its downside.  One brings with it a relative serenity of being rooted in the present while the other neither warns us nor prepares us for what is to come.  New Years Eve seems to bring us endings, the ending of another calendar year, the deaths of friends and love ones, of celebrating what has been while singing Auld Lang Syne, exchanging hugs at the stroke of Midnight.  We had a New Years Eve ritual in our house when I was young.  Dad always went to De Rango's in West Racine for pizza just before Midnight.  Then about two minutes til he would arrive home with two steaming thin crust pizzas, one cheese, one cheese and sausage, a style that I have yet to experience anywhere else.   While he was gone Mom would set out the root beers in iced glasses and my brother and I would get exited about the prospect of having pizza so late.  Then at the stroke of midnight Dad would flip open the lids and we would dig in.
The evening after my Dad passed I was waiting outside De Rango's to meet my maternal aunt and cousins for dinner, sitting on this large rock in the parking lot.  I was talking to my friend Paul, describing where I was and the memories that it held for me.  Riding my bike up to Nelson's Five and Dime down the street from De Rango's, entering through the back to sit at the counter of the fountain while I watched them ladle out that deep green opaque syrup out of a large ceramic lime for my Green River soda.  Memories of when they closed off the street in front for a evening of square dancing called by my Uncle Dan as he stood on a raised wooden stage in the center of the intersection.  Of the North Shore railroad, its station just down the street,  of us watching the daily runs stopping as they moved between Milwaukee and Chicago.  Of my friends and I going to De Rangos for pizza after school.  He said it sounded a lot like Mayberry, that infamous city from the Andy Griffith Show and in many ways I suppose it was; however, in many ways it also wasn't.  Whichever, that life I was remembering in that moment is also long gone.
This New Years also signifies new beginnings for me; the last full year I plan to be working, celebrating my Sixty-Second birthday; I still gasp at the thought of being that old.  The handing over of my novel to an editor, the new life that Larry and I will be creating as we continue to let go of all the structures that defined our lives while Crook was with us.  It will be another year of feeling into the powerlessness around my health issues and what that may or may not bring for me.  This new year also brings with it the beginnings of my second novel, The Gripman's Daughter, a story of little Anna Thoresen and her life here on this property prior to, during, and just after the great quake of Nineteen-O-Six.  She has been waiting for such a long time, revealing bits and pieces of her life to me as I finished the fourth revision of I Am an Old Soul.  I am excited for her, that she is finally finding her voice, and I am excited by the act of writing, an act that is nothing less than profound for me.  To get completely out of the way, letting the characters tell their stories, to be the passive typist as they reveal their intimate joys and struggles.   To be so present as to cede my body to them, trusting them with what is so precious to me.  Writing is such an extraordinarily freeing experience, much like gardening.  To lose myself in the soil, breathing in the sweet damp aroma of loam as I move my fingers through it.
December Thirty-First brings with it the duality of me mourning the losses of this year while looking forward in celebration towards what is coming just around the corner, this duality of spirit, of one foot in the here and and now and one firmly planted just across the new year.  Dare I mention what good this new year could bring for our collective lives too; the possible end of our current flirtations with the dark side, politically speaking; the inherent power of the MeToo movement and the profound cultural changes that I hope it will bring; a reawakening of our responsibilities toward the downtrodden and vulnerable; all of this embedded into the celebratory fireworks, cheers, and hugs we have just exchanged at Midnight.  Here's to an emboldened shift this new year towards what feeds our love, joy, and happiness and away from what triggers our fears, bias, and prejudices.  Happy New Years!!

Death and the Act of Grieving

Grief is defined by Webster's as deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.  It is a rather matter of fact statement, dry and to the point, with no hint of what to expect in reality.  Over the years I have bore witness to the act of grieving.  A mother standing on the beach in my birth town, wailing, her arms flailing towards God, pleading with him to save her son as his twelve year old lifeless body was being brought out of the waters of Lake Michigan.  I was not much older than her son at the time.  I stood helpless at the grave of a friend who had lost his life in a horrific car accident after leaving our flat, his twin sister weeping, on her knees, clawing at the casket as it was being lowered into the earth.  I carried my maternal grandfather's casket with five others as a young man praying that I would not trip and fall.  I sat on the edge of my maternal grandmothers bed as she laid dying.  I sat at the bedside of a dear friend as he literally and slowly drown from AIDS related lung ailment until the doctor sedated him so he wouldn't suffer anymore.  And after he took his last labored breath there was a silence in the room that defied reality.  I have lost count of all the funerals and memorial services I have been to since the Nineteen Eighties and before.  When I lost my first two partners to AIDS I was stunned more than anything.  Even though we were no longer together I still wept bitterly.  When I unexpectedly lost my animal companion Sylvia nine years ago I was the one on my knees weeping and wailing, crying out, not my baby girl.  And so it was this time with Crook.  I wept for days before his vet assisted passing knowing that I was about to lose him.  No one ever prepares you for someones death.  No one explains to you what it will feel like when you lose someone so close, when you can't catch your breath, when your body feels as if someone sucker punched you in the gut so many times that your internal organs are little more that mush.  No one prepares you for the act of grieving.  I wasn't prepared for Crook's death.  Nor my father's for that matter.  Both came out of nowhere.  Dad's, three weeks to the day he entered the hospital with pain in his gut.  Crook, albeit his pancreatitis had gone into the chronic stage during the summer and I did have "that" conversation with his vet; however, I had expected him to last for a quite a while longer.  I didn't expect to come home from my father's memorial service to immediately start working on stabilizing Crook's emotional life, one that unbeknownst to me had taken a huge hit while I was gone.  It was the coming and going so many times that triggered it, his family of origin stuff, those things that most rescue animal companions bring to the table.
Grieving has never been a healthy act of self care for me.  Make no mistake, it has gotten better over the years but it is still not as healthy as I would like.  Grieving has always been a messy and difficult process fraught with my demons speaking their truths, saying things like you're a horrible father, you should have known better, you are the reasons they are suffering, you were the cause of their death.  That was particularly acute with Sylvia and I still believe nine years on that I have some culpability.  It has taken many years though for that to wane, to see past my demons and more to what was fact at the time.  That is why this time with Crook was so intensely hard for me even though I had made so much progress.  This was essentially the first time I had to make the decision to end a life; something I wish upon no one.  To know when is the right time.  How does one know when it is the right time?  Animal companions lack the one thing that us two legged person's have; a voice.  We can say when we are in pain.  We can describe the issue at hand, ask for guidance, listen to advice from professionals.  Crook was not able to speak his truth.  Cats by nature are resilient beings and very adept at hiding their distress; however I knew Crook's body well and I generally knew when he was in pain, at times a lot of pain; but when is it that the line is crossed, the one that they can no longer return over.
In the days since his death I have come to realize just how ordered our daily lives had become around his diabetes, how everything was planned around the timing of his shots, how they occurred, and where in our home they happened.  How the before and after rituals came to be, how foods were introduced and discarded, supplements shifted.  Looking back I have begun to see now that they just started of their own accord, in the moment, as we all struggled to deal with the immediacy of his new diagnosis in December of 2012.  How, out of the chaos, came the rituals that defined our days and nights up to and including the morning of Crook's death.
Lars and I are lost, literally and figuratively.  The structures that were so ingrained into our existence are gone, never to return.  Gone too are almost all of the rituals that Crook brought with him from his family of origin, the ones that he had held dear with his former family; coming under the covers to sleep against the inside of my left leg as my right leg was bent up to create a tent in which he would crawl into.  Of us laying in the sun as I sung to him.  Him meeting me at the door when I cam home from work, of me carrying him around with me as I put my things away.  Him talking during the night.  I swore when I first adopted him from the rescue shelter he was able to speak a few words.  He would say or I thought he would say after eating his dinner, I Love You.  These rituals are only a few of what we had together.  He came to us with so many, all of which he lovingly taught us over the years.  Without them, we are trying to find our way forward, trying to reinvent our daily lives, trying to recapture many of the rituals Lars and I had before Crook came to us.  They were never lost.  They had just palled in comparison to what Crook brought to the table.
Crook had his rituals with Lars too, ones that were unique to them.  Most were endearing to watch, wonderful really, but others not so much.  Crook was traumatized by his time at Animal Care and Control.  He had lost his family of origin who he had been with for the first ten years of his life, a family that he absolutely adored.  He had lost his bonded mate of ten years when Shadow was euthanized a month into their stay at ACC.  After their surrender to ACC and especially after Shadow's death Crook transformed from being a loving, vulnerable, and open human to being untouchable.  Losing Shadow was the last straw it seemed.  As I was attempting to adopt him Crook savagely attacked a worker and was also slated for euthanasia.  Thankfully, they gave him to a rescue group who then contacted me to finalize his adoption.  And when I got him he was still untouchable.  However, it only took three weeks for him to start becoming his loving self again albeit as I said before with deep memories of his trauma, trauma that did complicate our lives from time to time, especially as he became more ill.  Still, we are lost without his loving personality, his open and vulnerable eyes.  I know that a few of his rituals will live on with us, the ones that Lars has made his own over the six years Crook was with us.  And in time the pain of his loss will lessen.  However, what I have also learned from death and the act of grieving over my lifetime is that each loss I experience becomes a part of who I am, as embedded into my DNA as the color of my eyes or the amount of hair on my head, or in my case, the lack of it.  Whether I was ever prepared for it or not, grief and loss have become my intimate friends, ones that bring both pain and pleasant memories and it will be both that I will rely on to help me find my and Lars way to whatever new life we are meant to have.

Rituals of Life

I found myself reaching for my journal after I came home from swimming this evening.  Writing is such a integral part of my life.  I have a novel that is ready for the editors.  I have two more in the wings, the characters patiently waiting for their day in the sun.  I have a number of short stories in various forms, all waiting for me too.  I haven't though written in my journal since the Ghostship fire last December.  I'm not sure why.  I'm not even sure I need to question why;  the act of writing is organic for me, happening in its own way and on it own time.  I have learned over the years that it is never subject to the ticking of a clock or the changing of the seasons.  It just exists, fully and authentically, in the way I wish I could exist.
Before I started writing in my journal this evening I reread that Ghostship entry.  It was all about loss, of me grieving the lives of those who died so tragically that cold December evening in Oakland.  Those mostly young lives never to be lived into their natural ends; their lives stopped in a brief second of time, swallowed up by the intense smoke and flame; the very things that we interpret as symbols of cleansing and of rebirth, of the Phoenix rising.   Dad's death seems to have brought me back to this place of deep grieving again, of me questioning my life's purpose, of whether I'm happy or just contented to show up each day for the rituals of my life.
As I have said many times before I have a very complicated relationship to loss, one that was created when I was a small child, then reformed again and again through the loss during the height of the AIDS Pandemic, from the loss of partners, of friends, and later of family, both chosen and blood.  I also have said that no one should be forced to have such an intimate relationship with death at such an early age.  We were in our twenties, thirties, and some older.  Most of us were new and fresh to the world, intent on claiming our rightful place as queer men and women, as transgendered, standing together against a hostile world that was intent on slamming the closet door closed again.  We, as those who came before us, created rituals that connected and grounded us to each other.  We created community with our rituals,  ones that sustained and fed us in our youth.  Through these rituals we celebrated life, and love.  We celebrated anniversaries, both personal and collective.  Of uprisings, and street battles, and protests; of weddings, of our love, for each other, of the birth of our children and in some cases, their deaths.  Rituals were and continue to be at the core of our personal and collective lives.  They are tied intrinsically to our identities, they inform how we view the world around us and how the world views us.  We have ethnic rituals, ones that bind us to each other, we have religious and spiritual ones that are marked by their calendars.  We have rituals marking the personal, the collective, ones that mark the passing of the seasons, ones that are millennia old and deeply connected to the core of who we are.  So why is it when I claim my seat again at the table of grief I begin to question the very core of my being?  Of whether I am happy or not?  Of whether my lifetime of rituals that I have established that bind me to myself and the world around me are still valid?  The key seems to be in that Ghostship entry and my deep seated feelings of Otherness.
Those young men and women at Ghostship were living their Otherness, creating rituals with their art and music.  They found joy in embracing it, they found community, and love however much their celebrations and their rituals were looked upon as less then, as an affront to society.  They refused to conform to the "accepted" definitions of wider society and were chastised for it; however, they did it and with an eagerness and zeal that most could only wish for.
I seem to not want to embrace my Otherness; still; even when it is mirrored so beautifully in the lives of those who died that night and in the lives of my many of my friends.   It is a frightening place for me.  It reminds me too much of my childhood, of those years of fear and degradation.  I jettisoned so much of myself during those years.  I suspect but I am not sure that my Otherness is about those jettisoned pieces of myself that still orbit just beyond my consciousness, the ones I still struggle to reincorporate; or better said, the ones that I till the soil for, preparing for their return when they are ready.  So much of my spiritual life is about that preparation, no wonder I am so deeply connected to the act of gardening; besides the genetic predisposition that is.  I do know that my authenticity is to be found in my Otherness, that I will find great joy there.  I just fear that Otherness and joy that it will bring.  It creates that well oiled dynamic of waiting for the other shoe to drop; don't be too joyous, that part of me likes to say, because it will be all taken away from you in an instant.  Better to be content than joyful.  It's that fight or flight thing within me; as always.
I was speaking to a close friend of mine last night and I realized that I still hold onto that understanding that my authenticity is a goal that I am working towards instead of a state of being in the now, one that is perpetually organic.   I suspect if I sit quietly for long enough I will find that I am already deeply grounded into my Otherness and that my life reflects that fact.  And that I am joyous more often that not.  How does that old saying go; I am already at where I think I am going.

Through rose tinted glasses

I am a sentimentalist at heart.  One only has to stroll through my home to see the little things I have placed in every room; a tiny glass vial that holds water from the Ganges, the amethyst crystal on my the bedside table, a photo of my friends and I from our trip to Italy, the ashes of my sweet baby girl Sylvia.  These and others that I have about, or are stored in memory boxes, hold deep meaning for me.  This is not to say that they are who I am; they are not.  They are though a representation of who I am much like the colors, form, and fabric I have chosen.  They are all, in a sense, an emotional and physical road map of my being, my history, and that of my family, both biological and chosen.  They tell the story of the friends that I have loved and lost, of parents and grandparents, of partners who are no longer in this world.  The other day I took out one of my memory boxes as I am in the midst of a deep spring clean the reasons of which I will explain later.  It was filled with letters and cards from my late teens and early twenties, letters from my first lover, ones filled with his professions of eternal love, of building a life together, and later of the frustrations of living separate lives in different states.  Birthday cards from my Gram and a favorite aunt.  Letters from dear friends all of who are lost to me now.  It’s interesting to me how in the first blush of adulthood we see things through rose tinted glasses.  Those honeyed phrases like, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.  We pledge eternal love and friendship to those in our lives never presupposing that anything could change, that we could fail out of love, or lose contact, or that they would leave this earth before us.  I experienced a great deal of loss after moving to San Francisco in those heady days of the late Seventies.  Who amongst us could have foreseen  what level of loss we would experience in just ten short years, what it would be like to have such an intimate relationship with death forced upon us at such an early age.  I am grateful to Goddess that I have survived when almost all of my friends of that time did not.  Many of the sentimental things in my home were given to me by those very friends that passed so early in their lives.  One memory box held gifts from my former long term partner’s brother, from close friends, and lovers, mementos that I still find impossible to let go of.  Sitting on the floor in my bedroom, these mementos scattered about me, I cried as I read the letters from my first lover, as I held long faded pictures of Tyler when we first met, the both of us in the full blush of youthfulness, of pictures of my Gram surrounded by my aunts and I on her Ninety birthday.  This is not to say that I regularly wallow in this kind of dripping sentimentality, I do not, as a rule.  As I said before this adventure into my past was in part due to an ongoing deep spring clean that I am presently engaged in and why I have chosen to write again.   It is not easy for me to share intimate details regarding my health in general.  I have for many years shared about my emotional struggles with my childhood memories.  In fact that was the reason I started this blog in 2009 during the tumult of those years of my recovery.  It was a way for me to speak my truth in the face of the denial of my family and of society.  In those blogs I rarely if ever share about my physical struggles or not that I remember.  (Now I have the urge to reread every one to see if I have indeed written about it before.  Ahhh, the mind does play tricks.)   To say what I came here to say:  I have been struggling with breathing issues for some time now.  It’s been a progressive issue over the last few years that prompted a recent visit to a lung specialist.  A CT Scan later and the doctor has found that I have asthma.  Not an insurmountable problem for me.  In actuality there was a relatively easy fix.  I now use a powdered steroid inhaler in addition to my old inhaler.  The problem that I am now struggling with and that I am now willing to share outside my close circle of friends is that they also found two small growths in my upper right lung, growths that bear watching.  To that end I will have to have repeated scans in the coming months to monitor the size and to check for any additional ones that may appear.  The other significant issue they found was that I have a heart abnormality, one that my primary care doctor said is evidence of an old heart attack.  In retrospect I suspect that is possibly related to when my body crashed in 2006 but I am not sure.  It would certainly make sense of the non-sensical as no medical professional has ever been able to pinpoint the cause of that crash, the results of which I still deal with.   I am hoping that my new cardo doc will be able to confirm when I see them.  It is these last two issues that have forced me to inhabit emotional territory to which I have not had to do before, that of questions relating to my mortality.  Nothing like a couple of shots across the bow of my mortality to get me motived to do a deep spring clean.  I’ve seen what others had to go through when attending to the estates of their dearly departed, what I had to look through when I did it for my friends.  There are always those questions like, why and the hell would he keep a picture of a rock in the middle of a forest, or a piece of the rock itself.  What is this?  A half of broken heart on a chain.  Where’s the other half and did he even remember who had it?  I couldn’t by the way, remember who had the other half.  I did try.  I seem to remember it being a girl.  Or was that a boy dressed as a girl.  Either way it ended up in the trash with many other things that I could also not identify.  Did I say I’m having memory problems too.  I am also not sharing this information because I expect to die soon, quite the contrary.  I suspect I’ll live well into my Nineties like my paternal Gram did and like my father has now, a guy who on some days is more busy then I am.  He leaves me check-in messages almost every day about driving around visiting friends, going out to dinner, and the like.  About leaving his apartment at noon and not returning until past eight in the evening.  No, I’m not writing this because I have any concerns regarding my imminent demise.  My reasonings for this blog and the deep clean is, I suppose, because I am searching for a way to access that emotional territory of powerlessness, the one that I haven’t yet had to do.  This is not to say that my health has been extraordinary.  Quite the opposite.  I have and have had challenges with my physical health for eleven years or more, things that I have had to find a way to coexist with and still have a quality life.  I have, at the best of times, ongoing issues with fatigue, ones that stem from 2006, and alignment issues with my hips and sacrum as well.  Prior to this latest diagnosis I also use to get up in the morning wondering what truck had hit me during the night that I didn’t remember.  My dad and I had that conversation once about a year ago.  We both shared that we are about thirty three on the inside and think we can still do the things we did when we were, that is until we stand too quickly, or turn and find that the left side of our body’s seem to be going in the opposite direction of that of the right, or when we trip over imaginary things laying on the carpet while we feel our way to the bath in the middle of the night; multiple times thank you very much.  Or when we swing our body’s over the side of the bed in the morning and hear the sounds of crunching bone fragments readjusting themselves in our knees, or elbows, or backs, or all three.  Aging is such an undignified process.  We laugh at the stories that our elder relatives or friends tell us recounting how they laughed just a little too hard at a joke, or pulled a chair just a little too aggressively, until those very things happens to us.  Then we are horrified at the thought that someone may have witnessed our distress all the while laughing on the inside on how undignified the process really is and what else may the future hold for us.  And that is the territory of powerlessness that I am now charged with navigating, what does the future hold for me.  I can only hope that my recovery will guide me in living that question until someday I may live into the answer if I am to have the answer at all.  Until then I will be swinging from the trees and dancing in the streets until that is my cardiologist tells me to stop.  And I may not even then.