My Turkey

November 25, 2008 at 4:11 am (relationships)
Tags: , , ,

I am a smidge cynical about some things in life.  You can’t do atrocity work like I did for fifteen years (investigating child abuse and neglect) and not get a little bit crusty about people and love and warm fuzzies.  But I’ve always liked the holidays.  I enjoy the traditions…the ’sameness’ of it all. 

Every year, you know that Uncle Ed is going to drink too much…and Cousin Ellen will pick her nose when she thinks no-one is looking…and your mother will tell embarrassing stories about your potty-training experiences.  Someone will get out of sorts…(I’m imagining many Republicans who will be dining with their gloating Democratic relatives).  You’ll be tired…the kids will be over-sugared and over-wrought.  But it’s family, and family matters. 

I have a favorite Thanksgiving memory.  November 28, 1974.  My husband’s family was coming to our home, which was a first.  The pies were baked.  The house was as clean as I could get it, being a rather slapdash homemaker who much preferred reading over sweeping.  And I…?  Well, I went into labor and delivered a beautiful eight pound boy turkey at 10:30 on that cold Thanksgiving morning.  (My husband later said, “You’ll do anything to get out of spending time with my mother, won’t you?”)

Daddy ate my hospital lunch and then went around to various friends and family homes to tell them of the new arrival, and to eat their Thanksgiving food.  I spent the very quiet day getting to know my new son.  We didn’t converse.  Just gazed into each other’s eyes and napped alot.

And the next day baby and I were released to go home before the blizzard hit.  My favorite moments over the next few weeks were those middle of the night feedings…all snug in my chair, looking out at the mountains of snow across the road, cuddling that precious little boy.  A very special time indeed.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.  Hold your loved ones dear…forgive them their irritating ways.  The wheel just keeps on turning in life, and one day they will be gone. 

Peace.

3 Comments

Only at Funerals

October 27, 2008 at 1:06 pm (relationships)
Tags: , , , , ,

I come from an extremely broken family.  My father was married three times, had several children with each of his first two wives, and then married a woman thirty years his junior.  I was the only product of that last union.  As a result I grew up with my nieces and nephews who were my age-mates.

As adults, none of us remained closely connected.  We sort of existed in “pods”, would see each other only infrequently, (at funerals mostly), and would always say that we needed to get together. 

I tend to think that it’s hard for families like mine to develop those close emotional ties when there’s no strong matriarch to pull everyone together.  We have good intentions, but other priorities prevent us from ever acting on them.

I said all that to tell you about Don. 

Don was the son of my sister.  She and I were born on the same day…thirty-two years apart.  Don and I were the same age…and basically grew up together.  I lived with his family several times throughout my childhood.

I remember the scary time, (we were six then), when Don ran into a busy street and was hit by a car.  I can still see his body flying into the air and landing with a sickening thud twenty feet away.  He was in the hospital for several weeks.  When he came home I wouldn’t go near him…he looked horrible, and scared the bejesus out of me.

Ten or twelve years later, when I was again living with his family, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone crying in the dark outside my room.  It was Don.  His girlfriend had just broken up with him.  He was devastated, and asked me, that night and several times over the next couple of weeks, to ride with him past her house, just because….

Don went on to marry his next high-school girlfriend…Patti.  They had two children, and a good life.  He worked in auto dealerships for years…as a service or sales manager.  His leisure time was spent racing cars, and later he rode horses for show.

In February of this year Don fell and hurt his back.  Upon examination, it was discovered that he had stage four lung cancer…that in fact one tumor had grown so large that it severed two vertebrae in his spine…and that it had spread to his brain and other major organs.

He died on October 21st. 

It had been years since I had seen him.  I didn’t know he was ill.  I got a phone call, two days after he died, from an old friend asking me if I was going to the calling hours that night. 

I stood in line for an hour at the viewing.  There was Patti, and, over there, the kids…Tom and Beth…and Beth’s five children.  And there was Don.  Oh, Donny!  He looked so horrible.  Patti said he suffered terribly at the end, but died peacefully…looking into her eyes. 

I loved him.  And if I could go back and change things…I would have made the time to stay connected with him and his family.

But as I said, in my family we tend to only see each other at funerals.

Good-bye Don.

2 Comments

« Older entries