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.

Burying Ted

We buried my 90-year-old father-in-law, Ted Kosiavelon, last week at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s what he wanted. He earned the privilege by serving in both the Solomon Islands and in the Philippines during World War II. Like millions of other young men of his generation, he fought for his country against the forces of evil. In Ted’s case, it was against the Japanese whose unprovoked attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor brought the United States, and Ted, into the struggle.

Ted is squatting in the lower left

A talented swimmer, Ted was selected by the navy for The Naval Training School (Salvage), which after the war became the Diving and Salvage School in Bayonne, New Jersey, made famous in the film “Men of Honor” with Cuba Gooding and Robert De Niro. After his training, he spent most of the war in Manila Bay where the dry dock he worked from was repeatedly attacked by Japanese planes where he was wounded. That’s how I remember Ted: a man of honor. He was a humble man, but very proud of his military service.

Young Ted in the Navy

Fifteen million Americans served their country in World War II which author Studs Terkel called “The Good War.” No war is good, especially one in which 400,000 Americans died along with millions of others around the world, but Terkel called it that because there was almost no moral ambiguity. There was little doubt that Americans were the good guys, while German Nazis and Japanese warlords were evil. Ted and millions of others put their lives on the line and most survived to tell about it. Ted spent the rest of his life serving his family just as steadily and reliably as he served his country. He was a humble hero.

Ted on the left, brother Buddy on the right

Men like Ted and my own father were taken into disciplined training just as they entered manhood five or six years out of knickers. They didn’t have to spend a decade or more “finding themselves” the way so many from my own generation did. The world found them and they clearly understood what they had to do. They had to keep fighting until their enemies surrendered. Theirs was a dangerous and difficult task. Victory was anything but assured, especially in the early years of the war when we were losing almost every battle, but at least they didn’t have doubts about whether their jobs were important, or meaningful, or whether or not they were doing the right thing. As I mentioned above: moral ambiguity wasn’t a problem as they discharged the duty that defined them for the rest of their lives.

Each branch of our military does burials differently at Arlington National Cemetery and I was impressed with the way the Navy handled Ted’s. Although more than a dozen veterans are buried there every day, there was no indication of any complacency in the honor guard. They were thoroughly professional and treated Ted with all the dignity and honor he deserved.

Ted’s body was driven down in a hearse by a Massachusetts funeral home. When we arrived at the grave, eight uniformed sailors and an officer stood waiting to be pallbearers. Within sight, but off at a distance were seven riflemen with another officer ready to perform a 21-gun salute amidst the perfectly ordered rows of white, marble headstones on the gently-rolling hills. At a similar distance in another direction a lone bugler stood ready to play taps. All their performances were flawless.

My wife, Roseann

Just before flying down there, a friend told me that students from Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine would be helping out 20,000 other Americans the following weekend with the “Wreaths Across America” project. This was begun twenty years ago by Merrill Worcester, owner of Worcester Wreath Company of Harrington, Maine downeast who found himself with a surplus of Christmas wreaths and was moved to place them on the headstones in Arlington.

All those rows of identical white headstones, mark graves of other men and women who fought for the United States of America and I felt their presence as they welcomed another one of their own for eternal rest among them.

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.

Uncle Joe

It had been a while since I lost a close family member. Lately, however, I’m losing several and others are seriously ill or injured. It’s less difficult with the older ones, but some are younger. A couple of friends and acquaintances have passed too.

Joe Haggerty was my favorite uncle and my last surviving one. He was part of the “Greatest Generation. He did things for me no one else took time to do. He took movies of us kids growing up - Hours of 8mm film chronicling two decades that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him buying a camera and then pulling it out so many times as we were growing up. Joe taught me to appreciate music and art. He explained what caused the Great Depression. He taught me to sail. He organized a surprise party when I finished graduate school. He encouraged me and everyone else to strive and to savor life. He was an example of someone who did both.

Joe lived on a lake. That was wondrous to me as a kid. Go swimming or fishing any time you want? Amazing. When he took his family on vacation somewhere else, he invited our family of eight children to stay there, even when knowing that some of us wet the bed. He brought his family to our house every Christmas Eve. For the first few years he and Aunt Pat gave each of us a pair of pajamas. Practical. Then one year he said the heck with the pajamas and gave the whole family a ping-pong table. My brother and I became quite good at it.

Joe and his sister Mary (my mother) in the Aran Islands

Joe smiled a lot. I have a hard time remembering him when he wasn’t. He was positive, always looking for a silver lining though his life wasn’t always easy. For years, he and Pat were unable to conceive, so they adopted three children. Then she got pregnant - with triplets! None made it, however, living only a few days. Later, Aunt Pat came down with MS. Joe nursed her lovingly for years until she died, and we never heard him complain.He joined the Navy before World War II broke out and was assigned to guard the Panama Canal as a crewman aboard a PB4Y - a huge “flying boat” that could land in water and take off from it. I asked him if he ever saw action and he answered, “Yes and no.” While flying a diplomat from Hawaii to Australia the clouds opened and he looked down at the Battle of the Coral Sea raging below. He hoped no Japanese pilots looked up and spotted his big plane because they would likely have shot it down, but the clouds came back together and it proceeded unmolested. He saw action, but did not participate. A painting in one of the US History books I used to teach from depicted just the kind of view he would have seen and I’d share Uncle Joe’s story with my classes each year.After the war he went to Northeastern University on the GI Bill and became an electrical engineer. As the grandson of Irish immigrant coal miners, that was a big deal. He was the only one if his generation on both sides of my family to have gone to college, much less graduated. After years at Raytheon and RCA, he changed careers and taught economics at a small college in Massachusetts. It was then I asked him what caused the Great Depression and he took the time to give me an understanding that I’ve built on throughout my life.Asking other family members how they remember Uncle Joe, I hear that he listened. He was easy to talk to. They trusted him. I drove down for his 90th birthday three years ago. He’d been a widower for some time by then and he introduced me to his “lady friends.” There were five of them. He went dancing with them regularly. He played the piano. He was a prolific painter, mostly with water colors. He was good at both.At a pub in the Aran Islands: Me, my mother Mary, Joe, my wife Roseann

With my wife and mother, we toured the west of Ireland together the following spring. I was concerned that she at 85 and he at 90 would slow us down, but I needn’t have been. I had to pull them both out of a Doolin pub our first night there because I wanted to go to bed. We looked around the village of Crossmolina in the County Mayo countryside from where their grandparents (my great-grandparents) Peter Haggerty and Kate McDonnell came. Both knew Kate, but Peter had died of black lung in Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania before they were born.
Getting ready to take a shot in Connemara

Uncle Joe has joined them now in the Great Beyond where we’ll all go someday. I’ll have more questions for him when I get there and I’m confident he’ll take the time to listen.

Forgotten Stories in Stone

For over twenty years I’d driven by and never noticed it. Pulling over to study the rocks in an old stone wall, I saw it not ten feet away. A metal fence closely surrounded a single gravestone. The little cemetery was deeply shaded by thick hemlocks on a small knoll that dropped off sharply beside an active little brook. It was the final abode of Marion Abbott - a 17-year-old girl who died in 1860. Alone on the edge of the road - me for the moment; she for eternity - I contemplated Marion and her place. She must have spent time there when she was alive and enjoyed the solitude. The fence suggested that. I wondered if it was her idea - if she’d had time before she died to think about where she wanted to be buried and how her grave would look, or if she passed on too quickly and her family made the decisions.

Was the fence for preserving her privacy in death? Did Marion cherish alone time in her short life? Would she prevent others from sitting next to her grave in her special place? Or was it to stop someone from following her to the great forever?

Looking around, I envisioned the place 150 years ago. The paved road would have been dirt then with the same stone walls on either side, but with sunny, rolling, green pastures behind them instead of dark hemlocks. Did she lie down there alone on the knoll and chew on grass stems, or did she bring a picnic lunch to share with someone else? Did she watch animals graze and drink from the brook now crowded by forest? I climbed over the mossy stone wall and stood on a thick, spongy, hundred-year-old bed of hemlock needles covering the lower part the inscription on the marble headstone. The knees of my pants moistened and the piney smell was strong as I knelt to read the summary of Marion’s life.

MARION
daut of James E & Mary F Abbott
died July 31, 1861 AE 17 yrs 6 mos
Dearest friend, thy pains are ended
Thou hast found a better home
Thy songs are now with angels blended
Where no death nor sorrows come

Climbing back into my truck, I drove off slowly in second gear, thinking about Marion, wondering what she might have looked like, how she dressed. I wasn't in as much of a hurry as I had been. I checked my rearview mirror frequently and pulled over to let others who didn't like my slow pace rush by. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed a big old oak with heavy limbs beside the road - a clue to the location of a cellar hole. Sure enough, on the other side of the road was a line of split granite stones and a break in the wall I could pull my truck into. Again I was surprised to see a family cemetery dominated by an obelisk in the center and surrounded by stone markers. I walked over and climbed the stone stairs leading up the raised earthen platform that comprised the Smith Cemetery. On the base of the tall monument was the following epitaph:

HERBERT
Son of Simon & Mary Ann Smith
Aged 16 YRS 10 M’s
Wounded at Cold Harbor June 3, 1864
Died in Baltimore, Md June 23, 1864
at National Camden Hospital

Why did you go off like that, Herbert? You were too young for battle. Then I remembered that over a hundred thousand boys lied about their age on both sides in the Civil War.

As two crows flew lazily over the surrounding treetops, their caws absorbed by the deep woods, I realized Marion and Herbert very likely knew each other. Did Herbert ever look longingly on the more mature Marion, wishing he were older? He would have been twelve when she died and the war started only two months before. Was his decision to go off and fight before he was old enough influenced by her passing? Had he ever seen her sitting alone by the brook? Did he join her and talk?

Herbert’s grave was the most prominent, but his baby sister, Ella Smith, was born the same year he died. Perhaps he was in camp somewhere in Virginia and read of her birth in a letter from his mother.

The age of trees in and around the Smith cellar hole told me that the Smith family survived in Stow much longer than the Abbott family. Did the Abbotts abandon their farm down the road and join the great migration westward with the dozens of other families from West Lovell and Stow? The woods taking over the Smith farm were less mature than those around Marion’s grave down the street. Herbert’s parents lived on until 1901 and 1903 and were buried next to him. The farm was worked well into the 20th century and the remains of an old automobile were discernible among the encroaching juniper and alders near the barn foundation. His father, Simon, died at 79 on June 26, 1901 - the same time of year Herbert died and the monument marking Herbert's grave was visible from the house. Did painful memories of his soldier son finally get to him? Simon's wife, Mary joined him in the cemetery two years later, also at 79. Three years hence, Ella died an old maid at 42 and is buried nearby. Did she stay and care for her aging parents while Stow’s and Lovell’s eligible men went west? Did anyone live there after Ella? How long before the house and barn fell in and rotted away? I don't know.

The woods and the stones hold many stories. Most, however, are forgotten.

Published April, 2004. Some weeks after it ran in local newpapers, John Chandler of Lovell, who grew up in nearby Chatham, NH told me he knew of Marion Abbott's grave and he'd "heard people say" the teenager died after being gored by a bull.

Molly

We found Molly at the pound where she had been abandoned. She was timid and not well-bred. We never found out who her parents were or what breeds any of her other ancestors were either. We could only guess. Even though she had apparently been born under humble circumstances, she had dignity. She was kind. When she looked at you with those soft eyes, you knew she could see right into you and you could keep no secrets from her about what kind of person you really were. Our children took to her right away. She was with us for eighteen years and now she’s gone. All we have left are pictures and ashes. As soon as the snow melts, we’ll bury them in my wife’s flower garden, where she liked to lay in the sun.

Molly’s time overlapped my children’s lives from elementary school to adulthood. She frolicked with them in the yard when they were young children. When they became teenagers, She let their boyfriends and girlfriends pat her as they were introduced. They are grown and gone now, but when they learned Molly was fading, they made a trip back to say good-bye before we had to put her down. As I watched each one lean down and whisper to her, I wondered what they were thinking about. Was it how she never barked when each was sneaking into the house after their curfew? She let us know whenever a stranger came near the house, but even in the dark of night, she always knew when it was family coming home. Was it in the way they walked? Was it their scent? However it was, Molly always knew who belonged there and who didn’t, and she never told any tales. She would take their secrets to the grave.

She’d been deaf for more than two years and there were cataracts on her eyes. Still, she maintained her dignity and she could sense the mood of whoever was present around her, something she had always done. She got along with everybody, but she didn’t force her attentions on people. Whenever I hugged my wife or one of my children, Molly would come over and nuzzle between us. She never approached outsiders, but waited nearby and allowed them to approach her, preferring women to men.

As I younger child, I liked dogs quite well and I had a German Shepherd who was a constant companion until she had to be put down too. After getting a paper route, however, I realized that some could be a real pain in the butt and, though I can’t lean over far enough to see for sure, I think I still have scars to prove it.
I was beginning to lose faith in the species until we found Molly at the pound.

As a puppy, she paper-trained fast and there was never much need to discipline her. She only needed to be told the rules once, it seemed, and she’d remember. She wasn’t the type to perform tricks and she didn’t need to be told what to do. I never said, “Lay down,” or “Sit.” Molly did what she wanted and it always seemed appropriate. She was so good at being a dog that she made me want to be a better human.

For most of her life here on Christian Hill, the neighborhood’s dogs went where they wished and they were well-behaved. They didn’t bark too much or chase cars or get into the trash. They may have fertilized the lawn in spots, but that’s it. The neighbors knew them all by name and where they lived. But they’re all gone now; Molly was the last one.

During her life, Molly was a good example for her human companions. Nobody had to tell her how to be a dog and she didn’t sweat the small stuff, always seeming to understand what was going on around her. She did start to lose it at the end though, but don’t we all? She was incontinent, occasionally. She forgot things, sometimes. She’d go for a stroll and forget how to get back. A couple of times, she wandered down to the Village and appeared lost. Donny Chandler called from his garage and we’d go pick her up. Two other times she didn’t come home and my wife called Harvest Hills to discover that she’d been picked up on the road heading out of town and acting confused. When she made her final trip to the Fryeburg Veterinary Hospital, she seemed to know it. She lay peacefully on her favorite blanket and hardly flinched as the hypodermic needle went into her leg. We weren’t surprised to observe that she died as gracefully as she had lived.

This column was first published in March, 2005

The Eyes Have It

“I care more and more about less and less,” said the old man.

He’d just recovered from two brushes with death, each requiring major surgery and I had asked him how he was feeling. That was his answer. He looked me in the eye and waited for me to respond. For several seconds I thought about it and then asked him what he meant. “The number of things that concern me has narrowed as I get older,” he explained, “but I care more about those things than I used to.”

I understood that. He’d chosen his words carefully. He continued to look at me and I could see in his eyes that he was okay. He’d accepted that he would die sooner or later and probably sooner, but he didn’t seem anxious about it. He was a religious man and he’d had many heartaches in his long life. He was no stranger to suffering - physical, emotional and spiritual. We were friends because he let me know him and I wondered if our friendship was one of the things he still cared about. I didn’t ask, but I believe it was. We had discussed much about what troubled us and what made us happy, but words were not the only way we communicated. Silent eye contact said a great deal. He didn’t look away when we talked or when we paused and I could see no guile in his eyes. There’s wisdom in that old Yiddish proverb: “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” and also in the quote from Emerson: “The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.” The old man had lived through a long life with many hills and valleys and swamps. He didn’t look forward to dying, but there was no fear in his eyes.

When I was a young man, death was part of my job. My college classes were all in the morning and I worked a 3-11 shift every night at a geriatric hospital where people didn’t get better and go home. They went there to die and if they had their marbles, they knew it. As an orderly, I fed them, cleaned them up when they soiled themselves, put them to bed at night, and brought them down to the morgue when they died. During my two-and-a-half years there, many dozens died on my shift. I cleaned their bodies, tied on their toe tags, wrapped them in their shrouds, lifted them onto the stretcher and brought them down to the “cooler” from which the undertakers would pick them up. Most didn’t go gracefully, but some did and I’ll always remember those. Often I could tell how they would deal with their deaths by looking in their eyes.

Some people I’ve been acquainted with for years don’t let me know them. They guard their eyes in various ways, and they have a repertoire of personas they put on and take off like a set of clothes, only more quickly. Whatever is real under all that I never see. Maybe I wouldn’t want to if I could. G. K. Chesterton said, “There’s a road from eye to heart that does not go through the intellect,” but for these people, that road is blocked. Some block it on purpose; some aren’t even aware.

Other people let me know them. After we get friendly, a few will confide that I made them nervous by the way I looked at them when we first met. They were intimidated. That surprised me at first; then it started to bother me because I didn’t intend to make them uncomfortable. Lately though, I’m coming to accept it. I’m just not very good at small talk and I don’t often engage in it. If there’s nothing to say, I prefer to look and listen silently to people, and that makes some of them nervous. Sometimes my mind will wander while I’m trying to listen. That’s rude, I know, but I can’t help it. If I think of it, I’ll smile more when I’m looking at someone to try and soften whatever their impression might be, but only if it’s a real smile. I don’t want to fake it. Life is too short for pretense.

Familiarity with death isn’t morbid. Awareness of death can enrich life. One of life’s few certainties is that we all die. It’s just a matter of how and when. Though I can’t say for sure, I believe there are worse things than death and a meaningless life is probably one of them. We humans need to believe in something greater than ourselves. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.”