Person lost

(Been processing this since September 16, 2023.  He passed on September 27.  The difference between the passing of Person Adjacent and Person are a couple orders of magnitude.  I haven’t fully absorbed that he is gone.  What follows are some reflections on the plane ride home…)

On the plane back from Greenville, lots of things to process, since this wasn’t the day I thought it was going to be.

Zio is dying. He might actually be dead already, we’re in the air and in radio silence until Newark. I can’t believe I just typed that, and I can’t believe it’s happening, yet here it is, and here we are.  I’m not eulogizing yet. I had a whole raft of things to say in my head before cracking open the laptop, and I’m sorry I don’t have my journal to write in, but honestly my handwriting is so bad that I can’t even decipher my own notes anymore.

Good to connect again with the cousins. I want to get down maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas to spend time with them.  I’m glad we got in on Thursday night, because we got to see him while he was still him.  He was in so much pain—I know this because I held his hand and he squeezed hard as the pain coursed through him. He pretended he wasn’t feeling any pain, but that was only because he was waiting to say goodbye to everyone and wanted to be present for his goodbyes.  A was the last to arrive, so he held off on taking the big guns, the heavy painkillers, until noonish today, until after he saw her.

“He didn’t seem happy to see me.” She was dejected, just having flown from upstate NY and having to turn and burn, out tomorrow morning early.

“He was, honey, he’s just in a lot of pain.” 

It’s tough to be an adult child in this group.

 But there’s Zio. His eyes lit up when we finally got to the hospice Thursday night.  Hubby kept getting calls tracking our progress. Nic wanted adventures. G would rather stay home, but gamely was along as only he can be. We finally get to where we needed to go…

 And there he was, looking smaller and frailer than I have ever seen him. This guy. The same guy who took hubby camping, hunting and fishing, the same guy who was basically hubby’s first person, the same guy I fell in love with 33 years ago with his camouflage Tyrolean hat and ever present morning Meister Brau and evening Zio Carlo—this guy now on oxygen, his thin arms covered in bruises, his shoulders like angel’s wings poking out of his hospital gown.

This guy.

I parked myself in the chair next to him and held his hand.  That was my spot for the better part of the last two days. I absorbed his pain the best I could. He turned to me often and told me he loved me, he was comfortable, he was happy.

But the pain. 

I knew it was there. So did my cousins.  But he was waiting for his granddaughter.

Then she came.

Then he finally found relief for the pain.  That was when he left us.

He wasn’t dead, it didn’t kill him, but that was when he made his decision to start shutting down.   He even announced that he was leaving—I wasn’t in the room, I heard later—and he was told he wasn’t going anywhere.

I knew what he meant. I saw he was already gone. His eyes were open when I sat with him again, but they were blank. He was transitioning right in front of us.

I’m on a turbulent plane right now typing all this after the fact. G is trying to read a book but is anxious about the turbulence. So am I, but typing this helps.

Anyway.  Dinner with the cousins was fun, if not comic in trying to get service.  We didn’t take pictures. Too busy visiting, catching up, reeling in the years.

We took a bunch before we left. It was loud. 

Tears.

Everyone is a little fractured.

Person Adjacent

 So when I say my person was the third time, the charm, turned out I’ve miscounted for the last few decades. Because there was one before, one I never counted because we had one date and we ‘went out’ for less than a month. After chasing him for two years, I caught him and decided I didn’t want him.

Well, it’s not as pat as that—is it ever? The long and short of it was that he wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but he was close enough that we probably could have figured it out. Except I thought we could each do better.

Turned out I was right. It didn’t happen overnight, and it took him longer to find his person, but he eventually did, and got four bonus people in the form of her kids and even more in her extended circle of people. We saw each other once in the last 35 or so years, grade school reunion 12 years ago. He was annoyed at my Irish goodbye, but the bar got too loud, and I needed to go.

So we didn’t say goodbye. It was like leaving the phone off the hook.

I found out he died last week. He cheated death once, about a dozen years ago, so I thought maybe he had some superpowers gleaned from decades of comic book fandom. But no. Death wasn’t taking a second pass. His departure called up a whole bunch of memories I’ve all but forgotten.

Mostly good. Mostly a reckoning that we’d both eventually get where we needed to go and find the people who really, really got us. I’m happy to say we both did. 

Later days, Mike.

Unshakable, unbreakable

 I’m neither thing, unfortunately, but I’m a little less shake n break than I used to be.

So goals. My last two decades have been all about setting goals for the boys. Now they need to set their own. Just like their stories are theirs to tell—or not. Agency. They both have it, and I’m sweating it out on the sidelines waiting for them to start exercising it.

Might be a wait. Need a distraction.

So one of my teammates announces that the International Dragon Boat Festival is in Taipei in 2026. As a team, we’d have to qualify at the national level to get there. I recall elder telling me in 2013 at the Cross Country Nationals that I’ve never been a National anything.

Challenge accepted.

The very worst that can happen is that I get into shape.

Game on.

Working on Myself

 I’m trying to be a better human. I’m struggling as ever with little things, but at least I can acknowledge the struggles.

Joining the dragon boat team is probably the single greatest education in my adult life. I’m not used to functioning as part of a team; I’m not used to asking for help; I’m not used to being accountable for showing up. In the last year, I’m learning how to do these things, and I’m getting better at doing them.

I still have a lot to learn. But one of the things I figured out is that kindness and patience are my super powers. I used to think these things didn’t matter, or they didn’t have value. It turns out that I was wrong.

I couldn’t be happier to be wrong.

Is Today the Day?

 I’m writing from the relative safety of bed.

About 2 hours ago shit went sideways.

When I set out on my kayak 3 hours ago, the air was still and the water calm. Checking weather, I had at least two hours if not more of the same. I packed some water and snacks—along with both phones—into my dry bag and set off for the far side of the peninsula—perhaps 2 klicks as the crow flies.

A leisurely paddle and wind from the East got me there in about 15 minutes. I hugged the shore and watched all the birds. Looked up at the sky. Marked some milestones in my head and talked some things through and allowed the truth to hit the air—a pretty productive few things in it of themselves.

I noticed the drift and where I was in the bay at about the same time the winds started picking up. My point of return lay on the other side of the peninsula, so I started paddling….

And…shit. A stiff wind greeted me on the other side of it and banged me against the shore.

Shit. I jumped out of the kayak and ported it to the nearest beach. That was slightly more eventful than expected, mostly because the ground underneath the water wasn’t solid, meaning I had a whole other world of trouble if I didn’t keep moving.

That’s about the point where I wondered if this is how it ends.

I dragged the kayak onto the beach and sat for a moment.  Flailing about in panic wouldn’t get me anywhere. I took a drink and looked around. Checked the wind and realized that even if I did a hard paddle straight for our dock, the wind would make sure I gained no ground.

Tacking would work, though.

I put in again and hugged the shore. This was about triple the distance, but I didn’t care. I just needed to get back. I sent hubby a picture and my location. Then paddled.

At some point the wind died down. I passed some paddlers coming out. They were four in two, and with an outfitter so would be okay. I paddled until all I needed to do was drift south to our pier.

And I did.

So today was not the day.

Unexpected Fun

 Back to school time is particularly spiky this year. I hate the constant reminders of what we’re not. I’m not sure what is worse, those reminders or the negative reinforcement that I need to try to account and correct for. This shit is getting hard as the grey, wrinkles and all the ‘end of life’ cycles start to kick in.

There’s the added bit of “shit that never happened’ that unexpectedly and inconveniently rears its ugly head while we’re trying to do the business of living our lives.

Case in point; it’s Saturday night in a party town and it’s time for us to figure out dinner. I had my own ugly meltdown and a couple shitfits trying to get the boys and I from point A to point b with a stop in between. Here’s how I know I’m frayed; shit I used to hide effortlessly is waaaay out in the open. I don’t have the spoons to hide my crazy. I don’t care. I’m tired.

“Mom, let’s go,” elder said once we unpacked the car. “Let’s go to our usual.”

I don’t bother telling him that our usual wouldn’t be possible if we allowed him to dissuade us from coming in the first place. I’m tired. We head over to our place; there’s a line. I put us on the waitlist. We people watch. I sing 80s songs with younger as the house band plows through their playlist. We finally have a table; when younger gets carded, I explain we’re there for dinner. It’s the second time in as many hours my kids are carded. Elder is beside himself both times explaining he doesn’t drink. Younger is quiet and allows elder to speak for him. 

We sit. Order food. Sing along with the band. It occurs to me that I’m having a night out with the boys they should both be having with peers. But there’s only me. And we have fun anyway. And I have more fun with them than I did when I was their ages and struggling to fit in.

It occurs to me that they have the better deal.

And that gratitude is in order.

It could always be worse.

And they aren’t any the wiser.

And sometimes it is a beauty contest

 This morning has me contemplating all the things.

Mostly elder right now, and there’s a lot that falls into his bucket.  He’s trending toward full time hours, but is stuck. Again. Baseball is his obsession du jour, and like every other obsession he’s ever had, he cranks it to 11. But baseball isn’t his biggest problem.  I could argue that parenting him is.

He’s having the usual needing’ to differentiate ‘ from us, and everyone is having boundary issues. I’m of the camp that he needs to figure some of his own shit out and dad still wants to direct, and elder would just rather tell us what he wants and we need to figure out how to make it happen.

Here I dig in my heels.

Growth is uncomfortable AF. You need to do some painful things and put yourself in hard places, but it’s necessary. I know; I’ve done it, still doing it, and every day I need to ground myself in the things I love to push outward and onward.

This is what he needs to learn to do.

Hopefully he figures it out before we’re gone.

Bound up in this stuckness is his self-worth.  He noted to me the other day while we were talking about his brother’s movie obsession “G got to pick his classes [in high school]. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted.”

I’ve sat with this quite a bit. While it’s not strictly speaking true, as he did give us some input, he also took the path of least resistance—if someone told him it was a good idea, he signed off so he could get back to whatever he was thinking about.

His brother never signed off on squat. He has always figured out his own stuff. The more dad and I pushed an agenda, the more autistic he looked. He looks tons more capable steering his own boat.

Elder uses his agency differently, and has been disappointed to learn that the world won’t cut him a break based on his dx. He’s been angling for student or employee of the month for the last 7 years or so and still speaks bitterly about the fact that it never happened for him while he was at the VoTech.

I still hear about the ‘lazy good looking guy’ who beat him out his first year and the bitterness about getting passed over his second at the VoTech. And not for nothing, the folks who spoke so well for him there wish him well, but wouldn’t hire him.

It says a lot about people’s expectations of him, in general.

I KNOW he can. I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who does.

We need to let him figure it out. He already knows life can be a beauty contest; he’s got to figure out his own way to reckon with it.