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Archive for the ‘Loss’ Category

Jaren’s stone …

Posted in Children, Family, Loss, love, tagged on February 18, 2010| 15 Comments »

With timing that has me wondering why things have to come in bunches … like snow that builds into mountainous drifts obscuring the comfortably familiar … yesterday, Jaren’s birthday, brought me long-sought-for photos of the headstone that now sits on his grave.

It was supposed to be placed a couple of months after his burial, but has apparently taken a bit longer, and I’m sure it stands out amongst the staid markers in the tiny cemetery in Paskenta where he lies aside my father and very near my grandparents and great-grandparents.

Jaren’s dad and I had to chose from a wide range of shapes, sizes, materials, designs, fonts, texts, styles, and so on back in June when we buried our son, and it was no easy process, and certainly not one we had any practice in beforehand.

At one point, we thought to ask if it would be possible to have a guitar engraved somewhere on the stone and were surprised when the funeral director pulled out a book of tombstone clip art … yes, those exist … and showed us a drawing of a fat mariachi guitar with three cheesy notes issuing from it. Although I was sorely tempted to saddle my son with such cheese for the foreseeable eternity, being not one bit happy about him being dead and all, it was decided to investigate the possibilities of emblazoning his marker with something much more him. What is there is a representation of one of his guitars … the one his brother Sebastian now plays.

I know many of his friends plan to make a pilgrimage to Paskenta to visit Jaren’s grave, and I will be thankful to hear about those trips. It is in a lovely place, very peaceful under giant old oaks, and I plan to spend many hours there as soon as I can.

There will be no trouble finding him … his face and his guitar mark where he lies.

Jaren's stone

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Jaren’s birthday, and a story …

Posted in Children, Family, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past, tagged on February 17, 2010| 18 Comments »

Jaren kissing me goodbye on his way to a party

Another year has passed and today would have been Jaren’s 45th birthday. That is almost as hard for me to grasp as the fact that he’s not here for it. It is the day to repost this …

February 17, 1971 … 7:41 am … welcome to the world, Jaren Eli Combes!

I’ve written a lot about Jaren, but one story worth repeating comes from the day of his birth and is one he liked to hear, so I’ll repeat it:

Once upon a time, in a decade and hemisphere far, far away …

Delivery of my second bio child was pretty easy. Only seven hours of labor, then a straightforward delivery (Yes, I suppose there’s a pun in there somewhere.) was a welcome relief after the twenty-four-plus hours I’d put in bringing his older sister into the world. It had been only eighteen months since I’d done all this before, so I was much more relaxed and quite happy to hand off my new son for his after-birth cleanup having conducted nothing more than a quick count of fingers, toes and other appendages, assuring myself that everything was in the right number and the right place.

A couple of hours later, I was resting comfortably and chatting with the new first-time mom in the bed next to mine. Feeling quite the old hand … at all of nineteen … I was experiencing little of the anxiety my roommate suffered as she waited for the first post-birth contact with her newborn. With a toddler at home, I was happy enough to have some peace and quite for the very short time I’d be allowed.

Soon enough though, a nurse entered the room with an armful of bundled baby that she carefully placed in my arms. Once again using the skills I’d mastered over the past year and a half, I easily unwrapped the little tyke for his first thorough inspection.

Sure enough, the fingers and toes were fine and he looked the picture of health. That was, as it always is, such a wonderful relief after nine months of involuntarily conjuring some worst-possible scenarios in a hormone-overloaded mind.

What he was not, however, was pretty. In fact, he was pretty ugly. His face resembled a road-squashed potato as much as anything else, and straggles of black hair wove around a veiny, lumpy, scaly head. He was very long and ropey, with scrawny arms and legs and a distended abdomen that sported a red and puffy umbilicus anyone could see would end up being a very prominent outie.

“Oh, my,” I’m sure I sighed loudly while I examined my homely little bundle of joy. “And his sister was so pretty when she was born…”

My roommate took serious issue with my evaluation, insisting that all babies are beautiful. I explained that his unfortunate appearance did not in any way hinder my deep and abiding motherly love, nor did it mean he’d not eventually become less of a gnome, but he was certainly NOT beautiful in any classic sense of the word.

“Just look at him,” I said, holding the tiny guy up so she could get a good look from her bed. “Really now, all love aside, he is an ugly baby.”

She was on the verge of agreeing when, right about then, the nurse came back with another bundle.

“Sorry,” she announced, “but I’ve made a mistake.”

Uh oh.

“This baby,” she said, indicating the one she held, “is yours, Sandra.”

Please, no. Please, no. Please, no!

“So, this one?” I barely could bring myself to ask …

“Is hers,” the nurse said sweetly as she reached to swaddle the naked little baby I held.

My roommate had the nurse pull the curtain between our beds and never spoke to me again. Her husband shot me furious glances when he visited over the next couple of days, but never said a word, either.

I often wonder if they tell this story.

By the way, my son was beautiful! He still is.

Jaren lived only thirty-eight and a bit years … today would have been his 39th birthday … and I can so easily pull up those moments of the first meeting between us … his huge blue, blue eyes that just got bluer as he grew … sugar bowl ears he eventually grew into … baby boy all pink and new and smelling sweet … tiny hands and feet that gave no clue of the 6’5″+ frame he filled out … the smile that never stopped lighting up any room …

I miss him.

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Life, death … and shit

Posted in Health, Loss, On getting older, tagged on January 18, 2010| 13 Comments »

Back in the 1980s and 90s, I spent a lot of my time raking up exotic shit. This is no euphemism. Elephants, orang utans, lions and tigers and bears … oh my! All regularly deposit shit by the shovel-full, and much of my job description involved seeing to it that wonderful creatures didn’t have to step in any poop piles.

The Sacramento Zoo was where I passed the hours, days, weeks and months back then, and some of my happiest moments involved the animals and the people I tagged along with and cleaned up after.

Skewed toward the old side of the age range represented by my coworkers, I was well pleased when our ranks were joined by Robbie … near my own age, we had much in common and immediately and permanently became best friends.

We’d both led life on the wild side, and had the physical side effects to prove it. I was already well into the coronary artery disease that plagues many in my family, and I smoked. Robbie already had AIDS.

Almost 20 years later, Robbie and I are still around. I’m here and he’s in Atlanta, and we’re still best friends. Sadly and unexpectedly, a few of the others aren’t.

Fit, athletic, health conscious Lee died of breast cancer a number of years ago. Kevin, at least 10 years younger than me and Robbie, was dropped by a heart attack. And we just had news yesterday that another one of our group has some horrible cancers growing in horrible places. All younger non-smoking folk with no touch of HIV. (Another friend is also facing the cancer fight now … also a much younger, non-smoking careful eater.)

It’s a funny old thing, this life and death and health and illness stuff. Twenty years ago, all predictions would have had Robbie gone within a couple of years with me not too far behind, and Lee and Kevin shoveling shit till ripe old ages.

Earlier this year, my son died at the age of 38. My mother turns 78 today in hospital.

There is no moral to this post. I’m certainly not suggesting that people take up smoking and have unprotected sex, as tempting fate is exactly that. But the fates often have their own agenda, of which we haven’t a clue.

Living life while we have it seems to be the only thing that makes much sense, even if that means spending a lot of time up to our eyeballs in shit, exotic or otherwise.

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Another year ends … Head ’em up! Mooooove ’em out!

Posted in Family, Health, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past on December 31, 2009| 10 Comments »

This time last year, I was digesting the news that my ex-husband had killed himself and foolishly thinking that 2009 would HAVE to be a better year.

Well … I’m done with those sorts of thoughts.

“Things can’t get any worse” is a phrase that will never again cross my lips or enter into my mind, and this year has provided proof absolute that worse happens, as I thought I had stressed sans equivocation in my last post.

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the summing up pool … after a year fraught with uncertainty, fights and fear, disappointment, betrayal, and hitting an all time low with the sudden death of my son … hoping against hope that the last few days of this horrid year would slither by without creating one more drop of misery, my mother was taken into hospital. THEN, after surgery to correct the issue that was making her miserable, she had a heart attack. Yesterday.

So … another year ends, and although I am very glad to see the back of it, hoping for better in the next one feels too much like tempting the fates to fuck things up even worse. I still have a lot to lose.

Wish me no Happy New Year. Keep all Hallmark admonishments to put on a smiley face, party like a rock star, make the most of it … blah, blah, blah.

I’m tired, my friends.

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Herding hyenas and other attempts at sorting out a new year …

Posted in Hopeful thoughts, I wanna, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past on December 26, 2009| 2 Comments »

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. ~T.S. Eliot

If there’s one thing the past couple of years have taught me, it would be to never assume things can’t get worse. They can. They do. And 2009 stands as an example of just how faulty my thinking was at the dawning of this year.

To say that I approach the closing of this admittedly arbitrary bunching of days with some sense of relief would be accurate, although no little trepidation accompanies the heralding of 2010.

Much like an attempt at herding hyenas, I formulate plans, well aware that so few factors lie within my control … or even influence … and try to prepare for contingencies that range beyond the boundaries of the comfortably conceivable all the way into OMG!-if-that-happens-I-won’t-make-it-this-time territory.

At the same time, I take onboard frequent admonitions to think positively, to take the bull-of-the-future by the horns and wrestle it into submission, in the hope that thoughts are things and we can create our own reality.

With that in mind, I’m dwelling at length on options I do have and taking T.S. Eliot’s words to heart. The whole “to make an end is to make a beginning” resonates and puts a spin on endings I can warm to.

With this holiday season being about as dreary and miserable as I can take, a determination to form a 2010 that will close to a more upbeat finale has formed, and it’s very likely that to begin that ending I may have to stamp “DONE” to quite a few aspects of my present, stop listening to “last year’s words” and await another voice.

Life is, however, a process and 365 days of the coming year will toss a lot of flotsam into whatever pool I manage to dam up. Some will float and some will sink and some may even be fun to play with for a while. My job now is to clear the debris and find somewhere to stand that won’t have me constantly treading water.

Now if I can just stop with the metaphors …

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The year in pictures …

Posted in Children, Family, Friends, Fun, Island life, Loss, love, Seychelles on December 10, 2009| 8 Comments »

The year begins ...
Cj and me in February
First f 3 trips to Bird Island
Anchor Cafe
With Shrone at the beach in March
Book promo in April
Happy and Iris were here in May
June 2nd ... the worst day of my life
California ... filled with sadness
Lots of love in Mexicoa
Switzerland in July
Tribute tatt ...
Old friends leave ... Ciao, Lio!
New friends come ... Me with Carlos and Violeta
With Deb and Mel
Visitors Kim and Cake
New friends Tommaso and Helen
Alan adds my kids to an old tatt
Gay takes the kids on hayaks ...
I spend some time online ...
Back to Bird in October and in November
Sam's 7th birthday dinner
Cati finally arrives ...
Enzo and Amanda add to the mix
November ends
Christmas is coming and the year is almost over ...

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Jaren … Six months gone …

Posted in Children, Family, Health, Loss, love, tagged on December 2, 2009| 13 Comments »

It’s been six months today since my son, Jaren, died of a massive heart attack. The fact that half a year has passed has done little to alleviate the loss, although I can now write the words, “Jaren is dead” without crumbling.

In the case of the death of one’s child, I don’t think time heals. Much like an amputee, the edges of the missing part of me have scarred enough to tolerate the many times a day I bump up against memory, pick at regret and finger possibilities forever gone, but gone is gone and phantom pain hurts.

Jaren was the smartest and funniest person I have ever known, and the privilege of being his mother for 38 years I will carry for the rest of my life. Only 38 years is an unbearable shame nothing can change. Nothing.

Only recently, I received a copy of the autopsy report, something I had been waiting months for. No parent should ever have to read such a document, but for me it was a necessary part of the process I must go through to come to some understanding of the events that led to such a horrible conclusion.

I didn’t really need to know how much his brain weighed or the contents of his stomach, but that’s the sort of information the coroner’s office provides, so I know all that now. I also know that my son had a 98% blockage in the same place my coronary artery was clogged before an emergency bypass extended my stay on the planet in 1999.

I was told at the time mine was discovered that I had a one-to-30 day probability of a fatal heart attack, and from that moment until the surgery the following day I was not allowed to do as much as raise my head.

Jaren had been suffering from intense angina, and the night before he died worked his usual shift pushing drinks at the Liquid Kitty. On his feet for hours, he mentioned to his buddy behind the bar with him that his left arm and neck were “killing him”.

Perhaps it was too late then. Maybe if he’d had the option of seeing a doctor, the bypass he needed would not have been possible. But …

If he’d had health coverage, medication to control cholesterol and his diabetes would have been provided for years, and the routine operation that reroutes blood through the heart would have happened when needed. Other health issues could have also been addressed, and he wouldn’t have felt so alone, so on his own, so without options.

Jaren never asked for help. Any questions about his welfare were always answered with an “I’m fine”, and although he always went the extra mile for anyone in his life who needed him to do that, he did not do it for himself, nor request it of anyone else.

The list of “should haves” for me is longer than I can look at in one sitting, so I pick and choose and wish I had done different things and had one more chance.

I miss my son. The world … not just my world, but the whole damned thing … is poorer without his smile, his gentleness, his humor and his amazing intelligence.

If there’s one thing I would ask on his behalf now, it would be that universal health care in America becomes a reality.

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Are we having fun yet?

Posted in Loss on September 7, 2009| 4 Comments »

Fuck itWall … ouch. Wall … ouch. Wall … ouch. Wall … ouch.

Just call me Lumpy and hand me a helmet, please.

My house may be made of wood, but brick walls are everywhere, and I’m bloody tired of banging my head against them.

Spin, spin, spin, stop, step forward and, smack! … the wall of sadness. It gets no thinner, no shorter, and I’ve yet to find a door through. I’m learning every chink and seek out some when I need to feel specific pain in a hurts-so-good sort of way when I worry about scabbing over.

Spin again, step, bang, and it’s fear I run into.The how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-make-it and where-the-hell-am-I-going wall that sends me stumbling down dark corridors searching for the tiniest flicker of light somewhere, anywhere.

Spin, lurch, and smack into loneliness, missing people, yearning, regret.

Turn away from that one and slam straight into frustration, had-enough-of-this-shit, doing-the-best-I-can-why-isn’t-it-enough exhaustion that makes me want to lie down on the cold, hard floor and curl up into a ball.

Some days are better than others. This is not one of those days.

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Ketchup

Posted in Children, Expat Living, Family, Friends, Fun, Hopeful thoughts, Island life, Loss, love, Seychelles, tagged on September 2, 2009| 6 Comments »

Sam and Cj on and adventure with Gay and Carlos

Sam and Cj on and adventure with Gay and Carlos

Ooooh, lookie here … a brief window in the pickle that’s been gerkin me around lately, taking up my thyme, so how about a little ketchup?

We’re enjoying the last week of the holiday, as Sam and Cj start school again on Monday. Sam will be in Year 2 and Cj in what’s called Reception 2, and both are looking forward to getting back in the education saddle.

We’ve not done a heck of a lot over the couple of months they’ve been free from schedules, but have hit the beach more than usual and enjoyed leisurely breakfasts at The Pirate’s Arms … which is not the same as IN A pirate’s arms.

Irina, a lovely Russian friend, took Sam to Praslin and LaDigue, and Gay has invited both kids to adventure and hyake (That’s hike and kayak on the same day … sounds much better than saying they kiked.) a few times.

With guests here — Carlos, Kim, Cade — excuses to be out and about were easily available, so we took advantage and showed the sites of Victoria, both of them, which managed to fill a couple of 15 minute slots that would have otherwise been spent sitting on the veranda gazing at the sea.

Party fun with Violeta, Mel and Lio ...

Party fun with Violeta, Mel and Lio ...

I’ve had many laughs at great parties lately. Sadly, some of my favorite friends here are coming to the end of their Seychelles time and are soon to move along, but that no longer stops any of us from enjoying what we have while we do, and staying in touch no matter the distance in future.

Diversion has been good for me. I’m okay most of the time now, but do get sideswiped by sadness on a regular basis. Some days are better than others, but even on the bad days now there is comfort in the fact that this hole I live with in my heart will refuse to heal; I don’t want it to scar over, not ever.

Ernesto, me and Carola in Basel in July

Ernesto, me and Carola in Basel in July

Ernesto is headed to Seychelles at the end of the month for a five week stay, and I’ve been laying the groundwork for him to play here … a lot. He’ll be doing guitar workshops for the National Arts Council, giving group lessons for music students at the French School and performing.

We’re all looking forward to having him around for quite a while, and Sam is working on his Spanish in order to expand a repertoire of mutual banter that is presently limited to little more than pollo loco.

So, life is what it is, and as the summer from hell draws to an end I’m not sorry to see it fade into past. 2010 looms and I have hopes that arbitrary designation contains more happiness sandwiched between its bun than its predecessors 2008/2009.

Pass the mustard …

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Sunday Tangent

Posted in Hopeful thoughts, Loss, love, Music I like, science, tagged , , on August 16, 2009| 11 Comments »

Music ... for the soul. Photo: Kim Pockpas

Music ... for the soul. Photo: Kim Pockpas

It has longed seemed to me that as humans we are over-engineered and severely limited by our biology.

I suppose that could be why Yoda’s line … in addition to many issuing from sources less mainstream and more respected … resonates:

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Crude matter, for sure, even when we fix ourselves up, often to the detriment of luminosity.

What could be the reason for minds that allow us to imagine everything, but bodies that begin falling apart as soon as we’re born, spend a lifetime secreting disgusting fluids, can’t see in the dark, breathe under water or fly?

Only one answer makes sense to me, and that is that this life is merely a pit stop, a quick duck-in for some sort of tuning up or tuning in or tuning out … whatever ends up being made of our time.

I know many who are convinced that this is it, that in becoming human we have hit the wall, that we’re born, we live, we die, and that’s the whole story, and I have no problem with that, except that it makes no sense … it’s just bloody wasteful.

We can easily track the reasons for many evolutionary developments … whales lost their legs because they hampered swimming, mandrills developed colorful butts to keep track of each other in dense forest … and much of human change, from bipedalism allowing for quicker spotting of predators, leading to shapely asses in the process, to color vision letting us find ripe fruits, fits the program. At some point, however, it just got silly.

Science may argue that our capacity to dream up Shakespearian plays, grand music, art and philosophy is some sort of side dish, a naturally occurring consequence arising in tandem with the ability to hunt and gather, but I’d have to ask: What would be the point?

Did we need to be able to put man on the moon to put food on the table … Did we need a table? … and reproduce? Other animals that have been around much longer than we have, tortoises, for example, haven’t been compelled as a species to invent French horns to enrich their environment .

Our evolutionary biology has worked against us as we’ve been honed. We’ve lost the capacity to smell sexual readiness, fear and illness as we’ve relied more and more upon vision, even while knowing well that we can’t trust our eyes much of the time, the hand being quicker than and all that.

And as great as our minds can be, our bodies limit us; our brains can only process so much of the information in our world. We know, for instance, that time is not linear. This has been proven, but can we wrap our heads around that? Even those who can quote formulas live one day at a time.

Stephen Hawking, for one, who said: “It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.”

How much in our world do we miss, ignore, refuse to incorporate into our version of reality? We know that we are constantly surrounded by energy; light and heat are two we notice, but it’s likely that there is much more. We may even sense the occasional touch of something, but not being able to classify we chalk it up to whatever …

There was a case of a “new tribal people” discovered in South America some years back. Poor slobs were inundated by scientists wanting to study this unique and untouched society. At one point one of the researchers, noting the weekly overflight of an airplane, asked the people what this object in the sky was called in their culture. He was looked at with amusement … poor guy was obviously batty … because the plane simply did not exist in their world. They didn’t even see it.

It is possible that we exist in simultaneous multiple universes, even though we can conceive of them wonderfully without really “getting it”, so are very likely missing a lot.

Or are we? Perhaps we know more than we think we do. After all, we create art and music for our souls … the part of us we know and touch without proof. We are more than our biology, and death is a door, nothing more.

Okay. Tangent over …

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