Category: Life & other interesting questions

Remembering Papi

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Yesterday, I kneel and reached into the back of the closet for a bag. One that I placed there when I first moved in. It contains items that I kept from my time with Papi. I found the business card that he gave me at our first lunch date. I didn’t know it was a date at the beginning but at the end, I was already falling in love with him.

The bag also holds the books he signed for me and three frame photos. Papi took the photos one summers day in my living room as I laid on the sofa before him. They are intimate pictures where my body was cast into a shadowy light by the blinds. Sometime later I framed them and put them in my bedroom. They have been in the closet since my move to Virginia three years ago.

Today, I took placed them on a table where I will be able to see them. It feels good to see them and remember how he saw me.

To remember that he loved me and I loved him.

I will remember Papi everyday that I am alive. I will never stop missing him or loving him.

I will remember Papi as a great man, but not a perfect man.

I will remember that we loved each other more than the other knew.

I will remember him every time a play or movie takes me on a journey.

I will remember him walking around Lake Eola with him.

I will remember seeing him smile the full intensity of his gaze melting me.

I will remember how he hated writing but was phenomenal at it.

I will remember how he took care of his partner and loved her like no other.

I will remember him whenever I think of New York or walk its streets.

I will remember him when the pain of his loss weighs on me until tears release it again.

I will remember him…as I loved him with each and every breath of my being.

State of Things May

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Oh, lord, it is May and I’m a teacher. That alone would be enough to describe how I am doing this month. May is the time that all of the good little children begin to earn for freer days and all the rotten little children (the few that actually rotten) begin to fight against all authority. Schools struggle to keep children contained within the school walls and ground. This week, I had to get a child out of a tree twice. Same kiddo, he needed to climb and he did.

So professionally, the state of things is more chaotic than on average. State testing ends soon and then the days of waste. Days where learning had been dictated to continue by administration but everyone is so exhausted that the lessons are light and fun by design.

My tutoring gig ended abruptly. I’ll miss the kiddo and my interactions with his family. Our weekly tutoring sessions were a bright spot in my week. I have another side gig starting soon which won’t be as fun. It will however get my closer to my goals.

Writing has mostly been happening here on the blog. My other projects are either in research mode or caught in the Bermuda triangle of editing.

Mentally and Physically, I am on survival mode. Grief has a funny way of doing that to you. The only way I know to get through what I am feeling now is to keep moving forward that way I can get out before the devil knows I am here. I don’t think that I am moving fast enough.

It isn’t a perfect plan but it the one I’ve got. When Papi died, one of the people I hold most dear in the world, I poured my feelings into a blog and it touched people. Papi and I had a complicated relationship with good and bad moments, caring and cruelty- but at the end we had reached a better place because of all of that. My naked feelings touched someone in a way I hadn’t intended and a bridge was broken. Written words like spoken ones can’t be taken back.

I can’t undo the unintentional damage I caused and that bothers me. There is a part of me that just wants to find the perfect words to make it all better to explain myself and rebuild that bridge. And that is the part that has been waking me up in the middle of the night and draining my wine supply. It is also responsible for me putting a pen in the sink to be washed.

Did I see him as a villain? No, but there were times in our relationship when I held on to the hurt to the point when it was unhealthy.

Did I paint him as villain? Probably. Was it my intention? No, but intentions and results are often two different things. I can’t take back those words. The only thing I can do is honor the man I love.

In that light, let me tell you a story. Once a upon a time, I had lunch with Momma at the mall near where I worked. Things had been difficult between us for a couple of months so the lunch was a step in repairing our relationship. We talked about my paternal grandmother and that’s when Momma told me that my grandmother wasn’t part indigenous but that her father had been black. Suddenly a whole bunch of things in my life made sense. My sister’s comments about my body among other things and why we were discouraged from looking into genealogy.

Sometime soon after I told a friend who told another friend and that’s when the trouble started. I was excited about finding out more about my family’s history. The friend she told, unknown to me had feelings for me and the idea that I wasn’t white was too much for him. He ended our friendship with a nasty gram. My heart was crushed; nothing about me had changed beyond knowing more about my family. Papi called that day and when he found out he came right away and held me.

He didn’t try and console me by telling me that my friend had never really been my friend. He just held me in my grief and let me feel what I needed to feel. I will never forget that day or him.

I love you, Papi. And I always will.

What to Expect When Grieving

On By rosereadsIn Life & other interesting questions, PoetryLeave a comment

Expect that you won’t know what to do from one moment to the next.

Expect that people are going to say stupid things like comparing losing your father to join a club.

Expect that you won’t be able to sleep or you will over sleep.

Expect people to treat you different. Or like nothing at all happened.

Expect them to tell you it will be ok, when it never will be ok again.

Expect others to share with you quite moments of their own grief or moments where your loved one made them smile.

Expect there to be moments when you smile and think of them.

Expect beauty to return in drips and drabs until rainbows shine like they are the first rainbow ever created.

Expect to think of them everyday, sometimes with a smile and sometimes on the edge of tears.

Expect for friends who love you to mess up when they are trying to talk to you.

Expect that the sun will continue to rise and set and you can be angry and sad all at the same time.

Expect that there is no guide to what you are going through that will ever be enough.

Expect to smile and laugh again, but not always when society deems acceptable.

Expect that your life has changed and your new reality will be something you never imagined….

Living with Grief

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When did you first meet grief? Were you a child or adult? Or somewhere in between?

My family introduced me to grief in a dull funeral home in Ohio, somewhere near Columbus not far from Springfield. Grief didn’t touch me that day. There was no way for it through the stoic ritual containing everyone’s best manners. Everyone was appropriately sad but not too sad. No room for a wondering mind to question because there was no one talking about it; grief that is. We went to the wake, then the funeral and finally a family reunion. So in a matter of 24 hours, I was introduced to grief and then pushed outside to play with distant cousins.

Grief reached out again in the death of my brother’s friend, Justin. The story was told to me as an misbegotten allegory; a reason not to wear a seat belt. The three other boys in the car with him were thrown and survived. The seatbelt pinned him in place crushing him against the telephone pole. I never met Justin. Granny thought of him as part of the family. I only knew him the stories of a young high school football star who was genuine and kind.

Grief then was something to observe and mimic, not an personal experience.

Time would fix that oversight. After all someone had to die. No one gets out of life alive.

Death in America is so often sanitized that when you get to adulthood, death is a horrible stranger. You see it but you don’t know it.

My granny died when I was 18. She had been my world; the one who took care of me when the nuclear family I was born into disintegrated. As I grew up and she grew frail, I started taking care of her. I spent every school break and long weekend with her. My world was expanding at that time, like many eighteen year olds. That summer I took an internship at the law firm my sister worked at. It was a good job for someone with no experience in anything except for living in the protective shell of family; not that I would have admitted it.

None of us were with her when she died. I am not sure who was. I never thought about that until now. Was her death a good death? Was it peaceful? What is a good death? As her granddaughter and part time caretaker, we never talked about it.

When my aunt died two years later, I was again unprepared. The shock of her death thrust me back into the realm of my birth family who take passive hostility to a suffocating level. I remember getting ready for the service staring out on to the dam on which my grandparents built their house and my oldest sister telling me to put heels so we would both be taller than our biological sister. It felt off; like she forcing herself make it joke due to the occasion rather than her usual direct attack. K was good at those direct attacks.

I never saw my aunt’s body. My eldest brother returned me to my college life covered in grief and I stumbled through life trying to be ok and failing. I remember as we made our way out of the mountains of central Pennsylvania how he lectured me on how our father’s grief was greater than mine. Had I been too emotional at the service? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Death came again and again. Sanitized for the public comfort and profit. If you didn’t know it already, the funeral industry makes millions upon millions every year exploding our collective grief.

Then came Shannon. Oh Shannon, you never knew the power you held. I never knew her when she wasn’t dying. When I first started dating Stew told me about Shannon and being with the family through her first cancer treatment. He also told me that the cancer had come back. The first time I met Shannon, she surrounded me in her arms. The warmth was amazing.

Months later, I visited her with him, It was the first time, I saw people gathered around someone before they died. We visited often but not enough. You can never visit the dying enough to relieve post-mortem grief.

I stood in the room with her fresh death and told the nurse what I was going to do. The nurse nodded when I had expected her to protest. I washed her body and recited a prayer honoring the vessel that had carried her through life. There is a stillness to death that you can feel in you in your bones. It wasn’t scary, it simply was.

When Papa died that stillness slid over his body as I held his hand. I knew death was there before Momma and my brother did. My gratitude for the nurse who came and told them, sparing me the task is immense.

Grief flows in and out of our lives until we get to the point where we are used to the ebb and flow of it like the tide . We adjust to our new realities thinking it can’t get any worse and then it does. Megan Devine opens her book It’s ok that you’re not ok with this statement “Here’s what I want you to know: this really is as bad as you think.” Raw grief is overwhelming like being caught in a tsunami. One that can return at a moments notice.

On May 1st, the tsunami hit me again. It knocked me out at first and then sent me through the city of memories and regrets you build in two decades of love and friendship while I fought to keep breathing. I didn’t tell anyone until the afternoon, I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Even then, I only told one person. At family dinner, it came out and the look of shock hit everyone so hard that I immediately apologized. The latest wave brought anxiety with it. My heart is threatening to pound its way out of my chest. I don’t know how to exist in this new reality where he is gone.

I’m not being melodramatic, I really don’t know how to exist in this reality without him. I look over the text messages we passed back and forth daily and his voice is fading. The voice that gave me advice, that missed me and loved me.

I know it will not always be like this. I know there will be better days, but I also know that there be days where the grief washes over me and I don’t know which way is up.

All of this sounds very bleak. Grief doesn’t end but it does transform you (or at least to others), because when you do surface you are different. When the water recedes, a memories that you had passed over is uncovered. And you remember the love, you had for them. After all, “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Will it be ok, again? A lot of people will try and tell you that it will be. That grief is something to move through and there will be something better around the corner. But that is a lie. It may never been ok again. The world is shaped by grief in ways that can not be explain to others that have not gone through it or who have chosen to ignore it. The world will never be the same without my Papa. Nor will it be the same without the man I loved for nearly two decades.

Ignoring pain doesn’t heal it. Time doesn’t always lessen it. What has worked for me and allowed me to live with and in grief is not trying to be ok. Thank you again to Megan Devine for her work on grief. I let myself grieve, cry and exist with this new reality. There are times like the last two weeks when I have poured myself into work to distract my mind from the loss. And there will be days like today when my body says enough and I let the grief turn into words.

Vague Death Post

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What do you do when the person you’ve been in a toxic relationship for 16 years dies and you find out a day later? What do you do when for the last ten years that person has kept you as a secret?

You cry.  The tears seeping out rather than pouring.  You tell yourself to get up but you lay in bed for a few moments more and cry.  So you click on his Facebook page, scroll the first couple of posts and click to make your own.  You try to say your goodbyes but you can’t. It is too fresh, too raw and you are a secret. You fear that your words will be deemed disrespectful, an insult to the woman who was by his side when he died. The woman who called him the love of her life and rightfully so.  He made a life with her.  Her grief more legitimate than yours.

Then you hear the words of a beautiful friend whom you heard say if you are afraid to write about it then write about it.

So you lay in bed and cry some more.  Then you get up.  Find your way to the kitchen, make coffee and eat raw cookie dough from the fridge while your real breakfast warms. You say morning to your family and let your dog out.  You say nothing about what has happened.  The kitchen caught in the twilight of morning does not give you away.

And then you climb the stairs and begin.

Do I begin with the fact that even though I broke away from you more than once and you broke me a dozen times that I thought about you everyday? Dreamt about you?  No, then where?

Because now, you are lying cold in the morgue a thousand miles away and I will never get to say goodbye or hello as I dreamed about?  There will be no trips to the big city to see you. No waking up with you and exploring your city? Because no matter where you lived, you were a New Yorker through and through.   No trips to see that cabin, the one you inherited from your mom.   Now there is nothing but your shell, memories and a thousand things unsaid and done.

No, I will begin with this.

I love you. Not loved, because I acknowledge that no matter how far apart we were, you always lived in my heart and mind and will continue to do so.  My heart held that loving you close to it.  She remembered how your voice wrapped me in seduction and coils around all the happy memories.  The day that you first kissed me. You directed it like a play, setting the stage and moving me into place.  I said my lines without even knowing it.  My heart, and lower places, remember the passion and excitement that never dulled. My mind, she clings with claws of steel to the harsher things; your long absences when we were officially a couple, the phone calls accusing me of cheating, and the text messages accusing me of not understanding your pain. My mind holds on to those like I bitterly held on to all of our text messages as records of the truth.

The truth that you loved me. The truth that you hurt me. And the truth that I allowed it all to continue.

*Note – this post was written hours after I found out I had lost him. My heart was shattered and this post is a reflection of that raw emotion. It was never my intention to paint him as a villain. The truth of the matter was our relationship was toxic at times because we didn’t learn to communicate which resulted in the two of us hurting each other at various points. In the end, we were communicating better and he had the love of woman who brought out the best in him.

The State of Things April

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Oh goodness, where am I now?

Physically, I am sitting on a broken chair at my writing desk. My knees aren’t aching, but my hip hurts. Don’t know why, but it is. Getting older when you have lived an interesting life isn’t easy. It is hard to get old. It is hard to deal with a body that doesn’t work the way it once did or the way you hope it would. The doctor is happy that my knees haven’t worsen and so am I. This means that the big knee surgery has been pushed down the road and into my mid-fifties. It is also incredibly wonderful to have a doctor that believes me and works to get help instead of ignoring what is going on.

Mentally, exhaustion is taxing my brain. It is hard to keep on top of everything that I need to get done for work and home; let alone work on my writing. One thing that it hard for people who don’t deal with chronic pain to understand is that managing your pain doesn’t mean you aren’t in pain. The pain means that everything takes more energy. Managing pain doesn’t mean that the pain goes away. It is always there. It is like the difference between swimming in a calm lake versus the ocean. The water’s current is always there pushing against your body. In the lake, you feel it and work with it. In the ocean, you fight it and there is a greater chance it will knock you down or out. In short, it is your constant companion.

Adding to that companion, it appears that I am a COVID long-hauler. The brain fog is real as is the on going dizziness. Yesterday, I stayed home from work because the dizziness didn’t stop all day.

Financially, things are moving where they need to be. Debts are going down and thanks to tutoring and book sales, I’m bring in more than I spend. Two months ago, I went to see a Financial advisor. A step further into adulthood and moving my life to a place where I have choices. The kind of choices that a better credit score and savings can give me.

Dayjob Workwise, things are crazy and it is hard not perseverate on all the things that can and are going wrong. We are entering into the days of standardized testing where elementary kids are put through a ringer in order to gain data for the State. I don’t get why are the students are being made to take a test that doesn’t really test their knowledge. The State says it is only for data but come on there have to be ways to get the data without stressing kids out. On top of that, the COVID numbers among staff have decrease but each week more students are contracting the virus.

Side-gig. Tutoring has dropped to once a week. Good on one hand because it gives me more time to do my regular stuff. Bad because the money I earned goes towards my debt. I enjoy the gig and am grateful for the opportunity to work on mathematics again. Once upon a time, I was a math major so it is great to revive those skills.

Travel Plan: Now that I am fully vaccinated, I have those again. A trip to Florida is in my future. I’m overdue to see my family. Beyond that a trip to Richmond to see my beloved friends and give a few attack hugs as well as my favorite Virginia cemetery. One of my favorite humans has a new house in Maryland that I would love to see as well. Lots of ideas of where to go but no firm plans of yet.

Writing/Project-wise. Things have slowed down. They haven’t however stopped. The ideas keep coming and I am doing my best to stay on track with everything. The Devil’s Due is on its second draft. The non-fiction projects remain in research and outline mode. Time has been short supply, energy has been in even shorter supply. The ideas come and find there way into existence but they don’t feel right. There was no rhythm to them. They were my words but they feel flat and awkward like a ball without air.

Garden: The garden moved and expanded this year. We’ve spent three Sunday’s stripping turf. If we don’t get rain, we will finish this weekend. The weather has turned cold so it will be another two or three weeks before the plants can go in the ground. I am excited and nervous. There are a lot of seedlings in my dinning room. They are all going to need homes in the coming month.

Luke: My furry son turned 10 this year. We have been doing more off-lease time which has been great. He follows me when I go to the barn to work on things. As soon as I turned to go back to the house, he comes running like Momma don’t leave me. There is joy to his galloping that lightens my heart.

So that’s where I am right now? Where you are my friends?

Love,

Lu

Only Human

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I am only human, although I have gone by nickname of Dragon for years. My flesh is mortal and although I have dry skin, no scales adorn my body.

COVID-19 took me out for 3 weeks.

In the midst of these unpresideneted (only unpresidenet because we don’t really study history) times, I have faltered from my writing routine.

I know why it happen and I could list the reason/excuses for it, but they all boil down to the fact that I am human. I can only do so much and in order to maintain the silver of sanity I hold close to my chest, something had to give.

And it was my writing routine.

I started a second job tutoring, twice a week. I’ve worked through the pandemic and all of the ups, downs, twists and turns around. I wrote and I plotted new projects and then came the night when I couldn’t.

The Writer in Happier and Healthier times.

Couldn’t sit and write after work. I couldn’t write because I was asleep. Night after night, I crashed on my bed. The mornings were a blur of things I needed, wanted and could to get were all mixed together. In the evenings, the only thing that kept me moving was the routine of my family life. It anchored and has let me weather the continuous storm that these days have brought.

Writing and the routine of it has returned. I am writing for at least a half-n-hour a day; more when I can. Vaccines have brought hope and some freedom, but the end isn’t insight. There will be a lot more days and nights of this pandemic. And my routines might falter again, as long as I survive this, I am ok with that bargain.

I’m Not Positive, I Am Trying to be Pragmatic

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I am not positive, I am pragmatic.  Or at least that is what I strive to be much of the time. It may seem like my attitude toward problem solving is positive, but the reality is that it is rooted in pragmatism.  Pragmatism is more concerned with matters of fact than of what could or should be.

It is one of the reason, I make lists. It is too easy to get caught up in what the day should be and forget what needs to be done. Or more to the point, it is how to keep myself focused so that I can write and maintain a job, all the while living with depression, anxiety and chronic pain.

There is no use in panicking. Panic doesn’t solve problems. It tends to add fuel to the fire or worse starts the fire. And if I let myself, I will panic. I will freak out. And with that wave of chaos comes the threat of a complete shut down which I can ill afford.

I am also not negative, well at least not overly so. I tend to look at things thought the eyes of experience. Sometimes, this means that I am not outwardly shocked when bad things happen. It means while I don’t want or wish them to happen, I don’t let them crush me at least not for long.

Isn’t there a saying about if you are going through Hell don’t slow down because you might get out before the devil even knows you are there. Some times the best thing to do is to keep moving.

Do I get mad? Hell, yes. And do I sometimes panic? Yes, but overtime I have been learning to let myself feel things instead of fighting it and then release what doesn’t serve me. It isn’t easy and I have failed at it more times than I can count. I have learned to that it is ok not to fix everything that the day needs to end so the dawn will come again. Sometimes with that light comes more than just mere illumination, sometimes there is a new perspective.

Two weeks ago, I started tutoring a young man in math and English. Mostly math, it vexes him. I adore math and all of the things it gives us. A couple of times in our tutoring sessions, I’ve said something about how math is all around us and if it we like those things why not like math. He will think for a second and say he never thought of it like that.

Hating math doesn’t make it any easier so why not embrace it or at the very least not actively hate it. Just one of the many gives that adopting a pragmatic philosophy has given me.

 

Why We Hate Math

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Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com

Math is logical and our brains are not. Our brains make leaps while math takes a steady and careful path to its destination. It follows rules and its paths are well chartered. Our minds not so much.

For the record, I don’t hate math. I love it. I became a history major at a point in my life where the emotional side of my life wasn’t adding up. The rules of math can not be applied to the heart. My mind didn’t know to reconcile with the focus need for calculation when it was exploding exponentially with the chaos causes with loss, heart break and uncertainty.

Back in the day (which if you ask my students is anytime between when man discovered first fire to the day their parents were married), math was been a subject which vexed mankind. It remains so to this day.

In other words, math is hard.

We seek meaning and understanding, but you can’t apply formulas to your emotions. The heart resists all such logic.

Take my first college boyfriend (no, we aren’t going back to my first boyfriend, cause that jerk pour a coke on my mom’s white jacket that I had borrowed for some now forgotten offense) I loved him and he loved me. Or at least, we loved the idea of each other. But when it came down to it, the drama that flowed in both our lives was too much. The love equaling love didn’t work out. There were too many unseen variables.

Math has rules and once you understand those rules, problems become solutions that you can check. The heart isn’t such an easy equation to solve. The variables are too numerous for us to calculate any answer consistently and the rules seem to change at Cupid’s whim.

Math is really easy when compared to the calculations of the heart. Just follow math’s rules and you are set.

Not so in love or grammar. But that is another story.

Night Stalker Too Graphic?

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The Netflix docuseries “Night Stalker” has been criticized as being too much for viewers. If it is then we have sanitized the real horror of Richard Ramirez’s crimes to the point that we expect no longer to be uncomfortable when dealing them.

Richard Ramirez was a monster. He was rapist, a child molester and a murder among other things.

This morning, I finished the series. It wasn’t too much. Or maybe I am far more twisted than I thought. But I think the reality of the situation is a little more complex. True crime has become a genre where people expect a certain level of fear and revulsion, but only a enough to be entertained. We want horror to be a fun sort of fright. It is ok for a horror movie to be gory, but not a documentary about a serial killer?

Now, before I go any further, I am also a lover of most things spooky and creepy so my level of gory may be different from others.

Still, I don’t think I am off base when I say that maybe if we understood more about the horrors of men and women like Ramirez that maybe we would fetishize these killers. When Richard Ramirez was being taking to jail, a woman climbed up on the top of a fan and flash him. That’s right, a man who killed thirteen people had groupies upon his arrest.

We focus so much on the killers and their motivations that we forget about the victims including the communities that they terrorized.

So, no, in my opinion the series didn’t go too far. It talked more about the victims and the effects of the investigation on the men and women hunting the Ramirez than it showed gore. Yes, there are crime scene photos. There are also the voices of Ramirez’s victims defiant; some alive, some speaking through their surviving family members. Their humanity is brought forth in this documentary.

The documentary does take advantage of the material it had available, including crime scene photos, interviews and mood music. Some attention needs to be paid to the score. It is ominous and atmospheric tone was composed by Brooke and Will Blair. The brothers have been working since the mid-2000’s and have composed over 50 scores.

Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno were the detectives who worked on catching Ramirez.

This is less a documentary about Ramirez and more a documentary about the people that hunted him and the people that survived him.