Long Time To Pass

Carrying Ryan in his backpack

I now belong to an exclusive club no one wants to join: parents who have lost a child. “I cannot imagine how you must feel,” say other parents not in the club. Neither could I before it happened but I knew it would be awful, and it is.

What happened wasn’t my worst fear, but close. I feared our son might die alone, and he didn’t. He lingered in the ICU for nine days. During the first five he was in and out of consciousness, knew all his loved ones were with him and had the Last Rites. There’s nothing for me to fear anymore, but sadness and grief have taken fear’s place. Those two will be with me, and my family, a long time I think.

I don’t know which is worse but fear had become familiar. Addiction is a terrible thing, debilitating for the addict, but also for his family and for everyone else who loves him. It’s a progressive disease and a fatal result was inevitable unless he could stop, and he couldn’t. Ten years ago I joined a 12-step group for families of alcoholics and it helped me cope, helped me live with the fear and anxiety. The program reduced but didn’t eliminate those two crippling emotions. Now there are two more with which to wrestle.

With his hamster

We buried our son’s body last week but I know his spirit survives, and I will see him again when my own body finally gives out. That knowledge is a comfort, and will it ultimately trump both sadness and grief. He passed peacefully, even if life offered little peace during his last years. He has eternal peace now. I know that, but sometimes I forget and have to remind myself that he’s in a better place.

Our family was open about what caused Ryan’s death. All of us contributed to his eulogy which my wife bravely read at his funeral mass with me standing beside her. Having done three eulogies in one year, the last being one for my brother at which I got very choked up and could barely get through, I didn’t think myself capable of doing one for my own son. While we were both thinking of whom to ask, my wife declared she was going to deliver it. I told her that morning I believed I could find the strength to do it, but she said no, I want to, and she did. We were all proud of her.

As a columnist for twenty-two years, editors have tried to influence me to write more about this or that, but I’ve always written about what was most on my mind any given week — except my son’s addiction. Very often that was what I thought most about, but I’ve never written about it until now. Readers of the newspapers in which this column runs know my son died because his obituary appeared in their pages, but other readers around the country don’t know. Hence, this piece. 

My wife and I are helping each other through this ordeal and I’m grateful to have her. Our children and our grandchildren help too. While we were sitting next to our son’s coffin tearfully listening to the priest’s homily, our four-year-old granddaughter, Lila, came into our pew to hold our hands and console us. She helped enormously. When days later I thanked her, she said: “Friends are supposed to help each other.”

Before Ryan died, we had been at the hospital more than a week consulting with doctors and other specialists. Most of another week was taken up with funeral arrangements. People in our church community and friends in the wider community were sympathetic and solicitous. Everyone in our immediate family gathered pictures to display at the reception in our church hall following the burial. Assembled pictures of Ryan were both endearing the heartbreaking to look at. People hugging me and expressing their condolences triggered more tears. It’s going to take a long time to wring them all out but, as my wife the therapist says, “If you can let it flow, you can let it go.” And that’s the goal, isn’t it? I have to let him go.

I’ve had some practice with that. I’ve had to let go of my obsession with his addiction. My program teaches the “Three Cs”: You didn’t cause it. You can’t control it. You can’t cure it. I had to love and support my son as he struggled for all those years. Thirteen times he went into treatment. He had stretches of sobriety lasting several months, but always slipped back. He was much harder on himself than we ever were on him, and now his struggles are over.

Knowing I won’t be able to talk with him anymore this side of heaven makes me miss him desperately. It’s going to be a while before that longing diminishes to bearable levels, but with God’s help, I’ll make it. When it gets hard I have to consider all the good things in my life, and there are many.

Summing Up

Eulogies are hard for me. Though I’d never done one before, I’ve been asked three times in the last year to speak at a funeral. To sum up a life is a daunting thing.

The first was for the man who became the other grandfather to one of my grandsons. I met him at my daughter’s wedding. We talked often at holiday gatherings and at our mutual grandson’s birthday parties. Doug Kimble was easy to like. He died suddenly of a heart attack and his two sons took it hard, as one might expect. I told his son - my son-in-law, Nate, that if there was anything I could do, please ask.

Grandson Alex, Nate, Doug Kimble at Crescent Lake, Maine

He and his brother knew they’d be too emotional to speak at the memorial service, so he asked me to say a few words. I said I hadn’t known him very well and he said that was okay. Doug Kimble was a private guy, a surveyor, who kept to himself most of the time. He was in very good shape for his age, except for his cholesterol. We had discussed this in one of our last conversations because it’s one of the things sixty-something guys talk about. He indicated that his was high and that he wasn’t intending to do anything about it. Mine had been high too, but I told him I was taking Lipitor which brought it way down. We discussed ways of dying - advantages and disadvantages. He said the advantage of heart attacks was that they were usually quick - and that’s how it was for him a year hence. His son, Mike, found him in bed at his lakeside cottage this time last year where he’d been reading. A bit early at 67, but not a bad way to go.

Doug Kimble Memorial Service, Bridgton, Maine

My sister, a nurse/practitioner who works with geriatric and chronically-ill people, told me only 10% of deaths are sudden like that, but 90% of us linger. I’d watched a lot of people die, having worked more than two years as an orderly in a geriatric/chronic-care hospital on the second shift when I was in college. People didn’t get better and go home from there. They went out horizontally, and one of my jobs was to attach toe tags and bring the bodies down to the morgue where undertakers picked them up. I’d gotten away from death for thirty-six years teaching young people, but now I’m involved with it again.

Didn’t think I’d be emotional speaking at Doug’s funeral, but I was. It came on all of a sudden. It was the solemnity, the finality, the love in the room. I told people how I remembered him and invited others to do the same.

Then my cousin called a few months ago and asked me to eulogize my Uncle Joe. Now Joe I’d known my whole life and I loved him. He was a great man and I was honored to be asked, but I didn’t feel I could do the job adequately. I hesitated, and my cousin told me I could say no, but I really couldn’t. I said yes and then decided make Joe’s eulogy my column for the week.

Uncle Joe, Mary McLaughlin (my mother) and me in the Aran Islands

Writing it wasn’t as difficult as I thought, but delivering it was harder. Again, I was in a room full of people who loved him, only this time I was one of them and his casket was beside me. He was ninety-three and had been mostly bed-ridden for the last several months, so death wasn’t unexpected. I thought I was okay with it, but I wasn’t. Fear won’t make me cry, but sadness can put me off center. When genuine love is expressed in my presence, however, I can get emotional and in this case sadness and love combined. I choked up as I delivered Joe’s eulogy and that’s very hard for me in public.

Uncle Joe's funeral in Marlborough, Massachusetts

My younger brother died shortly after that and my sister-in-law, Vicki, asked me to deliver his eulogy too. Again I hesitated because by then I knew how I was likely to get. She sensed it and said I didn’t have to, that she could get someone else, but again I agreed. Dan was my brother and I loved him. We were two of eight and all of us have several children. Four of us have grandchildren as well, including Dan, and he was the first to go on to the next life. Vicki sent me pictures of him at all stages of his life. His was the hardest eulogy to write, and to deliver.

After it was written, I recited it to my wife and I choked up. She suggested I recite it again and I was able to get through it okay the second time. I thought I’d be fine when the funeral mass came around, but I wasn’t. Dan’s eulogy was the hardest of all.My mother with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at Dan's funeral in Fryeburg, Maine

Life goes on.

Grave Matters

Digging someone’s grave is an intimate thing, and I’ve done it twice now in just over a year. I’d buried pets like frogs and turtles when I was a boy, and a dog when I was an adult, but never a human being. I’d asked the caretaker at the small, private cemetery what rules or regulations there might be, which were very few. So, I loaded a couple of shovels into my truck and drove over the day before the funeral last spring.

My brother, Dan, died in Florida during March of 2012 of a chronic disease we both struggled with for years. He had lived a long time in North Fryeburg and, knowing death could come soon, told his wife of his wish to be buried there. He’d been cremated and she flew up with his ashes, so I didn’t have to dig a very big hole. She’d asked me to make a box for his urn and that, too, was a solitary, intimate experience.

Mark Woodbrey at Lovell Lumber

Once I had the urn’s dimensions, I went to Lovell Lumber and bought a ten-foot, one-by-twelve pine board. The mill owner, a fellow about my age, silently wrote out the slip for my meager, one-board purchase. “That’s all?” he asked, so I explained what I was making. He paused and looked up at me with a surprised expression and told me he had done the same thing for his brother.

“Hmm,” I said.

St. William's School Tewksbury, MA

 
Back in my garage, I thought about the carpentry projects I’d done for my brother because it wasn’t one of his skills, being in the plumbing and heating business. This would be the last. I wondered if he were observing me while I worked. He was my little brother and we shared a bedroom for many years. I protected him growing up in the neighborhood. As adults we perceived world quite differently in many ways and there were subjects I’d learned to avoid discussing while he was alive. That didn’t matter any more. “Ashes to ashes,” we were told by the nuns at St. William’s School, “dust to dust.” He had come to it sooner than I did.

My Uncle Joe's funeral last year

I’d been to professional funerals where artificial turf covered the excavated soil and edges of the hole, and with a stainless steel frame onto which the casket was placed and lowered by pulleys into a concrete vault. Backhoes dig those graves these days. I was doing it the old-fashioned way, alone with a shovel. Geese flew by in single-line flight, honking. Nature’s seasons mirror life’s seasons. Many poems, many songs compare them. My brother died in what should have been the autumn of his. His wife asked me to deliver his eulogy as well and I pondered that as I made the box and dug the grave. I knew that would be the hardest task because remembrances of my brother would not longer be my own private thoughts and feelings. I’d have to speak them in front of everyone.

This past spring, his son and my nephew, Danny Boy as we called him, died suddenly, also in Florida. The postmortem showed an enlarged heart. My wife and my sisters remembered how sensitive he was as a boy to the needs of his many younger cousins in our extended, Irish-Catholic family. Enlarged heart indeed. He was very gentle, and the world has a way of eating up those whose hearts are too big. The hundred-year-old Irish-American song “Danny Boy” is about a boy leaving his father in Ireland for America and how they may never see each other again. I thought about those lyrics as I dug still another grave uniting Dan and Danny Boy in death.

The area around the cemetery is familiar. I’d collected artifacts there over the years - remains of Indian occupation going back several millennia. If they buried their dead there too, evidence would have disappeared long before. That wasn’t likely though, given that the site was in the Saco flood plain and would have been under water in springtime, so their occupation was likely seasonal. All that’s been found were stone tools, hearths with charcoal, and calcine animal bone preserved by fire.

Cemetery on left, Old Saco on right

Conscious of that, I scrutinized each shovelful of soil but I found nothing in my brother’s grave last year. When I dug his son’s grave right next to it two weeks ago, however, I found chips of Mount Jasper Rhyolite from Berlin, NH just under the turf. That told me it was a toolmaking site many, many centuries ago. Both graves looked just like test pits we’d excavated four years previous within sight of where I was digging with a team of archaeologists and students.

Students in the test pits

British colonists and we Americans who derived from them have been in this area only 250 years or so. Artifacts I’ve found on that side of the Old Saco River go back about eight hundred, probably left by ancestors the Abenaki. Others have been found across the river going back several thousand, and we know relatively little about the people who made them. All civilizations eventually fade away and ours will as well. We’re all going to die of something, sooner or later, and being mindful of that enriches each new day. How we live those days determines how we’ll spend eternity. Meanwhile, a bit of a respite from graves, funerals and eulogies would suit me.