Eye Of The Storm

This is definitely a transition period in my life, whether I admit it or not. I'm trying to stick with not, while everything is spinning around me and I am digging my heels in. I'm not afraid of leaving the spot I'm in as much as I am scared that I have no clue where I am headed. I've faced a lot these past couple of years. The reoccuring theme seems to be Death. I capitalize it because I have to respect it. It is stronger than I and it is a mystery to me.

I'm starting to think maybe the real problem and the real reason I can't get by Death, is because I refuse to see it as a reason to examine life. I know I should, but that's too damn difficult. If I examine my life, I'll have to face the spin. I'll have to look into the tornado and try to see out of it. I am in the eye of the storm, nothing is getting out but nothing is getting in. And it really is so calm in the eye. A false kind of calm, that you know isn't right. A calm you know can't last, but a calm that is surrounded by so much chaos you are afraid to leave.

I went to yet another funeral on Saturday. This was for a lady I worked with. She was in her mid 40s and died of cancer. Cancer, cancer, FUCKING CANCER.

I sat in the church dressed in an all too familiar black and watched her 4 kids walk down the aisle towards their mothers casket. I believe the youngest was 5, his brother 7, the second oldest was about 13 and I think the oldest was 15 or 16. I could barely watch. Every person in that church thought of their mother at that moment and what they would do if that was them. You could feel people thinking it, you could hear it in their crying. These boys will grow up the rest of their lives without their mother. The youngest not even understanding that day, but having the nightmare of coming to understand ahead of them.

All this death around me in the last 18 months. Six funerals. Losing grandma. I haven't changed a bit. I take that back. I have changed a lot mentally but I have not reflected any of it in my day to day life. I'm in the eye of the storm and I'm still too scared. I don't want to wait till life is over to realize I should've enjoyed it, but I'm also afraid to do something just for the sake of not regretting it. I don't want to make life decisions because it is the age to do that and not because it is what I feel.

I want to actually feel that passionate about something again. The way you felt about everything when you were 13. The way you loved before you knew what love was. Does that ever come back? Is it when you meet that "special someone" or is that "special someone" something that good ole Walt Disney made up to make money. I mean everyone likes the idea of it. Some like it enough to pretend its how they feel. I think some even fool themselves.

Maybe, just maybe some actually live it. At this point I think I need to get out of the eye by myself. Get on the right path for me and be open to conversation if I run into someone on that same path.

My Strength From You

Looking around the living room, it hit me. I was surrounded by family, loving family. Everyone was opening presents, smiling, laughing and saying their thank yous. I took a minute to try to imagine what an outsider would think if they were just standing at the doorway, watching. I wondered if they, too, would be able to actually feel the love that was in that room. If they could sense the familiarity, the compassion, the kindness, the loyalty: The Love.

Sure, my life isn't perfect, but I am very blessed. Looking around I saw my cousins, my aunts, my uncle, my great aunts, my great uncles and my second cousins. All happy, all comfortable. What an amazing thing, so many people who see each other in different intervals throughout the year all gathering in one place every year. All talking and laughing like we all live together, like we're all one big happy family.

As my gaze ran across the room, over the smiles, past the jokes, through the fake dirty looks from someone's joke, my eyes stopped on my grandmother. There she was, sitting in her chair in the center of it all, mostly just taking it in. She'd look up to say "you're welcome" for giving way more gifts than had been discussed and agreed upon. Her face would light up as we openned them. She was surrounded by her family and she was happy.

That's what hit me. It was her family. Her parents came over here from Ireland when they were pregnant with her. Her parents both worked 2 or 3 jobs and never owned a house. She worked 2 jobs while in school and never complained. She grew up to be a Boston public school teacher. An Irish American school teacher who worked in Roxbury during bussing.

Despite all of the amazing things her remarkable life, I realized I was looking at her biggest accomplishment right in front of me. It hit me that the most important thing to her and really the most impressive thing to me was the family she created. The love she created. With the exception of great aunts and second cousins (whose presence still showed how much her family meant to her), none of us sitting in this living room enjoying Christmas day would exist without her. And our mere existance was just the beginning of what she created. The love that was in the air, the happiness of all of her family, the loyalty and the kindness was all a reflection of a strong, caring, selfless woman.

She raised 5 kids, 7 grandchildren, bought a beautiful house in West Roxbury and smiled the whole time. All 5 kids went on to be successful and still she managed to find a way to help them at every turn. She married a wonderful man and had a very loving marriage right up until the day her passed, 12 years ago.

She took me in only two years later when I finished high school and decided to go to school in Boston. There was never a second thought, she actually suggested it. It would make things easier and more affordable for me to live with her, so why would we even question it? That was her attitude and it was genuine. She would tell you that every time you asked but the thing is, she would mean it every time. Even after a few years of coming home late and being too loud, of never keeping my room clean and all the other things I took for granted that I now feel guilty for, she would still mean it 100%. After I had moved out, after 5 years of dealing with and taking care of me, she would often tell my mother that she missed me. Whether she missed cleaning up after me or doing my laundry I'm not sure, but I was sure she meant it. Family was what mattered most to her and to her, that wasn't just a concept. It was how she felt.

Living with grandma taught me a lot of things. I learned a lot about who I was, who she was, where we both came from. I was very lucky to have those dinner conversations about her parents, about her and her sisters when they were young, about how my grandparents met and of course, about her uncle who was in the IRA, haha. This Christmas that I am describing was a few years into living with grandma and maybe some of these other experiences and conversations were what helped put things into perspective. I began to notice how every piece of news in the family came through grandma. All her children called multiple times a week if not every day. Every piece of news and every big decision went through 11 Rutledge Street. It was like living at a command center. Grandma had 7 grandchildren, most of whom were all grown up, and still she had such a big influence in every one of her children and grandchildren's lives.

I'll never forget when grandpa died. I'll never forget absolutely losing it at the wake, not being able to stop crying and I'll never forget grandma there comforting me. All I could think was "here is the woman who spent almost 50 years with this man and she is making sure I am OK". I remember at funeral home just before the funeral, when we were paying our last respects. I was second to last in front of grandma and when I kneeled down there, I couldn't get up. I couldn't stop crying and I knew I needed to get up and let grandma say goodbye. I remember my mother coming over to get me and grandma stepping in before her. I remember grandma kneeling down next to me and looping her arm through mine and holding me close as she prayed and said goodbye to her husband. I will always feel guilty about that, that I never gave her the chance to say goodbye by herself, but I will also always know that she never minded. That she wanted to comfort me and that she was happy to be able to.

The strength she has is absolutley amazing and obvious to everyone who knows her. It's obvious to anyone who knows her children or grandchildren because she has given it to us, along with the love and loyalty that I saw all around that room.

And that's how I came to realize that despite all of the amazing accomplishments in this woman's life, that we were her greatest accomplishment and that we were what she was most proud of. She had created this love that surrounded me on that day and I began to realize that she had created the love that surrounds me every day of my life.

After years of battling cancer and assorted other ailments, it looks like it is finally too much. I just left her house tonight and as she lay there sleeping, unable to get up for the past week and half, I tried to make myself remember the good times. I tried to think of all the happy memories I've had and I realized that while of course there were moments here and there that stuck out, I had a continuous happy memory of her. I could look back at my whole life and remember her happily because I was lucky enough to always have her be a part of it.

Grandma taught me a lot of things, way too many to list. But what she gave me was love, strength, loyalty and not only happiness, but the knowledge to know what true happiness is.

The Inertia of Life

Death has been thrown in my face over the past year. Today I went to a wake for my cousin's grandmother(aunt's husband's mother). It will mark the 5th wake and/or funeral I have been to within 11 months. While I knew her pretty well and she was an extremely sweet and loving person(God Bless her), it wasn't necessarily a tough wake for me personally. Death is always tough of course and the reality of mortality staring you down in the face is often just as difficult as the loss of the one you love. So while this wake was not for someonee I was extremely close to, it once again made me face how fragile my life and the life of those I love really is.

This all started in February of 2008. It was a Friday and I was on my way to Bangor, Maine for work. I was replacing a domain controller for the office we have up there and I had to do it during "off hours". It's a 4 hour drive and I was driving up in the snow. You know how there are certain days you will never forget? The days you always remember the stupidest details of the entire day for; September 11th 2001, Columbine High School Shooting. Well, this was one of those days for me.

I remember working half a day and heading to Maine. The drive was slow and the weather got worse as I drove further up. There was a commercial-free-all-blues radio station that made the drive a little more manageable.

At one point, I had pulled over to refuel on coffee and cigarettes. The snow was starting to get bad now and I was stressing a little. About 5 minutes after I got back on the highway, all traffic came to a hault and I fish-tailed down Rte 95N in Maine for about 3 minutes. Luckily, I had seen the stop in traffic way beforehand and I still managed to get control and stop before hitting anyone(again, some days you remember every detail).

Anyway, I was actually getting off the highway in Bangor, 1 minute from the office when Andrew called me. He had called twice that day, but between being busy at work and trying to concentrate on the roads, I had just decided to call him back when I got to the office. I figured he forgot I was in Maine for the night and was just seeing what was going on for the evening.

As soon as I heard his voice, I could tell something was wrong. His father had passed away(God Bless him). He had fallen down a flight of stairs and did not know he had internal bleeding when he just got up and went to lay down. Talk about a shock, talk about completely out of nowhere. My best friend was devastated and I was 4 hours, a night of work and a snowstorm away. I'm not sure I ever felt worse.

A couple of months later, it was a weekend where my personal cell phone had been dead and I hadn't plugged it in all weekend. Almost all my friends had and used my work cell phone now, so I never really worried too much about it. Well, it was Sunday and I had plugged my phone in an hour before. I decided I would go check my messages. I walk over, turn the phone on; "1 Message". I flip the phone open and it's from a real good friend of mine, Dan. The message said:

"Shane's dead. Call me"

The message was from Saturday morning. I was shocked, stunned, horrified and I couldn't believe I hadn't responded to Dan in over 24 hours.

Shane was 23 years old and was hit by a train walking to his friends house early Saturday morning. They were trying to get an early start on a camping trip. God Bless him as well.

Thanksgiving morning I woke up to find out that my great uncle had died at 75 the night before. Now my grandmother is going to be 84 in February of this year. She has two living sisters and they both had living husbands. Our whole family is really very close. Out of all of them, Conrad was the healthiest. He was never in the hospital, never sick, hell - he painted his shed the day before. Well, he had a heart attack and died.

He was my great aunt's husband and also one of my grandfather's best friends. I will miss him. God Bless him, too.

A couple of weeks later, on a Sunday morning in December I woke up to a call from my friend Eric. He was living in Chicago now for grad school and should've known better than to call me this early on a Sunday morning. I let it go to voicemail and rolled over. Whatever he had to tell me from Chicago could wait. I knew he wasn't calling to make plans for the day or anything immediate, so I wasn't too worried about it. I slept till about 2:30 in the afternoon, woke up and migrated to the couch. I turned on some football and made myself something to eat.

At about 4-430 I remembered Eric had called that morning and I decided to check my voicemail:

"Hey man it's Eric. Jesse passed away last night from a blood clot in his lung. I'm trying to get a flight home tonight. Give me a call when you get this."

I couldn't believe it. Jesse? He's 27 and in the Army Reserves. He survived 3 years in Iraq. He died of a blood clot last night??

And it was the truth. God Bless him.

Deaths have a funny effect on the living and we deal with it in a funny sort of way. It is always an unavoidable reminder of our own mortality. It makes us face a question we hate to ask. "What happens when I die?" Everyone asks themselves that question at some point during a wake or funeral. It's how we as humans understand anything. We relate everything to ourselves. And that's a scary thing when it comes to death.

Death also makes us realize what we take for granted and more importantly, who we take for granted. It makes you think twice about making the extra effort with everyone because it could, indeed, be the last chance you get.

The thing about it, though, is that death is TOO uncomfortable for us to think about. Our mind is good at protecting itself and to constantly think about our mortality would not be good for us. Usually a couple of weeks after the funeral we are back to taking as much for granted as we did before.

That isn't a completely bad thing. It's pretty obvious living our whole lives thinking about and worrying about death is not a good thing. But where is that line? Because I am pretty sure we shouldn't go back completely to everything we take for granted. I guess having all of these deaths within a year hasn't allowed me to go completely back.

We spend a large portion of our lives trying to feel important, accomplished, respected. Life, time, the universe or however you want to term it, doesn't give a shit. After Jesse died, Andrew said something to me that I thought summed it up pretty well. He said:

"the scary thing is that your grandmother had a blood clot in her lung last year and survived. She's 83, Jesse was 27 and in good shape. There are some things that you just can't control."

And that's it right there. We are so small and so unimportant. I've always loved to sit on the beach at night, when no one's there and just wash the waves roll in. To stare out at how vast it is. How it moves so strong, relaxed and unwavering. The tides come in and out every day. That will never stop. They don't care who or what is on the beach. The water wildlife adapts to it. It never adapts to them.

Some people say they like to lay out under the stars and gaze upon a completely open sky in the country side. It puts them in perspective. That is what the ocean does for me. It goes out for as far as you can see and the furthest you can see is a fraction of its size. Not only is it vast, but its movements remind me of life and death.

Life keeps going and it keeps going according to itself. Death comes when it will come. Death takes no notice of us or if we are ready to go.

Death does not care if you are in your 50's and leaving a wife and two kids behind.

Death doesn't give a shit if you're 23 and getting an early start on your camping trip.

Death could give a fuck less if your wife is old and needs your help, if your kids aren't even close to ready to accept this.

Death is indifferent to the fact that you are 27 years old. Doesn't care that you spent 3 years in Iraq and are trying to get on the police department.

And Death doesn't care if you are 90 years old and ready to go. Doesn't care if you made a decision to stop eating and drinking. Death will wait a week and a half and pick you up on his/her schedule.

It's a hard thing to think about and an even harder thing to come to terms with. I've been forced to this year. I think all we can do is live. Swim and play and laugh in the ocean of life. Ride the tides in and brave the tides out because no matter how much you complain or fight them, they aren't changing, slowing down or speeding up. We need to stop taking so much for granted. We need to appreciate what and who we have in our lives and not just because they might die, but because they are alive and so are we and we are sharing this together.

Because when it comes down to it, maybe we're all just stealing minutes.

"laying in bed tonight i was thinking

and listening to all the dogs
and the sirens and the shots
and how a careful man tries
to dodge the bullets
while a happy man takes a walk

and maybe it is time to live "