Occam’s Razor

Suicide’s devastation and odd harvest

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see…
that suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

From the movie M*A*S*H

To me, suicide is one of these impenetrable mysteries. I think I can understand how someone who has had the bottom dropped out of their lives might want to take their own life. What is there to live for if, for example, all your living relatives were killed in a car bomb attack? Nonetheless, feeling as if you want to kill yourself and actually doing it are two different things. Our life force is incredibly strong. No matter how much pain we have in our lives, no matter how bleak our future looks, almost always something will pull us back from the ultimate act. Instead, we seem to prefer to kill ourselves slowly through the usual vices like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, food and risky behavior.

Nonetheless, suicide happens. In 2001, approximately 30,000 of my fellow Americans killed themselves. The favorite method is to use a firearm. You are most likely to kill yourself if you are male, white and age 75 or older. You do not expect someone who is relatively young and very gifted around 6:30 one morning to plunge head first from her eighth floor dorm room. This young woman, age 18 and from a good home, was a close friend of my daughter. She, along with her many friends and her devastated family are left to grieve, wonder if there was something they should have done to prevent it and to struggle with the powerful feelings a suicide will surface.

At first, the story of her friend’s death came in muddled. We heard that she fell down a stairway. Where? At home or at college? It must have been a very long stairway to cause massive brain death. There was no hint that the death was a suicide. That came later during a gathering of friends of the young woman. At the gathering were a school counselor, friends and parents of friends and many, many suicide notes that she had written, including one to our daughter.

I met Taylor a couple times. Like most of my daughter’s friends, she was bright, goofy and artistic and she had a skewed perspective on life. She showed up most recently early last month when she attended her belated 18th birthday party. She had come home from a university out of state for the occasion. They laughed, ate pizza and a birthday cake, and watched videos. It felt somewhat quaint. Here was my daughter, a high school graduate taking a gap year between high school and college and she was still able to muster a small coterie of close friends for a birthday party.

Six weeks later Taylor was suddenly, tragically and pointlessly dead. She left few tangible memories: a long missive in our daughter’s yearbook, a few gifts received over the years, and one last unfathomable suicide note. My daughter is mostly quiet but we know that she is wracked with pain. She feels great anger at her friend, but in her final act, Taylor left no way for her to reply. Suicide closed all channels of communication. She feels survivor guilt. Should she have noticed her suicidal tendencies? She also feels a prematurely early brush with mortality. When you are 18, you should think of life as limitless and the possibilities boundless. Death is an abstraction. No more. Here is one more radioactive thing to sort out as she struggles into adulthood. Fortunately, her boss cut her some slack. She did not lose her job while she struggled to sort out her feelings. Three days later, she headed back to work, in part in the hope that it will distract her from her constant circular thoughts.

Most likely, her pain will linger. At 18, my daughter has to try to make meaning from an act that really has no meaning. She has to figure out how get beyond survivor’s guilt. In the end, she has to find a way (if it is possible at all) to move beyond her anger and her feelings that her friend was a coward, into acceptance. More likely though her feelings about Taylor’s death will forever linger, rising its angry head during moments of stress in her life. She has no choice but to come to terms with her loss. She lost a close friend, someone she thought she knew intimately but apparently not well enough.

We are keeping a close eye on our daughter. At some point, she may need grief counseling. I can imagine but not really understand the magnitude of the pain her family is going through, particularly today when family becomes the center of our lives. A million charitable acts, a thousand hugs and expressions of sympathy can never wipe away the devastation her family must feel. An amputee can learn to have a productive life again, but can never erase the memory of life before the amputation. So too a family struck by suicide will never be the same again. It can go on, but it will never be the same.

Taylor was declared brain dead, but her young organs were still alive and were harvested. I presume that many of her organs are now occupying new bodies. Likely, her organs are helping others live better and more hopeful lives. While nothing can erase the devastation of her death, some small measure of good came from it nonetheless. Perhaps her youthful heart now beats inside the chest of a woman with severe heart disease. Perhaps her kidneys will mean that two lucky people will no longer have to make twice-weekly trips for dialysis. I cannot help but honor her family for making these were painful but correct choices during a time of utter devastation.

Taylor’s mind and spirit are gone. Yet pieces of her body are still alive in others. While her family and friends remain devastated on this Thanksgiving holiday, other families are probably celebrating their perverse good fortune. I do not know if Taylor would have wanted her body used this way or not. Perhaps she chose to fall in a way to kill her brain so other parts of her body could be used to bring others happiness that she did not feel. Her tragic death is more evidence that life itself is utterly baffling. Yet even in a death this bizarre and tragic, a few are getting the chance to live again.

November 22nd, 2007 at 11:28am Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Two years later

Two years later, I feel acceptance and serenity.

When a loved one dies, there is no accounting for the nature and length of the grieving process. Nor is there a way to know for certain whether you have really moved beyond their death. Yet here I am two years after my mother’s death. When I think about Mom at all, and most days I do not, those are my feelings. I accept that she is forever gone from my life. I find myself wholly at peace with her absence.

When I learned of her death, I was racked with powerful bittersweet feelings. Feeling unhappy, distraught and an emotional wreck were to be expected. I did not expect to also feel relief and happiness. I was relieved that her misery was over at last. I was glad to resume a normal life. In addition, I was happy that just maybe my mother was now in the presence of the God she had so slavishly worshipped. Perhaps she was even reunited again with her long deceased parents and many deceased siblings.

The first few months after her death felt surreal and were unnaturally quiet. It seemed like her death was just an extended absence. After all, for much of her last thirty years we lived apart. At best, I spent a couple weeks a year with her. It had become normal to be away from her. What was not normal were the last fifteen months of her life. She and my father had been living their retired years in far away Michigan. Her health had reached the stage where living at home was no longer an option. They sold their house and moved across the Potomac River from me to a retirement community called Riderwood. However, by that time she could hardly stand up and had to be carried up stairs. When she walked at all, it was with her walker. I went from seeing her once a year to once a week or more. Unfortunately, the time I did spend with her was rarely pleasant. Each visit demonstrated that her body was falling apart. Finally, there was little more of my mother than a shrunken old woman in a nursing home bed, ashen in the face, her eyes occluded and blank, her hair a surreal unnaturally white color. Near the end, her disease would not let her utter a word or even turn her head. You were never sure whether she heard you or not. I put on a brave face in her presence. I bawled in the hallways or in the privacy of my car. At some point how could anyone, including the dying, not take some relief from death? My mother’s death was ultimately merciful.

It took about six months before I really felt the aftershocks. My mother was the emotional heart of our large Catholic family. She was a loving person but she was far from perfect. She grew up impoverished, traumatized by the Great Depression and burdened with the impossible expectations from the God she loved yet that seemed to require ever more sacrifice and duty. She exuded duty and guilt, values she probably would not have wanted to transmit to me but which I absorbed anyhow.

My forebrain understood all this, knew that she loved all her children and was a product of circumstances. My neocortex had a different opinion. It still resented my perceived insufficient nurturing and the harsh punishments she meted out when we were children. I navigated through life but felt more and more detached. Inside, I was filled with turmoil. My neocortex was like a vast, dark storm cloud desperately wanting to discharge some lightning. My forebrain wanted to keep it at quite a distance.

Eventually I found myself disgorging my confused feelings to my therapist. Through therapy, I learned that to resolve my feelings that I had to do more than blab to her about them. I had to share them people who could empathize. Attempts to talk about my mixed feelings about Mom with my Dad were deflected. This left my siblings. One sister did not reply when I cautiously raised the issue in an email. Another listened patiently then gave me a different perspective of Mom, for being younger she had witnessed much less of her dark side. It was an older sister who I met for dinner one evening when she was in town who at last let me discharge my voltage. The one thing I had not anticipated was that I had a sibling who was far more upset with my mother than I was. It was clear from the endless tears flowing down her cheeks as we talked. “It’s is just hormones,” she claimed. For me, while I loved my mother some part of me also loathed her. Yet my older sister claimed that she never loved my mother at all. Her tears suggested otherwise.

At first, I had no idea I was on the road to recovery. Yet within a week, the storm clouds had disappeared. The voltage was gone. The skies were blue and the sun was shining in my life again. Since then I have felt simple acceptance at her passing and a serenity that suggests my feelings for my mother have finally been wholly reconciled.

On my first motherless Mother’s Day, I made a point to drive out to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland where her cremated remains lie. This Mother’s Day, I felt no such compulsion. When I am near Silver Spring I certainly intend to pay my respects again. However, the sense of duty is gone. This suggested to me that whatever unintended apron strings were pulling at me from her grave had been cut. Instead, I concentrated on the one living mother left in my life: my mother in law. I made sure we sent her a card and called her on Mother’s Day. I wished her a Happy Mother’s Day and many more to come.

Somewhere in the space-time continuum, my mother’s spirit is still present. She is happy for me. She is glad I cut those final apron strings. At times, I imagine that she is whispering to me. She is saying, “Get on with life, Mark. Life is to be cherished and savored. Do not forget me but do not let my death hold you back either. Be free of me so you can make the most of your life. Someday we will meet again, and when we do we will meet in love, as friends and as peers.”

Thanks Mom. I love you too.

November 16th, 2007 at 10:41pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | one comment

Legacy Achieved

Exactly a month ago today, on Christmas Eve, my friend Frank Pierce passed away. I briefly eulogized Frank after I learned of his death. As I noted at the time, that entry hardly qualified as a proper tribute to him. Even though I knew Frank for sixteen years, no eulogy I could write would begin to do him justice. For Frank Pierce was a complex mosaic of a person. I could put together only a few of his puzzle pieces. It would probably take a couple dozen of us sitting around a bar for the better part of a day slowly sipping from some dark German beers to properly give broad perspective to this remarkable man.

Most people are content to live ordinary and comfortable lives. On the surface, Frank’s life was quite ordinary. He raised a small family and lived in modestly in the Maryland suburbs. His work for the Navy spanned many decades and involved activities that I never fully grasped. Apparently, part of it involved writing manuals so Navy pilots could land properly and using the correct protocol on foreign vessels. He was actively involved in the Washington area’s local German American society. Through it, he developed a network of friends outside of work.

Frank was the type to grasp at any opportunity offered him, no matter how small. His nature was to be incessantly curious. He was also a ruthlessly pragmatic person. He would allow no mysticism to cloud his clinical observations of the world. He knew humanity’s place in the universe, and in his view it was much lower than we thought. He saw us as lucky to be where we are and believed we would not be there for long. Humanity, he often told me, was not a naturally peaceful species. We are a warrior species and aggression is in our nature. We had to fight it by carefully teaching each new generation and by learning lessons from history. He could survey the world around him, see its terrible wars, genocides, and rampant cruelty, and realize that Americans live fortunate and almost gilded lives. Our liberty, he frequently observed, was purchased at the cost of millions of lives. Consequently, he had a deep respect for the military (perhaps in part because he spent so much time working for the Navy), its necessity, as well as the necessity at giving the Commander in Chief the benefit of the doubt. In our many discussions on the War on Terror, and the War in Iraq in particular, he was very deferential to the President. Remember, he frequently told us, he has access to intelligence you and I do not. It was with some reluctance that late last year he came to the same conclusion that I did on Iraq even before the war had started: that we were engaged in folly. The Iraq War may be the sole instance wherein I was more cognizant of reality than Frank Pierce was.

Frank was a deeply grounded man, with his eyes wide open, who was always trying to discern cause and effect. The tools that gave him such wisdom included a natural brilliance, acute curiosity, direct exposure to the real world in ways that most of us would avoid, but also consummate self-education. It could take the form of slogging through history books, newspapers and magazines or watching C-SPAN for hours on end. However, it also came from simply making connections and talking to people. Most of us are lucky to know the name of our Congressman or Senator. Frank was likely on a first named basis with many of them. He could send a thoughtful inquiry to his Congressman and he would receive a personal and thoughtful reply. He would often get a phone call from them too. Not only did he know his representatives by name, they knew him by name too. No doubt, his incisive letters to them stood out in the crowd. As a writer, he could communicate with great effectiveness and did so in a way that almost compelled the recipient to start a dialog.

In short, Frank was not just a neat older guy friend (he died at age 75), a mentor and a role model, but also an inspiration. All these wonderful aspects of Frank though pale in comparison to the ruthlessness with which he seized control of his life. He found nothing boring. Every day and every hour had potential. It seemed to me that he saw his mission was living intensely. In truth, I think he simply found life too engaging to be philosophical about how he chose to live it. His incessant itch was not just to enjoy life, but to draw in all the world’s energy, let it flow through him and use it to energize him some more. If he were a light bulb, he would have radiated 1000 watts.

I was not surprised then to find myself in Princess Anne, Maryland last Friday for his memorial service. The service occurred so belatedly because both he and his wife suffered terribly from the same terrible infection. Apparently, it contributed to his death. It took weeks for his wife Nancy to recover to the point where she could participate in a memorial service.

Frank grew up in Princess Anne and apparently was enchanted with the small town. He wrote a book about life there as a boy during the World War Two years. I have not yet read the book (although I do own another book of his, which I purchased from him), but I hope to read it some day. At the memorial service, I spoke with a number of people who mentioned the book on Princess Anne and said it was Frank’s best work.

Speaking with his daughter after the service, I learned that Frank was the last of his family to grow up in Princess Anne. About fifty people attended his memorial service. At first, I was disappointed. I expected the church to be overflowing. Then I realized that almost everyone had to come from out of town. (It was about a three-hour drive each way for me.) Princess Anne is not convenient to anything. It is about fifteen miles south of Salisbury, Maryland on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (This area is now chicken country. It is where chicken magnate Frank Perdue made his millions.)

The service was held in Princess Anne on a cold, clear and blustery day at the Manokin Presbyterian Church, a church so old its brick walls go back to the 1700s. Even his son remarked on the oddity of his father being memorialized in a church. Frank believed in God, but he was not a Christian. Nonetheless, there was a time as a youth when he attended services regularly with his family at this historic church. The minister, who had never met Frank, did his best to eulogize him. Even so, it was hard to get many of the congregants to join him in The Lord’s Prayer. His son, Frank H. Pierce IV, eulogized him at the man we all knew, loved and admired: the ruthlessly skeptical and secular man with a boundless passionate nature for life.

I attended the service with my friend Angela. After we paid our respects to his family, we found ourselves in the cemetery behind the church. There we found the graves of the Pierce family, from the first Frank Pierce, through the Junior, then to the Senior then to our friend, Frank H. Pierce III. Frank cremains will be placed next to those of his family.

His grandson stood alone by the family graves after the service. Angela and I spoke with him. We spoke of the cynical, sectarian man we knew. “I last saw him on Thanksgiving,” he said, “and I had a feeling it might be the last time I would see him.” Angela and I expressed our utter shock at his death. We had no idea he was even sick. It was not something Frank chose to share with us. Frank kept up his regular conversations on my electronic forum, The Potomac Tavern, with his usual eloquence until the day before he died. He sent me a brief German translation I needed on that day too.

Whether grandson or friend, on one thing we could agree. As I noted in my first entry on Frank, Frank claimed he was not concerned about death. He was concerned about leaving a legacy. From his wonderful family (some of whom I met for the first time) to his many, many friends, all of us were deeply touched by Frank. We were simply blown over by his infectious spirit of life. As I spoke with his grandson, we agreed. If Frank’s mission was to leave a legacy, then he accomplished his mission in a singularly fantastic style.

I already know that when I pass out of this life that my life will be little more than a footnote to those other than my family. Frank’s seemingly ordinary life though will not be. He made quite a splash. Frank was simply unforgettable, which is why I am sure thirty years from now, if I am still alive, I will continue to treasure my time with Frank. I will think wistfully about our many conversations. Frank succeeded in getting every minute and every molecule of enjoyment out of life. I have never met anyone else who did this. I am certain he belongs to a small coterie of people who have ever lived who managed to do so.

Now that’s a legacy.

January 24th, 2007 at 10:59pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Thanks Frank

My friend Frank Pierce died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve.

Frank is a friend who I initially “met” online. Meeting someone online nowadays is not a big deal, but around 1990 it was a weird thing to do or to even acknowledge. In those days, there was an Internet, but it was not accessible to the average person. I met Frank on The Back of the North Wind, an electronic bulletin board system that resided on the spare PC of a woman named Dawn Gibson who, if memory serves me right, lived in Arlington, Virginia. In those days, you used your 2400-baud modem to dial up these computers, play games, swap software and engage in electronic conversations with people in your community. I wrote more about those days a year or two back in this entry, if you are interested.

The Back of the North Wind drew an eclectic crowd. You had to know someone who knew someone to get on the board because it was not advertised on Mike Focke’s BBS list. My friend Debbie who I met on a board called Zonzr directed me there. I quickly spent almost all of my electronic social life on Dawn’s board. A good part of the reason was Frank Pierce. Frank was an older gentleman who was fifty something at the time. He was virtually unique among people in his age group for indulging in this online community thing. His passion was discussing politics and he quickly found that an online community allowed him to engage in his habit very easily. Somewhat to Dawn’s disgruntlement (for she hated politics) her board was nearly taken over by an inner ring of Washington area amateur policy wonks. Frank and I were two of the main contributors to those political discussions.

The thing about Frank though was unlike lots of amateur policy wonks, he knew about what he was talking. Frank had a depth of understanding that always amazed me. Our political discussions evolved on The Back of the North Wind and later on the message board I set up and which is still in business, The Potomac Tavern. (Frank was the co-host.) There was not much about the world that Frank had not studied in some depth. When the conversation moved from politics to other areas like religion, Frank was equally well informed.

Since I “met” Frank in 1990, I figure I have known him for sixteen years. Over those years, I figure I actually met him in person less than a dozen times. Our last meeting was about two years back when I met him at a Starbucks near his house. We spent about an hour discussing Potomac Tavern business and just chitchatting. I also had the privilege of being invited to his house a couple times. Once he hosted a Back of the North Wind get together in his backyard. We did these get togethers once or twice a year for a number of years. More recently, he invited me to stop by so I could take him for a test drive in my new hybrid.

Frank was tall, thin as a rail, bony, grey haired and both gregarious and scholarly at the same time. He and his wife Nancy had been married forever. If my memory serves me correctly, he is also survived by two sons and a daughter. He was active in the local German American community, spoke excellent German, and even wrote a newspaper column for a German newspaper called, no lie, The Potomac Tavern. It discussed current political topics happening in our nation’s capital in the context of a real tavern with a regular crew of erudite patrons. Frank recently related a story of a reader who came to Washington and was disappointed to discover that there was no Potomac Tavern in the city. Frank’s portrayal of this fictional tavern was so convincing he had some people fooled.

For among Frank’s many talents, he was an excellent writer. He wrote a number of books. None of them was a best seller, but he knew how to target the small markets. You can buy a number of them from online sources like Amazon.com. Writing alone would suffice as a creative outlet for most people. However, Frank was also a photographer. On The Potomac Tavern, if you dig for them, you will see many an amazing photograph taken by him, often carefully retouched with Adobe Photoshop. Frank’s photography occasionally dabbled on the risqué side. He spent some time doing figure photography, and a number of his models posed in the buff. I recall one trip to his house when he showed me his portfolio of nude photography. As with all his other art forms, he excelled here too.

Frank was also incredibly generous with both his time and money. While on The Back of the North Wind, he grew to know a woman named Judy. Judy lived in the backwoods of Virginia somewhere. Frank saw potential in Judy: a very smart woman who simply did not have the resources to go to college. For whatever reason, Frank decided that he would make an investment in Judy. I do not know to what extent he did it, but I know he helped pay her way through college. Frank could do these things, you see, because along with all his other talents he was a shrewd investor. This, plus his modest lifestyle, gave him the leeway to occasionally indulge in these acts of targeted charity.

I expect to blog more about Frank in the weeks ahead. I am getting details of his death second hand, but it sounds like Frank died from the complications of bronchitis. I can say that I was shocked to learn he had died, since I believe he was in the bottom half of his seventies. He always seemed in such abnormally good health. He was so skinny and his mind was always so sharp that I fully expected him to be pontificating on my forum into his nineties.

Among the many topics I explored with Frank over the years was aging. For me death was and still is a very scary thing. Frank was not scared. He was pragmatic: there is nothing you can do to stop death, so the only thing to do was to enjoy what life that is given to you to its fullest. From a man who did not seem the least bit religious, this was a both a very pragmatic and positive philosophy. He succeeded in walking his talk. He lived his final years as if he expected to live a hundred years more. He said he was not concerned about death, but he was concerned about leaving a legacy. At that, Frank clearly succeeded.

Frank taught me many life lessons I might never have grasped otherwise. I am trying to emulate his philosophy and to see every day as a gift full of boundless potential. If I can manage to do it, and I have a lot of work to do to achieve this, then perhaps Frank will have passed on to me his most treasured gift.

Frank, I am going to miss you like crazy. You have been such a positive presence in my life these last sixteen years. You are one of these people who, when you pass on, leave a large and beneficent wake. You touched and inspired many people. We in your online world were a small fraction of them. Thank you for your friendship, which has touched me in ways I still do not fully realize. I am hopeful that I will carry forward your positive spirit into the second half of my life. I hope that I can draw on your positive energy and pull some people into my wake too.

Rest in peace, dear friend.

December 27th, 2006 at 10:28pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | one comment

The Last of a Generation

My Uncle Dick died on Sunday. I cannot claim to have known him well. I visited his house at least once in recent years. He showed up at the occasional reunion that my mother’s side of the family put together. Uncle Dick lived to age 84, which is about average for my mother’s side of the family. For someone of his age, his body endured a lot of abuse. He smoked and drank freely. He was arrested at least once for driving intoxicated. As a result, he lost his driving license. According to my mother, he was a lot of fun to have as a younger brother. Like his older brothers, he was a big man on the high school football team. Like many Michiganders, he spent his time in the auto assembly line. He also drove the Tasty-Rite potato chip truck. To me the most amazing thing about the man was how much he looked like my grandfather. The last time I met him, I could not tell him apart from a photo of my dziadek circa 1960 or so. He spent almost his entire life in Bay City, Michigan and married a woman named Grace, who survived him. Together they raised four children and loved six grandchildren.

Perhaps you have read the book (or have seen the movie) Cheaper by the Dozen. My mother lived it: there were an even dozen in her family, including the parents. (This compares to the more modest ten in my family.) However, unlike the Gilbreths their financial situation was far dicier, and often dire. Starting with my grandparent’s first child Edith who was born in 1908 and ending with Betty in 1933, their ten children arrived over a remarkable 25-year period. Edith was born when her mother was 22. Betty arrived when my grandmother was 47.

My grandmother, who I never met, had the unfortunate experience of having three of her children die before her. The first was Don, who was shot down over occupied Europe in 1944 during the Second World War. A year later, it was Albert’s turn to meet an untimely end. Ironically, he also died in an aircraft. In his case, he was a private pilot and his plane malfunctioned. Albert was next in the queue, dying of severe stomach ulcers in 1951. The following year my grandmother died. Her husband survived her for 15 years.

The rest of the Zielinskis were blessed to live full lives and die of the complications of old age. Essie went at age 83 in 1996. Ernie followed her a few years later at age 84. Somewhere around the same time the eldest child, Edith, died. She (so far) proved to be the most long lived and died at age 93. My mother followed Edith last year. She died at age 85.

Now there are just two left. Gee is in assisted living in Jackson, Michigan. She appears to be dying of the same disease that killed my mother: Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. If she can hold on until February she will see her 80th birthday, but the odds are against her making to her 81st. When Gee passes, that will leave only Betty.

I once wished I had been the last child in the family, rather than one of many in the middle. I figured I would get the special attention from Mom and Dad I likely did not get as a middle child. (I am the fifth of eight.) Now, I am glad to be a middle child. While the timing of our deaths is unknown, the odds are that the later children in a family will help bury those siblings who were born before them. With each progressive year, ever more of the times, people and the friends they knew disappear from their lives forever.

I am just starting the process with my mother’s death last year. Fortunately my father is still alive and in good health. Logically he should be the next of us to go. Since my siblings are all in good health, after our parents are gone I expect we will have many happy decades ahead of us to enjoy each other’s company. Yet time will eventually take its toll on us too. Invariably some of us will pass before others. We too are in a death queue. We are just ignorant of where we are in the queue. Right now, it is difficult for us to see, but we felt its cold presence when our mother died last year. It is better and it is easier right now for now to put this later phase of our lives out of mind.

Within a few years, Betty (whom we call Aunt Penny) will likely be the last of her dozen alive. She will have no sisters or brothers to visit or call on the phone. Fortunately, she has three terrific sons, one daughter and hopefully a devoted husband who, I am sure, will be there for her in her last years. In addition, I am hopeful that she will have the good fortune of her sister Edith, and live into her 90s. For Aunt Penny is a spunky woman, quirky and irreverent, but warm and down to earth nonetheless. For most of my siblings, she is our favorite aunt.

How strange and odd an experience it must be to be the last sibling alive in a large family. I imagine it must feel sobering and melancholy at the same time. Particularly if your spouse precedes you, your final years are likely to be ones where the past seems to be on the tip of your tongue and yet has receded from everyone else’s views. Meanwhile, a new and different world swirls around you. This world is both familiar yet alien. My mother felt this way in her last years. She did not understand computers and this Internet thing. In some respects for people of a certain advanced age, death may be a relief. For the Earth you see is not quite the one you knew: it becomes something like living on another planet.

Being a middle child, when my time comes to meet my maker, I will likely have siblings around to help me on my dark passage. For this, I feel fortunate. As death becomes less an abstraction and more of a near term reality, I will likely feel differently.

I do make this promise though to my younger siblings who may some day be sitting around my hospital bed as life utterly drains out of me. It is this: if there is a next life, then after I die I will be there at the gate to welcome them home.

September 6th, 2006 at 08:49pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

JonBenet Ramsey and the tip of the iceberg

If I have one axe to grind against our modern news media, it is how it can blow one individual story way out of proportion. Last week while traveling on business, I was watching CNN from my hotel room in Augusta, Maine. The story broke that John Mark Karr had been arrested in Thailand as a suspect in the now ten-year-old murder of child model JonBenet Ramsey. I immediately groaned and looked for things to throw at the screen. I knew what was coming. For about a week, CNN along with the other major American media outlets were going to turn into the “Nearly All JonBenet Ramsey News Channel.”

It was not that I am unhappy that maybe this case would finally move toward resolution. Justice delayed is better than no justice at all. The other hard, arguably far more important news was out there, like the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the continued carnage in Iraq and increasing violence in Afghanistan. These stories all got short shrift, if they were mentioned at all. All our news media outlets were focused on the murder of one child ten years ago.

Yes, our media decided that the case of one six-year-old girl who had been brutally murdered more than ten years ago was worth at least 75% of its news time. Just in case we had forgotten the gory details (if that were possible, since they have been burned into our national conscience by this point), it was: let’s regurgitate the disgusting details of her murder again and again, every hour, on the hour. Let us recall the secret chamber beneath the Ramsey house. Let us relearn that the poor child had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned. With this new development, new questions were raised. Was it possible that her parents been falsely convicted by the media for the crime? Isn’t it a shame that her mother Patsy Ramsey passed away in June of cancer under a cloud of shame and scorn? Prominent psychologists racked up big consulting fees on the airwaves. The hype was incredible; the news content was marginal at best.

Why is JonBenet Ramsey’s life still worthy of such media hype? Because she was a weird little child-model who had something terrible and bizarre happen to her. We were also fascinated because her parents had turned her into a moneymaking machine, seemingly so they could live a more opulent lifestyle. Yet there was a more obvious reason than that: because JonBenet Ramsey’s murder was one mother load for the media. Her strange case reached the demographics that our news media wanted to reach. The more they publicized the case, the more their ratings soared. The more their rating soared, the more they could charge for advertising time. Their pandering was mostly about corporate profits, not the public interest. As long as the news media could sustain interest, other more important news items got short shrift.

Focus, people. Of course, I have sympathy of JonBenet Ramsey and her family. Nevertheless, her death is simply a blip on the radar screens of child deaths, murders, molestations and abuses going on it there all the time. It is just that those other statistics do not seem to bother us. We are mostly inured to the daily child carnage swirling around us.

Approximately 30,000 children die every day from preventable causes like dysentery, malaria, fouled water and hunger. I would die of shock if CNN spent just fifteen minutes a day drawing our attention to these statistics. The closest we came to it recently was the media’s exposure the situation in Darfur. The genocide going on there among the non-Braggara tribes in western Sudan included not just many miserably dying children, but adults too. Then there was the famine, war, racism, terrorism and the half hearted international response to the crisis. Thousands of women were raped, sometimes repeatedly. Over 50,000 people have died in Darfur.

Sad as Darfur is, it is a minor problem compared to what has happened in the Congo. 3.8 million Congolese died in their latest civil war. Who among us Americans actually cares? Most Americans could not even pick Congo out on a world map. More people died in the Congo’s latest civil war than the 3.3 million Cambodians that were massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Yet we find Terri Schiavo or JonBenet Ramsey to be far more interesting, even dead, than millions of remote and desperately poor people in the heart of Africa or Asia. It is almost like 1,000,000 deaths of people we do not care about from ordinary preventable disease and civil war in foreign countries equals one death of some prominent White Caucasian American under unusual circumstances.

Okay, so we tend to have a hard time seeing beyond our own borders. So let us focus on some child abuse statistics here in our own country then. 1500 children die from child abuse in the United States every year. That is over four JonBenet Ramseys a day. Children in this country suffer 140,000 injuries as a direct result of child abuse every year. There are 1.7 million reports of child abuse every year. Add in neglect and the total rises to 2 million reports a year. Among those reports are between 150,000 and 200,000 cases of child sexual abuse a year. One in four women report being sexually abused as children, and one in seven men make a similar claim.

The living adult survivors of child abuse carry forward staggering amounts of psychological damage. Many will end up abusing their own children. With my adult perspective, I now count myself as a survivor of child abuse too. I love my mother, who passed away last year, dearly. I remember and cherish the many wonderful and truly extraordinary things she did for us. However, she also had times when she flipped out. Her emotional teakettle was frequently close to boiling. I suffered from the toxic environment of having an easily angered mother ready to lash out at her own children both emotionally and physically. My Mom was also a firm believer in “spare the rod and spoil the child”. In the 1960s, her behavior though was completely ordinary. If getting abuse at home was insufficient, there was much more to be witnessed in our parochial school. Most of my friends received the same, or worse, from their parents, so my case is hardly noteworthy. It took a couple more decades before society acknowledged that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. It was not tantamount to child abuse; it was child abuse.

So perhaps the JonBenet Ramsey case, because it happened to someone who looked more like a porcelain doll than a human being, gives us a safe way to indirectly confront the abuse we received growing up. Acknowledging our own abusive childhoods may be too painful. However, we can project our feelings and anger into a singular case and talk about it endlessly. JonBenet Ramsey’s tragic death then perhaps has the noble side effect of letting us express those feelings, yet without actually acknowledging our individual traumas.

The real conversation though should not be about JonBenet Ramsey, but about the abuse the vast majority of us suffered as children from people with power over us. Much of it was from parents. Sometimes it came from siblings. Maybe it came from the bully who beat us up at school, or a friend who through wounding words sliced our fragile psyches into cutlets. Child abuse, spousal abuse and plain old abuse goes on all around us. The best neighborhoods are no less immune to it than the roughest neighborhoods. Many of us seem to be unable not to hurt the ones we claim to love the most.

When popular news stories like the JonBenet Ramsey case are invariably raised in the media, outlets like CNN and Fox News would be doing a public service to also expose the scope of the child abuse problem. Perhaps it will bring this shame out of the closets where we can talk about it. Instead of letting these wounds fester, perhaps it is time for us to collectively take steps so they can heal.

August 20th, 2006 at 05:56pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

In memoriam

Death is an unpleasant fact. At a certain age, it becomes a fact that is harder and harder to put out of mind. When you are seventy-something and living in a retirement community it can become pervasive.

Such is the case at Riderwood, a retirement community in suburban Maryland where my widower father lives. The man who sat with you at dinner last night might be in the hospital the next, in the nursing home a week later, and dead a month later. On the other hand, they might die suddenly of a stroke. As if you needed any reminder of life’s fragility in this age group, death notices are prominently published in the lobby. You can check out their names as you get your mail.

I spent most of my day yesterday with my father in his retirement community. Mostly we hung around Riderwood. I joined him on his daily exercise. During allergy season, this means an indoor walk between the campuses’s many buildings. If you know the stairwell system you can walk a loop continuously indoors for the better part of a mile. This is possible due to the many enclosed elevated walkways between buildings.

With no interruptions, it would be a brisk walk of twenty minutes or so. However, it was hard to us to walk for more than a couple minutes before stopping. My father is extremely sociable and he seems to know half of the community’s thousands of residents. When he sees someone, most of the time he wants to find out how he or she is doing. The said answer usually is, “Could be better”. Very often, we learn that someone’s spouse or friend is ill.

Illness and death comes with this territory. The successful master of retirement living at Riderwood has to roll with death’s punches. You are in a compulsory boxing match with death. You need to keep your wits about you so you can avoid the punch, for there will be another one tomorrow. Invariably though you know that your body will betray you. In that event, Riderwood is prepared for your decline. When you can no longer navigate inside your own apartment, there is a campus assisted living facility. Next to it is a nursing home, where my mother spent the final five months of her life.

Most Riderwood residents understand that they are living on borrowed time. Their apartment may be their latest home, but their final days will likely be spent awkwardly in assisted living, then precariously in the nursing home. There, likely quite gradually, death will take them. This is actually the good news. Since the nursing home is local, your Riderwood friends can come to visit you. It is not as good news to spend them in a nearby hospital, surrounded hopefully by family, but likely bereft of the companionship of many of your many Riderwood friends.

Once or twice a year, Riderwood holds a memorial service for those who have died. Since my mother passed away last November, she was on the list of residents to be memorialized. My father asked me if I would attend the memorial service with him. He dressed for the occasion in his darkest suit. My mother would have been proud.

Outside the chapel were the pictures of many of those who had died. I found a picture of my mother when she was about my age. Inside the chapel, an organ played solemnly. My father and I took our seats on the right side of the chapel, which was reserved for families of the deceased. We looked at the names in the order of service. My father checked the names of the residents he had come to know. As the names were read, I realized that a number of spouses must have died within a few months of each other. Morris Questal must have went first. His wife Julia was not too far behind him.

The service was non-denominational but certainly had a theistic theme. “Oh God, our helping ages past, Our hope in years to come, Be thou our guard while life shall last, And our eternal hope”, we sang. The Riderwood Balladeers, a sometimes off-key men’s chorus of seventy-plus Riderwood residents sang Gentle Annie by Stephen Foster, Think of Me and Sevenfold Amen.

Altogether one hundred and six names were read aloud. They represented the residents who had died between October 2005 and April 2006. As my mother passed away November 10th, she was thirteenth on the list. After each name was spoken aloud, a bell was rung. If a family member was present, you raised your hand. An usher passed you a white rose. For about a third of the name read, no one family member was present to receive the rose.

One of the residents (Jane K. Myers) wrote a poem, which she read. It said in part:

Do not grieve because you miss us.
Listen, and you’ll know we are near.
We still meet you in your dreams.
And make mischief in your rooms.
We will whisper in your heart
And tickle you inside your brain.
Love entwines us all your days

I found myself a bit choked up, although I tried not to be. My mother may be gone nearly seven months, but the grief was still nearer than I thought. In some respects, my attendance was an act of courage. I can understand why my sister and wife passed on attending this service.

After the service, we wended my way from the chapel to my father’s apartment. My father held the fragile white rose in his hand. “I was glad you could come and represent the family,” he said. “You have done your duty.”

“Dad,” I said gently, “I came to honor my mother, and her life, and to support you. I was my privilege to be with you tonight.”

“What should I do with the flower?” he asked somewhat pensively.

“You could take it and put it on Mom’s grave,” I suggested.

“Yes, but the wind might carry it away.”

“You have Mom’s picture on the dining room table. Why not put the flower in a small vase and place it next to her picture.”

I gave him a final supportive hug, and then exited down the fire escape toward my car. It had been a long day.

June 3rd, 2006 at 12:37pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

The honor never ends

There was no need to buy a Mother’s Day card this year. There was no mother to call on the phone today either. I am feeling a bit like Opus the penguin today. Maybe I should be spending $1.99 a minute on a Dial-a-Mom service. Nah, it would not be the same. Just as there is no place like home, there is no mother like your mother. One thing is for sure: my mother will not be opening any mother’s day cards this year. She passed away last November.

I do still have a mother in law, for which I am grateful. I am sure she is a terrific mother (although my wife might quibble) but she was of course not my mother. She came with the marriage and in the unlikely event that my marriage dissolves, she goes out with the marriage too. Moreover, unless I elect to travel 2500 miles to Phoenix, it is unlikely that I will see her. Nevertheless, I call her Mom. She seems to like it and it is an easy thing to do. I signed the card my wife picked out for her. As mothers in law go, she is better than most. Nevertheless, she is not my mother.

I do honor my wife on Mother’s Day, since she is the mother to our fabulous daughter. I usually buy my wife a card for Mother’s Day, and do her chores. Yet this year it skipped my mind, probably because I did not need to buy one for my mother. What my wife really wants for Mother’s Day is downtime and a foot rub at bedtime. That is easy enough to accommodate.

That is not to say that I did not honor my mother at all. Mother’s Day weekend is an appropriate time to pay a visit to her grave. My father and I contributed plenty of fresh flowers for the cistern on her grave. With luck, they may look good for a week or so. We actually did our duty a day early. The Saturday before Mother’s Day is a popular day at the cemetery, yet I suspect it will be even more jammed today. For a while there I felt we needed to take a number. My mother will have to forgive our flower arrangement. There were no women present to artfully arrange them. We did the best that two heterosexual men with engineering mentalities could do. I brought yellow tulips; yellow was my mother’s favorite color.

It is entirely possible that with my mother dead that she will “see” more of me now that when she was alive. When she was alive, she was hundreds of miles away, and not easily accessible by either airplane or car. At best, I visited her annually. Now her cremains are interred in the Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Visiting her grave means crossing the Potomac River, not the Appalachian Mountains. The cemetery is not too much out of my way when I go that way, so I suspect I should be able to pay my respects at least once a quarter. I will be one of many people helping to keep the floral industry in business.

In her last year of life, she seemed to want rest more than anything else, for her disease meant that sleep often alluded her. There is no doubt that her cremains will remain at rest. Yesterday was the exception. It was almost lively with all the visitors at the cemetery. Peace is one of the cemetery’s key attributes. If you like meditation, a cemetery seems an appropriate place to visit. It is a good place not only to pay your respects to loved ones, but also to contemplate your own mortality. It does not take too many minutes of contemplation though before further contemplation becomes challenging. When surrounded by death on all sides, all one can really say about death is that it is. It is beyond argument or dispute. Rather than be the creepy place imagined in horror movies, cemeteries are spots of utter tranquility in an otherwise restless world. If I craved tranquility in order to get some sleep, I suspect sleeping in a cemetery would have me sleeping like a baby.

Some part of me though does wonder why I go and pay my respects. Exactly who and what am I respecting? What is left of my mother is a box of ash a few feet underground. I am too secular to believe that her spirit hovers above my shoulders when I visit. Thus far visiting my mother’s grave has neither made me mourn nor feel wistful. However, I do feel a certain sense of the sacred with each visit. While my mother’s spirit may well still be around, it cannot be geographically located. Her grave though is a physical place where what is left of her physical body remains.

The meaning of my mother’s life, like birth and death, is shrouded in mystery. Like most mothers, my mother was a nurturer. She provided a foundation and an infrastructure that I took for granted growing up. With an adult perspective, I understand just how much her commitment to her children really meant. It meant giving up her future so we could have a future. It meant millions of carefully prepared meals, thousands of diaper changes, and hundreds of visits to the pediatrician and emergency room. It meant a clean house, laundered sheets, picnics, recitals, science fairs, movies and watching bad family television together on Friday nights. It also of course meant hugs, kisses and caresses. I gave her lots of “go power”. For twenty-five years or so, we largely consumed her life.

All this so many of us could raise similarly talented children with good values, so we could have interesting jobs, enriched lives and make our marks on the world. For all that to happen though she first had to be there for us. It was a Herculean effort, but one at which she met the challenge, not just for me, but also for my seven other siblings. She did it without so much as getting to put one contribution into her 401-K. Her rewards were to be intangible.

That is why I still honor her. For I was launched into this world on her mighty shoulders. I could now be miserable. I could now be impoverished. I could now be dysfunctional. Heck, I could now be dead too. That none of these things have happened I can largely attribute to my mother. That is why although she is not around she is still a daily presence in my life. No gift that I could give her could come close to what she gave me.

Thanks Mom. Rest assured that as long as I am alive, you will never be forgotten. There is no card for you this year, but I still honor you on Mother’s Day, and will every Mother’s Day for the rest of my life.

May 14th, 2006 at 12:00pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

Report from the Post-Mom Era

Everyone grieves uniquely when someone they love dies. My mother passed away nearly six months ago. Overall, I have adjusted quite well, as has my family. At least, that is how it appears. For all I know my father and siblings could each be going through their own painful grieving processes. If so, they are not talking about it. My mother’s death last November 10th was hardly unexpected, although it did come quicker than I anticipated. Most of my tears for her loss were shed when she was still alive. Many occurred after visiting her during my many visits to her in the nursing home. While grateful to have time with her during her last days, I was also crushed with every visit, because with every visit she was more diminished. It was heartbreaking to see such a vibrant woman reduced to near total dependence on others. It was hard to stay chipper while feeding my mother, wiping her chin and brushing her teeth. It was little wonder then that her actual death was as much a relief for us as it must have been for her. My life was no longer framed by her decline. My weekends opened up again. There was no reason to rush out and see my father every week as I did with my mother. My father has all the companionship he wants in his retirement community. He seems to have moved on rather quickly too. As he told me, he really lost my mother several years earlier. When her mind went as a result of her disease, much of the woman he loved died too.

That is not to say that no one really mourned my mother’s death. I am sure I will be grappling with her absence for the rest of my life. In truth a day does not go by when I do not think of her. Her absence no longer brings tears, but does bring a certain wistfulness for the time when she was such a presence in my life.

Probably the person most affected by my mother’s death was my wife. For reasons I do not fully understand, my wife deeply cared for my mother. Of course she has a mother of her own that she loves, but my mother did not come with strings and a history. I am not sure that my mother was quite the wonderful woman my wife made her out to be. While she brought no baggage to her relationship with my mother, I had baggage with my mother. She never saw the anally obsessive, screaming mother I remembered from my youth. Her mother, on the other hand, never raised her voice.

It probably does not matter why my wife so bonded with my mother. All that really matters was that my wife was an angel during her darkest days. She visited her at least once a week, usually at midweek when no one else could. She patiently listened to her, spoke honestly of our small little life, helped her with intimate female things, and found unique ways to touch her heart. A few weeks before her death, my wife put together a large photo collage of her children and grandchildren and placed it on poster board at the foot of her bed. By this time, my mother was in the advanced stages of PSP (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) and could not move her eyes. However, she could stare straight ahead and look at our pictures, courtesy of my very loving wife. Perhaps during those dark times she also could marvel at how many wonderful children and grandchildren resulted from her life, how we all turned out to be such good people, and how we were making our marks on the world.

I do not think my wife has fully grieved over my mother’s passing. Other than her grandmother, my mother was the first woman that she deeply loved to pass out of her life. In retrospect, it was natural that she would be attracted to her. They were born about sixty miles apart and almost forty years apart. They came from poor white families and had similar values. They learned how to scratch a living. Both were introverted. In addition, both knew how to delight family and guests with culinary treasures made by scratch from their kitchens. In retrospect, it is as if I ended up marrying my mother. Moreover, in many ways, it was as if my wife ended up marrying my father. No wonder she feels more wedded to my family than her family.

My father is busy making the best of the rest of his life. After 55 years of marriage, you might think that the idea of another love interest would be far from his mind. That is not the case. He may be 79, but he is in good health. He clearly misses the intimate daily connection of living with a woman. For better or for worse, he has plenty of women in his age group in his retirement community. My mother had only been dead a couple months and he was making carefully considered and very gentlemanly advances toward other women.

I was wondering if my siblings would be offended. So far, no one has spoken up. I spent a week examining my own feelings. By pursing other women, especially so soon after my mother’s death, was he in a way dishonoring my mother’s memory? Should I feel upset or offended? Some small part of me wanted to feel this way, but the other part remembered how absolutely dutiful and loyal my father was during their long marriage. While I am sure their marriage, like all marriages, had its ups and downs, my mother got quite a bargain in my father. He is sober man, cautious with money, steadfast in his devotion, faithful and as devoutly Catholic as she was.

At 79, I am also aware that my father was not going to live forever. How could I not wish him happiness in his final years? Perhaps he will get a reward for his devotion in the heaven he hopes to get to someday. Meanwhile, I see no reason why he should not have a bit of a reward while he is still alive and in reasonably good health. Therefore, I wished him luck. So far though he is finding that these late in life relationships challenging. While I think he harbors ideas of another marriage, I doubt many of the widows he is gently pursing feel this way. They are settled in their apartments. Their wills are signed, sealed and notarized. Their children are probably not anxious to have him inherit any of it. Time will tell whether another marriage is in his future. Nevertheless, I can see why he is interested. After 55 years of marriage, six months of being a bachelor must still be a disconcerting feeling. He dutifully took care of my mother, but she also dutifully took care of him. Even during his short stint in the Navy, someone else did his laundry. He lived at home while he went to college. He is used to having a woman take care of him. His current state is exceedingly unnatural.

On the other hand, my wife is having mixed feelings. She sees my father as the father she never had. (Her father left home when she was six, and divorced her mother at age eight.) While she loves him as much as any of us, I think in some ways she thinks by pursuing women, especially so soon after my mother’s death, he is dishonoring her and their marriage. They were after all devout Catholics. Catholics believe in marriage for life. How could he consider someone else after so much time loving just one woman? I think she is wondering how someone in such a devoted marriage like his could move on so quickly.

Yet he has moved on. In fact, I think all my siblings have moved on. We are still touched daily by the memories of our mother. However, life did not stop when she died. It kept moving on and we were still caught in its vortex. Bills still had to be paid. Our children and significant others still had to be dealt with. We honor my mother, in a way, by choosing life, for she was always a woman in motion. She would want us to do move on. Perhaps that is why while I still miss my mother, it took me only a few weeks to work through the bulk of my grief.

Life is about living. Our ends will come soon enough. For now, simply enjoying being alive and healthy seems a fitting way to celebrate and honor my mother’s remarkable life.

May 3rd, 2006 at 09:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | one comment

Requiem for a Feline

(If you have Windows Media Player or can listen to a Windows Media Audio (WMA) file, please click here and listen to this music (8.6MB) when reading this entry.)

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

Preface to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography

When I blog, I try to let words express the depth of my soul. Sometimes I come close, but words can never quite capture my feelings. Nothing that I can say in this entry can quite express how I feel right now, although the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s quote above comes close.

I used to poo-poo the notion of angels. Not anymore. Sprite, my cat of 19 ½ years of age who was put to sleep Sunday night, was an angel. He was a special angel sent by the cosmos just to me to provide me comfort, solace and love through two turbulent decades of my life. Sprite was simply love wrapped in a feline form. The depth of his love for me was focused and boundless.

Anyone who has had a pet knows how attached you can get to them. However, some pets are singularly extraordinary. That I was fortunate enough to have him as my pet means that there is either is a God or I am the fortunate recipient of a random act of the cosmos.

Mark me well. I know how people with pets can love them dearly, as I certainly loved Sprite. Nevertheless, Sprite’s love for me was extraordinary and far beyond what I even imagined was possible in my life. During the stresses of life that would have pulled apart ordinary men, Sprite was there for me. His love was like a thousand watt light bulb. He radiated his love on me in such high megadoses I was able to pull through my challenges time and time again. He did it without saying a word, except for an occasionally silent meow. He did it by looking at me intently with his devotional wide eyes and purring contentedly on my lap. He gave all he had and more for 19 ½ years. He would have stayed with me forever had his body allowed it. However, even with a cat with such a gentle constitution, death could not be postponed forever.

Sometime during the last week, Sprite’s intestine became perforated. He developed peritonitis. The twice-daily pills, the daily yogurt, the special cat food and the laxative which kept his symptoms in check lost their efficacy. By Sunday, he had no more appetite and could not even drink from his water dish. He found refuge behind the couch. I coaxed a couple spoonfuls of yogurt into his tummy, which were quickly thrown up.

It was time to visit the emergency veterinarian. I prayed of course that we were not to taking him in to be put to sleep. However, the X-rays revealed the sad truth of a cat who had given all he could give. The perforation could be seen easily, and his kidneys were enlarged and his stomach extended. It is unlikely that surgery could correct the problem. He had worn out. There was nothing to do but spare him further misery by putting him to sleep.

Sprite was quiet but attentive when we wrapped him in a towel and took him into the car. It was evening. He did not fuss in my arms at all. He looked wide-eyed and with wonder at the streetlights, the signs and the stars. He was calm. It seemed to me that they were a comfort to him. Perhaps they were a distant memory of wherever he was before he arrived in this world. While my wife drove, I gently stroked his face. Underneath the towel, somewhere there was a small but consistent purr.

Sprite left this life with dignity and unflinchingly. We held him in a blanket, looked at him intently and stroked him. I told him again for the millionth time how special a cat he was. He truly was the best cat who has ever lived. Gentleness and love expressed the character of his soul. He watched us with his wide eyes, seemingly hearing every word we were saying although we knew he was deaf. He was not afraid but was comforted that we were there for him. The narcotic he was given freed him of his pain.

“Dad, there is no more I can give you,” is what I heard him say in my head. “Sprite, we will meet again, sometime and someday, and in some other life,” I said to him quietly, tears streaming down my face. “And then once again you will be on my lap, and I will stroke you and pull back your bat-like ears and you will be purring contentedly. I love you, son.”

It was my wife and the veterinarian who actually put him to sleep. I could not find the strength for that final act. Simply seeing the euthanasia tube in his paw was hard enough. He watched my wife intently during the euthanasia, half shut his eyes and was gone. He went peacefully, which was right. In addition, he went embraced in love.

We will meet again, best friend and soulmate. There is no way I could begin to repay the love you lavished so consistently on me for so many years. I thank you for your gift nonetheless. I know we will be with each other again. For now my love, au revoir.

March 28th, 2006 at 10:30am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2006 | 6 comments