Tag Archives: grieving

May 14, 2015 · 11:58 am

Atoms of the Soul

Dad sleeping

I dug this little piece out for a friend who is beginning a writing project. Pick an image, I told her. This is one of the first bits I wrote almost year ago with that same prompt. For some reason, the piece ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe I’ll bring it back:

I think I’m done actively grieving, and then I open my eyes. On top of my white king-sized pillow is a smaller one in a rose-colored pillowcase. When I open my eyes in the morning, lying on my side, it’s what I see first. A rose-colored world.

My husband says it barely qualifies as a pillow. It’s a suggestion, a flattened wisp. If I fluff it out and smooth it with my palm, it rises above the bed less than three inches. Strange when I see it that way. It almost looks normal, a utilitarian object that happens to be enclosed in a mismatched bed linen. Its wonder is its malleability. It can be curled into a ball, or laid softly across my chest like a cat.

I wonder if it began its pillow-life full of stuffing and somehow, as it was carried from one bed to the next, it lost a feather here, a feather there. If its diminishment fell beneath notice.

This is the pillow that cradled my father’s head when he died. I remember it from my mother and father’s house in Tacoma. I remember it – or one just like it – on my mother’s bed when she died. If it is the same pillow, I imagine it was encased, then, in a cover with yellow roses. My mother loved yellow. The pillow followed my father to his assisted living apartment in Seattle, then to my house. He tucked tissues under it each night. By morning, he had compacted it into a tight roll. Toward the end, when he was half-conscious in his recliner, I lifted his head and molded it around his neck.

I cannot let go of the pillow. A superstitious person might feel it is bad luck to keep something that came into such direct contact with death, that in those sloughed off skin cells, now reduced to dust, atoms of the soul remain. When I clutch it to my chest, I cradle the little bit of my father that remains.

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November 10, 2013 · 7:37 am

Dad Deconstructed

Dad comes to me in pieces.

As I approached what would have been his 97th birthday, it was his smile that came to me, the smile I felt he saved for me, the one I thought of as my smile.

This week, I’ve been thinking about his voice.

During the years when he was at the peak of his career in the Marine Corps, his voice was a primary instrument of his authority. Years of practice leading men in war and ceremonial parades at Marine Barracks afforded him the ability to issue a command like a rifle report. Without moving a muscle, he could expel a directive so that it burst out of him, sharp and clean. It was the voice that brought me to heel when I was out of line, that sliced up my spine and froze me in my tracks.

After Dad was forced into retirement following his heart attack, his command voice was repurposed for domestic use. It became a vehicle for entertainment. When family or friends lingered around Mom’s dinner table, Dad might without warning boom, “Speak!” Having gained the startled attention of the audience — for it was an audience then — Dad would continue, “Speak thou fearful guest, who, with thy hollow breast still in rude armor drest, comest to daunt me!” His voice would slip into a conversational “just between us” tone as he launched into Antony and Cleopatra, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold; purple, the sails, and so perfumed that the winds were love-sick with them.” Or he would channel Richard Burton, dropping his voice a register, intoning, slowly, “Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony.”

His Marine Colonel voice still made rare but memorable appearances. When my newborn son arrived home from the hospital with an inch and a half of black hair, standing on end, my five year old daughter approached her brother with a pair of scissors. Dad, reading the paper in our family room, suspected her plan was benign but as a father of five children knew something of the jealousies of older siblings. He ordered, “Stop! Put The Scissors DOWN!” For several seconds, she didn’t even expel a breath. Then she put the scissors down.

Dad’s voice continued to make an impression on my daughter, even though he never again raised it to her in anger, as far as I know. This week, I ran across a get well greeting in the form of a comic strip that my daughter created while in third grade to send Dad when he was hospitalized. The first frame was easy enough to understand: a drawing of a hand holding a balloon. The second frame stumped us for a bit. The hand held the balloon in front of a man labeled “you,” for my Dad. The speech bubble above him read, “tehupt!” In the third frame, the balloon appeared to be vibrating, rocked by Dad’s voice, and in the fourth, it had popped. Above the second frame, my daughter had drawn an arrow pointing to the speech bubble next to which she wrote, “My Dad said this is how you spell it.” She wanted to exonerate herself of any blame for the phonetic spelling of the call-to-attention drill command that Dad would demonstrate upon request.

Something happened to Dad’s voice over time. It dropped in pitch and took on a gravelly character. His voice, his calling card, led some people to falsely assume that he was a curmudgeon, or worse.

In 2003, after blowing out a tire on a new curb on a familiar side street in Tacoma, he decided to give up driving and moved to an assisted living community just two blocks from my brother Dean’s home. When I visited the first weekend after his move, I passed the front desk where I heard the staff member describing Dad at the request of a resident. “He’s very angry,” she said, “he might even be dangerous.” She had gone so far as to file an incident report with the nursing staff.

After a small stroke two years before he died, a speech therapist suggested we have an ENT physician examine his vocal chords with a scope, suspecting organic damage to the vocal chords. The physician found evidence that Dad had been experiencing acid reflux without knowing it. Although we tried a medication to control it, the damage was done.

In Dad’s last years, his voice was sometimes more breath than speech. He had to actively concentrate to gather his breath and push it through his vocal chords to produce sound. Reciting his favorite poetry required conscious effort to break the long passages into phrases supported by more frequent breaths.

Two nights before he died, when my husband came home from work, Dad was determined to greet the head of household, his host, properly.

“How was your day, sir?” he boomed, sharp and clean.

I hear it still.

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May 7, 2013 · 2:39 pm

Loss and Its Companions: Love and Forgiveness

Eileen Driscoll Campbell

In grieving Dad, my mind has turned to my mother, who died in 1999. I love her for who she was and her many gifts to me, and I have long since forgiven her for the things that I once ached to receive from her.

If I want to, I can call to mind the feel of resting my head on her bosom, dozing on a long car trip, comfortably settled between Mom and Dad on the plastic-covered bench seat. I can’t exactly say that it’s a recollection. It’s more like a muscle memory, as if the tissues of my face can reconstruct the very feeling of her. She is soft and warm, a little damp with perspiration, and smells faintly of Shalimar talcum powder.

But I also remember Mom being perfunctory when I expressed feelings of hurt or sadness. Which seemed to happen often. “Stop crying like a fire engine,” she would tell me, exasperated. Her lips would compress above her strong jaw line.

A few years into my marriage, she bluntly told me that I would lose my husband if I continued my commitment to career. Prohibited from pursuing the career she had imagined in law, she found success in her role as wife. She believed I would succeed only by doing the same. Implied in her warning, I thought, was a threat that she would be on my husband’s side if I screwed things up.

This doesn’t seem like much of a homily to my mother. But I couldn’t have felt for her what I did by the time that she died if I hadn’t spent time pulling apart the threads of our relationship and reassembling them with the advantage of time, distance and age.

Several years before Mom passed away, when she slid more deeply into dementia, a blanket of sadness settled on my shoulders. I felt immobilized and I had no idea why.

This fits my pattern: having been well trained to ignore feelings of sadness, I don’t recognize them. They rise up. They demand my attention. When they are persistent enough, I attend to them.

Realizing that I was losing Mom made me examine our complicated relationship. I knew she loved me, sometimes with terms, but ultimately unconditionally, with fierceness and loyalty. I wasn’t like her. I would never be like her. But I knew she loved me.

By the time she developed lung cancer, I was at peace with my relationship with her. I forgave her for not always being able to give what I wanted from her. As cancer ate away at her personality and memory, love glowed in the gaze of her fading brown eyes.

Loss and forgiveness. They go together.

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April 19, 2013 · 5:19 pm

Real-life Giving Trees

Camphor tree

On our daily walk down Berrendo Drive, Dad and I often stopped to appreciate this beautiful camphor tree in our neighbor’s yard. There’s something almost human about her – so much so that the female camphor tree branchespronoun is what springs to mind. Her muscular arms seem to embrace the Hall’s home while her graceful, leaf-laden branches stretch out in welcome. Trees can seem forbidding, or forlorn, or, like this lovely lady, friendly. Upon seeing her, my Dad expressed his admiration by reciting lines from a poem he learned in childhood:

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,

         
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;…
— Joyce Kilmer

 

sunset by betsy campbell stoneDad had a friend in our backyard, too. As the evenings warmed, we barbequed and dined outside. Dad’s eyes glowed with emotion as he gazed upward at the young redwood tree next door (at left in this photo). I saw that look on Dad’s face many times: awe of creation in all its variety, love of nature. He would mark the tree’s growth, noting that while he could still see the tip from our position beneath the roof of the porch, he would soon have to crane his neck to see where it met the sky.

I’ve always had the feeling of being in a relationship with trees. When I was five, we moved from Honolulu to Seattle after a disastrous couple of years. The ground had faltered beneath me: Dad had nearly died from a massive heart attack, and we lost Nana, my maternal grandmother, the year prior. I often fled to a tree in Roanoke Park, where hours slipped by as I invisibly watched people walk through the park or I curled up and let my imagination loose in lengthy daydreams.

That tree was my refuge and my friend, even as the redwood tree and camphor tree became my father’s companions. They may not have said much, but their reassuring gentle presence was a gift.

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April 11, 2013 · 1:53 pm

Everyday Moments

outside my bedroom this morning

Here’s what I didn’t do when I first awakened this morning: I didn’t wonder to myself if Dad was awake yet or whether this might be the morning that I found he had slipped away.

And last night, I didn’t begin my bedtime meditation asking for God to release Dad and take him home.

And at dinner time, as Todd and I dined outside for the first time with the arrival of balmy BBQ weather, I didn’t watch Dad’s eyes as he admired the growth of the redwood tree next door, or listen as he launched into, “Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood.”

Losing someone you love is a big change, even when it’s expected, but what I notice most are the small things – the everyday moments that have taken new shape.

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April 2, 2013 · 3:56 pm

Finding Dad Among the Living

IMG_1407

In response to my Easter-inspired Sunday post, my friend Chris Balestreri shared this with me. I thought it was lovely:

“Every good person shapes the infinite life and compassion of God in a unique way.  When that person dies, we must seek him among the living.  Thus, if we want a loved one’s presence we must seek him out in what was most distinctively him, in terms of love, faith and virtue.  If your father, brother or friend had a gift for hospitality, you will meet him when you are hospitable; if he had a passion for justice, you will meet him when you give yourself over to the quest for justice; if he had a great zest for life, for meals with his family and for laughter in the house, you will meet him when you have a zest for life, eat with your family and have laughter in your house.”

– adapted from “The Holy Longing” by Ronald Rolheiser

Ronald Rolheiser

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March 26, 2013 · 8:06 pm

The Voices in My Head

I’m hearing voices, but don’t worry about me. I’ve only been home three weekends since Dad died on January 12, and only this week has life begun to coalesce around a new normal. I’m back to my usual exercise schedule, working on a consulting project, and reconnecting with friends and colleagues.

But it’s quiet enough for me to recognize who’s missing. About a week ago, I learned of the unexpected death of a dear family friend, a woman I first met in 1981.

The first thing that came to mind was her voice: her rapid-fire, nearly breathless way of embracing one with her exclamations of appreciation. No one talked like Char.

Now, as I sit quietly in my living room – Todd’s out, Maddie’s on her own in her apartment, and Thom is almost 5,500 miles away as he begins his study abroad – it’s the voices of loved ones that echo in my head.

In the morning, I still half expect Dad to holler from his room, “Hey Bets, I’m up!” Gravelly and damaged by time, his speech was still arresting when he could summon the breath to support his vocalizations. Much farther back, I remember how badly he startled nearly-five-year-old Maddie when she tried to cut her newborn brothers’ spiky hair. In his best parade ground command voice, he exploded, “PUT. THE. SCISSORS. DOWN!”

And my other mother, Ann. I can still hear the remnants of her Floridian childhood in her soft, kind voice as she asked, “How is my other daughter Betsy?”

Farther back, I hear the bubbling-up belly laugh of our old family friend Patsy. She was so tickled when, for a summer job, I went door-to-door in Seattle explaining the merits of the city’s pilot recycling program. “You’re in gar-BAGE,” she would say in an intentionally affected accent, before unleashing a laugh that started as a chuckle, rumbled up and grew exponentially in volume until her whole body shook. It was infectious.

Certainly I remember their faces: Mom, Dad, my “other father” Terry, my “other mother” Ann, Patsy, and now Char. But what keeps them present in my mind and heart are their voices: their wonderful, distinct way of expressing their affection as only they could.

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March 9, 2013 · 9:38 am

I’m not done

Celebrating a friend's 50-year milestone birthday

Celebrating a friend’s 50-year milestone birthday

My father had several pet peeves when it came to American usage. When asked, “Were you in the military?” he would answer, “No.” He was a Marine, which to him was not at all the same thing. He also did not like being asked, “Are you done?” when someone wanted to know if his plate was ready to be cleared. “No,” he would reply, “but I am finished eating.”

I’m not done either. I have been overwhelmed by the number of people who have reached out to me since Dad’s death on Jan. 12. Many have thanked me for sharing my journey on The Henry Chronicles. But I am still very much coming to terms with Dad’s death and this new void in my life, and by extension, not done writing about this experience.

After Dad’s death, I pushed the “play” button on my life. I accepted every invitation and added a few junkets of my own. Since January 19, I’ve been to Seattle/Tacoma twice, Santa Fe, Minneapolis, Napa, Palm Desert, and Marin. I’ve been part of my niece’s Bat Mitzvah, a 5-day birthday celebration for a 50-year-old, and a 3-day birthday celebration for a 70-year-old. I’ve been gone a full month out of the past two months.

Without planning to do so, I ran away from home. And grief.

Grief isn’t a terrible thing to me. The more that someone is worth loving, the more they are worth missing.

I am still running in to people who do not know that Dad passed away. When they express their sympathy, I find myself saying, “He was 96,” as if to say that because it was expected, I’m not sad about it.

As much as I have enjoyed the visiting and celebrations I’ve been part of, it’s time to stay home. It’s time to remember and reflect.

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February 20, 2013 · 6:23 am

I can, therefore I am

Cocktails with Maddie at Clyde Common

Cocktails with Maddie at Clyde Common

Last week, Todd and I looked at each other in surprise when we came to the same realization. We could go to a movie. We could go out for a cocktail. We could watch recorded TV shows. We could eat baked potatoes for dinner, leftovers, or skip dinner altogether and snack on pita chips and hummus with a great bottle of wine.

I’ve been out of town a total of almost three weeks in the 5 1/2 weeks since Dad died on Jan. 12. I will get home today and leave tomorrow for a friend’s 50th birthday bacchanalian.

With Maddie starting a new permanent job next week (with benefits!), I realized we could do something fun. So we went to Portland where I showed her the wonders of Powell’s Books, the Living Room Theater (where we saw Oscar-nominated short animated films), and restaurants like Andina and Clyde Common.

I know I’m free in a way I haven’t been in seven years, but I can’t quite wrap my brain around it yet. I keep waiting for the electronic collar to zap me when I’ve come to the end of my tether. Or worse, the phone to ring with Dad on the other end, saying, “Bets, I need help. Where are you?”

It’s going to take a while to get used to my new reality. Todd, too. He isn’t getting much in the way of meals these days (I can hear my mother’s voice chastising me for that). But maybe I’ll surprise him and even shave my legs for a change. What a concept.

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February 19, 2013 · 5:23 am

Scott speaks to Dad’s exemplification of Marine values

scottdad

My eldest brother, Scott, 15 years senior, kicked off the family remarks at my father’s memorial on Saturday. He spoke from notes rather than full text, so I’ve done the best I can to recreate them here:

My Dad was, quite simply, the finest man I’ve ever known. He was always a rock for everyone in the family, and his passing has left a void that will never be filled. The family was very fortunate that he was a major part of our lives for so long.

If I were to describe my Dad’s character, I would say that he exemplified the core values of the USMC:

Honor,which means to display the highest ethical and moral behavior; of abiding by an uncompromising code of integrity; and of respecting others. The quality of maturity, dedication, trust and dependability commit Marines to be responsible and be accountable for their actions; to fulfill their obligations; and to hold others accountable for their actions.

Courage, which entails the mental, moral and physical strength expected of all Marines. It carries them through the challenges of combat and helps them overcome fear. It is the inner strength that enables a Marine to do what is right; to adhere to a higher standard of personal conduct; and to make tough decisions under stress and pressure.

Commitment is the spirit of determination and dedication found in Marines, it leads to the highest order of discipline for individuals and units, and it inspires a driving determination to achieve a standard of excellence in every endeavor.

Dad displayed an abundance of all these qualities throughout his life.

But Dad’s most important achievement was of a more personal nature. Dad did not have a particularly happy relationship with his father, although he did not talk about it much until the latter years of his life. He made a deliberate decision to break that cycle and to be the best father he could be. Several pivotal events in his life may have influenced that decision: marrying our mother, Eileen; combat in WWII, the death of Midge, their first daughter; and his heart attack in 1962, which forced his retirement from the Marine Corps.

He was a romantic in the complete sense of the word, with a deep love for his wife and family. There were almost certainly times during WWII when he wondered if he would come home alive. If he had not, I’d be his only child, and I would not have the same brothers and sister.

After Ken Burns’ series about the Civil War aired Maj. Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife, I shared it with Dad. He told me that, had he been writing in the 19th century, he might have written a letter very much like this one:

July 14, 1861

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days — perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure — and it may be one of some conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done.

If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter.

I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.

But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows — when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children — is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my forefathers floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?

I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last hours, perhaps, before that of death — and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country, and thee.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us.

I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me — perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar — that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have oftentimes been!

How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot. I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night — amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours — always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

Sullivan

Major Ballou perished at the first battle of Bull Run.

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