B is for Brother—and All Those PB&J Adventures

After I picked writing about my brother as my second April A to Z blog topic, I searched my archives to see what I’d already said about him. What I thought might take fifteen minutes took half the morning. He appears in fourteen posts, with six of them devoted entirely to him. I was shocked, but it also sparked an idea for a gift I might make for my nieces and nephew. If I gather everything I’ve written about him into one place, add a few photos and a handful of bridge‑paragraphs, I could turn those memories into a short soft‑cover book. At Blurb Publishing, twenty‑five pages keeps you under the price break for small runs, which means I could print enough copies to give one to my great and great‑great nieces and nephews, too, who are old enough to remember their great and great‑great grandfather. (Is there a prize for how many times you can use the word great in a sentence? There should be. Figuring out the lineage was not easy for an old brain like mine.) So many ideas, so little time.

My brother and I started life during WWII, and some of the antics we grew up with—think Happy Days episodes—might seem ho‑hum to others who lived through the 40s and 50s. But in an age of helicopter parents, some of the things our parents allowed would seem extreme or even akin to child neglect. For example, several years before I was even a teenager, we could pack peanut‑butter‑and‑jelly sandwiches, grab bottles of pop, tell my mom we were going to walk around the entire lake, and she’d simply say, “Be home before dark.” What didn’t dawn on me until adulthood was that she could probably see us from the shoreline of our cottage as we made our way through alternating cow pastures and woods. Not that it would have helped if we’d gotten into real trouble. Few housewives of the era had cars while their husbands were at work, so the quickest way she could have reached us was by rowboat—assuming it wasn’t too windy. This was long before cell phones or even a landline at the cottage. When we weren’t circling the lake, we were walking five miles to the nearest store for ice‑cream cones or playing at a fort we’d built on the far side of the woods behind our cottage.

As kids, my brother and I were close, but as adults we drifted. Jerry married young—too young—and I went to college. They had the kind of marriage a lot of people have when they marry right out of high school, where both partners eventually look around and wonder if they’re missing something. Nineteen years later, they divorced.

One conversation from my mid‑twenties stands out. Jerry was trying to figure out why I seemed to have no interest in getting married. Most girls in that era listed marriage as their number‑one goal. So did I, if I’m honest, but I was stubborn and wouldn’t have admitted it short of being waterboarded. I’d had a few serious relationships, and he couldn’t understand what was “wrong” with me for not taking the next step. I didn’t tell him the first guy turned out to be an in‑the‑closet gal‑guy. And the second — well, that’s a story too long for this post, not to mention it took me a decade to figure out why exactly that relationship fell apart. 

In the last two years of his life, when Jerry moved into my continuum‑care community, we grew close again. Even though he was in the Memory Care building and I’m in Independent Living, I could see him a couple of times a week and most of the time we could still talk about our childhood, our parents, our marriages and his children. We understood each other in that way only siblings can. He had a good sense of humor, loved his kids and our parents fiercely, wrote great poetry, and was a dedicated caregiver to his second wife, who had early‑onset Alzheimer’s and didn’t make it easy.

And I still miss him because some people leave a space that never quite closes, and maybe that’s how you know they mattered. ©

This is the End, my Friend

It's over. The internment of my brother’s ashes took place today and as I left the cemetery I nabbed two long-stemmed yellow roses out of the family floral arrangement that was brought over from the funeral home. It was a beautiful arrangement of mostly orange gerbera daisies and yellow roses and it bothers me, as a person who was in the floral industry for twenty years, that I can't remember what other flowers were in that arrangement. While we were getting ready to go our separate ways it also bothered me to leave that gorgeous bouquet behind but I resisted taking any more flowers, knowing that they were supposed to go on top of the bare dirt left behind after the sexton buried the box of ashes that he was waiting in the wings to do, after we all left. My youngest niece at the same time I was fight the impulse to take more flowers, finally broke down in heart-wrenching tears as she kept feeling her dad's box of ashes, saying over and over again that she didn't want to leave him there. If nothing else my twisted need for those yellow roses put me in the right place at the right time to be of some comfort. She'd kept her emotions in check far too long and I knew exactly how she felt, given the fact that I Johnny Appleseeded Don's ashes over seven places, places that didn't seem as final as a cemetery.

I should backtrack to the service. As I was getting ready to leave this morning I got a call from my youngest niece. She wanted to give me a heads up that the service would be "more religious" than I might like. My brother was never a member of a church and while he and I had "that talk" a few months back I can't honesty say I know one way or another if he would have been put off by phrases like "Jesus was waiting with open arms" the way I would be if I knew Jesus was invited to my memorial service. But as I told my niece, half his grand-kids are super religious so the songs and prayers will comfort half the people there. All in all, it was a nice, well-balanced service with something for everyone. There was also a great slide show with 84 photos for his 84 years on earth and a touching and often funny eulogy written and delivered by my brother’s oldest grand-daughter. She does a lot of public speaking and teaches writing classes so she was a pro. As I listened I couldn't help admiring her vocabulary, it made me feel like I write in me-Jane-you-Tarzan mode.

The only thing that bothered me about the entire event was that my brother's first wife wasn't in a single photo in the slide show. They were married 19 years and it didn't seem right to erase her from my brother's history like she never existed. When I asked my oldest niece about it---she put the slide show together---she joked that two women were enough for any guy. "His second wife and girlfriend (who came after) were enough." I shouldn't have even asked, but questioning that editorial decision was my worst transgression of the day. At least I think so. I hope so. I did made a point of not getting too clingy with any of my brother's kids, knowing they had a connection to everyone single person who came and who also wanted a piece of them. But if I had had my dream seating arrangement for the service, I would had sat on my nephew lap, folded in one of his bear hugs while being flanked on the sides by my two nieces who would have each been holding one of my hands. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see? People read all kinds of gossipy things into the order in which immediate family members sit at memorial services and my dream scene would have said the little sister inside of me was feeling needy.

I didn't speak up when the minister asked if anyone had a story to share, but I wanted to. If I had I would have started out saying, "Jerry was my older brother, my only sibling and he was both my protector and my tormentor" then go on from there to recount some cute stories from our youth, but I didn't trust this geriatric shell I live in to get the words out of my mouth in the right order. And I often have to remind myself when I share anecdotes that it isn't about me. I worry sometimes that others think I'm trying to steal a spotlight when all I'm trying to do is show empathy...and that's what I call my 'Me Too' defense. When I catch myself doing it, I remind myself that a tat doesn't always have to come on the heels of a tit. Sometimes we just have to listen to show empathy and concern.

There was a funny story told at the cemetery and it’s a good example of my brother's character and sense of humor. His second wife had a framed, pastel painting of her two sons when they are really young. It was rather large and the boys had super yellow hair that---knowing the nature of pastel chalk---I imagine that hair probably glowed in the dark. She loved that painting but neither of my step-nephews wanted it after she died. So my brother bribed the oldest and his wife by telling them to hang it in their living room and he would pay for their son's college. "But if you take it down, the college money will disappear." At the cemetery the oldest said he kept his word about hanging the painting but the day his son graduated from college, it came down and its been under their bed ever since. At the cemetery he was trying to get his younger brother to take it home to Colorado with him. 

The biggest laugh that came during the eulogy was about the "yellow haired boys" that dominated my brother's living room decor in the '80s. I don't know what made my brother place strings on that painting but it sounded just like something I would do if I had his resources and wanted to keep something in the family for another generation or two. I hope my great-niece, who finally spoke up saying she'd take the painting, writes its history and attaches it to the back. It's too good of a story to get lost with the passing of time. 

Until Next Wednesday... ©

P.S. After Don died I bought a silver locket that is made with a compartment to contain ashes, a photo and an engraving and I wore it a lot for the first year after Don passed away and on special occasions now. I highly recommend them as a bereavement memento. Just touching it that first year made me feel closer to Don. The post about the locket can be found here. The post about the places I left his ashes is here.

My Brother

My brother passed away last weekend after a few stressful weeks following a fall he took. When they were ready to discharge him from the hospital, his doctor recommended Hospice only to have Hospice turn the him down after they did their evaluation. Apparently, with no underlying health issues like cancer or heart failure with a six months or less prognosis their bar is set high for dementia patients who could go on for years. At that point in time he was moved from the hospital to Skilled Nursing at our sister campus and was working on getting stronger so he could return to the Memory Care building next door to me. He seemed to be making progress when he started running a high fever and a temperature they couldn't bring down. So back to the hospital he went and he died in his sleep soon after. He didn’t even last a week after Hospice looked over his medical records.

It's been a long goodbye for my brother and his wonderful kids and they couldn't have done a better job of keeping him safe and well cared for these past few years---nearly a half decade if my memory serves me right. At first they supported him in his own home, eventually bringing in more and more paid caregivers as his dementia worsen. Anyone who has been there, done that knows that home care comes with its own set of issues and stresses and his kids were burning out. A little over a year ago they placed him in the complex where I live.

Those of us who has ever had to place an aging parent in assisted living knows the mixed feelings you go through. It's a special kind of hopelessness that settles in as you watch their world get smaller and smaller and pieces of your parent's personality peel away, but then the euphoria comes when your loved one is having a good day which in turn gives you a good day. It's like you're on a yo-yo string, up and down, up and down with each visit. But all that is past tense now and the hardest memories of recent years will fall by the way side and be replaced by memories of better times. For some it takes longer than for others but making peace with the past is something my brother’s family has had a lot of practice doing. It’s a work in progress for anyone, isn’t it, a journey we make alone with a little help from our friends.

When someone dies the first place we tend to go is to the selfish side, counting the ways our own lives are effected. For me, I’m now the oldest person in our immediate family and possibly the oldest of all my cousins. I’ve lost track of my oldest cousin from the other side of the state. She was a year or two older than my brother. I hated it when she came for extended visits which happened every summer for a week when we were kids. She came with a steamer trunk like people took with them on ocean-liners like the Titanic. She’d lay on my bunk bed reading movie star and Glamour magazines, and she changed the color of her fingernail polish daily and wouldn't leave the room without refreshing her lipstick that matched her nails. Our cottage was on the primitive side back in those days. We took baths in the lake and had an outhouse and I’m guessing that she didn’t like being there anymore than I liked having her. My mom was always after my brother and me to include her in the endless activities we lake front kids could find to do in the country. 

One time my brother came up with a plan to make my cousin an honorary chief in our band of Indians. We placed seven newspapers down in a circle on the sand to sit on. When Jerry brought her down to the circle the rest of us were already in our places and when she took the one place left she sunk down into the water-filled hole we’d dug and covered up with the newspaper. She---I grudgingly acknowledge now---was embarrassed and wanted to go home. We didn’t have phones back in those days and her parents had dropped her and her brother off on their way to a vacation without them. She had no choice but to stay but the rest of the week she stayed in the bedroom. My mom even served her meals in there. If it had been me or Jerry refusing to come out Mom would have let us starve to death.

But my cousin must have forgiven my brother for orchestrating the prank because when Jerry hosted a family reunion at his house in the early ‘80s My cousin and her then husband flew their little two-seater airplane over to join all the other cousins. She was still flamboyant with her long cigarette holder and flirting shamelessly with anyone with a pair of balls in their pants, still my nemesis and I still hated every red hair on her head. Ya, I’m that stubborn person who rarely changes my first impressions of the people I meet. I’m not proud of that, but I am honest about my shortcomings. She, however, flew over to visit Jerry a couple of times that same summer so she was the better person who could forgive and forget. My brother had a quick wit that got him out of trouble as often as it got into trouble as a kid, and as an adult he was fun to be around when he was in party mode.

Most of my memories of my brother (like the one above) are tied to our growing up years. Memories of summers filled with playing at the cottage, building forts, swimming, exploring in the woods and walking the country side. Of going to small towns on the weekends for carnivals or movies. Back in the city, during the school year, my memories of my brother are centered around ice skating, roller skating, sledding and going to after school music lessons together. Then in our teen years I turned into the kid sister who was crushing on my brother’s friends much to his annoyance, and of working together on our chores until we got to an age where we fought like cats and dogs and my mom separated us. 

Still, one of my favorite memories of my brother is of the two of us singing while doing dishes. In recent years when he was moved into the Memory Care building next door we got to sing together again at three or four music events last summer. Funny how those old words were still “up there” for the taking but remembering what my brother had for breakfast was a task he couldn’t do. 

My brother left this earth on the receiving end of love and compassion and his passing was peaceful. For that, I'm grateful.  

Until Next Wednesday. ©

He never lost his fondness for black cats.

Part of our summer Indian tribe.

 

Jerry's high school graduation.

 

2022??

In between Jerry and the steps behind him used to be all sand 

and it's where the infamous initiation of my cousin into our Indian tribe took place. 

 

 

The Move-in and my Personal Woe-is-me Day

I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t fall back to sleep so at 5:30 I got up, had some cocoa and here I sit in front of the computer screen. I was not surprised. I went into my bedroom last night around 9:00, selected a Netflix movie and promptly fell into a deep sleep by 9:18 (according to my sleep app) until the ending credits when I woke up long enough to turn off the TV set. My usual pattern is to watch a movie until around 11:00 then take two Melatonin gummies and turn the TV off at midnight. It had been a long, busy couple of days for the mind and body. My two nieces were in town setting up their father’s room in the Memory Care building on campus and I was there for awhile and they were here for awhile. I also played Siamese Mahjong with my instructor, the first time we’d attempted it and we were both on our phones reading directions. How did we ever live without our palm sized libraries of knowledge at our fingertips? Two of our regular players were gone---one at her husband’s death bed in our hospice building and the other on a color tour, thus the need to learn to play Mahjong with just the two of us. I’m sure we both generated a bunch of new brain cells while we played a game that is complicated enough with four of us at the table. We were essentially each playing for two. I love that game. Mahjong is full of crazy rules, and is a combination of skill and luck to win.

At dinner I ate with four others and we made arrangements to make it a standing Wednesday night date. I’m dubbing us the Secret Society of Liberal Ladies. We talked freely about the upcoming midterms and who to vote for or not. We talked about the Proposals on the ballot including women’s reproductive issues. We cannot believe after 50 years of living under Roe vs Wade that we’ve come to this. Here in Michigan we even have a Trump backed state senate candidate who once started a think tank called the “Society for the Critique of Feminism” where he put forth the argument that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or work outside the home, a real Handmaid’s Tale kind of guy’s utopia. Now he’s claiming it was satire but how can voters trust a guy who licks Trump’s boots down to the stitches and seams? 

I’ve never been inside our Memory Care building---been to several outdoor events---and my brother's room is very nice. It’s been newly remodeled with fresh paint, new fixtures in the bathroom, new carpeting and brand new furniture, all in a what I’d call a winter wheat color. But it’s a thirty year old building with narrow halls and a layout I can’t figure out yet. They are remodeling the whole place, including tearing down a wall between two lake view common rooms and that will be entertaining for my brother to watch. He’ll want to help. I told our maintenance man who was there doing last minute stuff in my brother’s room that he’d better keep an eye on his tools when Jerry is around. He likes to take things apart and can’t put them back together again---his latest was the furnace. 

It's both sad and otherwise, watching my brother get moved from living in a big house to a single room with a bath, bringing in just clothing, some wall decor, a candy dish, a few place mats and throw pillows. I couldn’t help thinking someday I could be moving in across the hall way and my life would boil down to a handful of possessions. What would I want on my walls, on my lounge chair? God, I’ve always been a long-range planner but do I really need to make a list in my head of what I want my nieces to grab from my current apartment when/if I get moved on down the road? Apparently I do/and did.

I’m having a ‘Be Sorry For Myself day’. Taking a shower one-handed was tougher this time compared to the first hand surgery because of the way my shower stall is set up and putting on my socks made me want to cry for all the times my husband struggled doing it one-handed over the twelve and half years after his stroke. When I had my other surgery it was summer time and I didn’t have to put on socks. I helped my husband if we were in a hurry or he got particularly frustrated but most of the time he did it himself and I’m going to break my computer screen if I don’t find a way to kill a pesky little gnat that seems to follow me around. He was hanging around my coffee pot earlier. Every where I go, there he is like he thinks we’re the Bobbsey Twins. When he gets around my face I’m afraid I’m going to snuff him up my nose or give myself a black eye trying to swat the devil gnat. The meme at the top is the second biggest question of the day. 

The first being how did my brother handle it when he was introduced into his new living quarters today and figured out he isn't going home from the Covid rehab where he's been gaining strength after a hospitalization with the virus. I'm on pins and needles waiting for a report. His kids are rallying around him in a show of unity for the decision they've made and I won't walk down there to visit until I know how things are going. I'm hoping maybe by the weekend but it could be longer. Their patient liaison told the kids it generally takes a month before patients settle into the fact that they aren't going home again. It was the right decision at the right time, but that doesn't make it an easy one. 

Now I'm off to the pharmacy to pick up a third prescription for an UTI that has resisted the first couple of antibiotics the doctor gave me the week before my surgery. I'm so sick of peeing sixty thousand times a day that I'm about ready to declare the UTI a winner and lay down and die. I'm allergic to that 'shotgun antibiotic' that kills everything possible growing in your urinary track so they had to grow a culture with my pee to come up with this last (hopefully) medication which should have me feeling better soon. But on the good side of life, I'm typing this is real time. The hand still has some swelling but so far so good on keeping infection out of the stitches. ©

I'm Sick of Everything!

I’m so sick of life right now! I mean it! I’ve reached my limit of tolerance. My give-a-damn is broken in half. Yup, I’m sick of everything to do with anything especially the cold and snow that's finding its way to parts of the country where it doesn't belong rubbing our noses in the fact that it's still winter. If we didn’t have a world pandemic still taking people out like balls rolling near the gutters at bowling alleys take out the seven and ten pins I’d say I need a vacation. A nice trip to any place, even to the local sculpture park would brighten my mood. When are the butterflies coming to their tropical conservatory? March? April? Oh, ya, they’re be there for both months but will it be safe for humans to attend the normally shoulder-to-shoulder exhibit? Will school kids be bused in one load after another, day after day? I have gone most years, often meeting my youngest niece there with her grandkids. After not seeing her for a whole year, I’ll bet she wouldn’t even recognize me with my pandemic hair style. Make that two years! The pandemic closed the butterflies down last year, and I'm sorry World but emails, text messages, phone calls and Facebook postings aren't slicing and dicing my loneliness enough to make a tablespoon of cure.

I suppose the state of my mind was inevitable after weeks and months of being invested in things I have no control over like the pandemic, the state of our political climate and now with Republican Senator Ted F'ing Cruz making his "excuses tour" on the media for flying to Cancun while the people of his state were/still are suffering during a nearly state-wide power outrage due to a harsh weather event. In the meantime, Democrats and private citizen Beto O'Rourke and Senator A.O. Cortez stepped up to do what Cruz shoulda'/coulda' have done---care about people, help them! Beta organized a massive phone bank to check on seniors and AOC raised 2 million dollars to fly food and water to Texas food banks.

Is it possible for an entire nation to have a collective mental health breakdown? If so, call me the Indian scout who goes out to test the route the tribe behind is about to travel. You all, turn around, find a kitten to pet and calm down! Meditate. That's what scouts did, they'd find trouble up ahead and warn the tribe to change course. Yes, I’m of that generation who grew up watching Western movies, double features on Saturday afternoons which begs the question: What were our mothers doing with their time when we sat in the movie theaters for four hours? I don’t remember ever going to the grocery store with my mom as a kid. Did mothers in the 40s do their shopping after dropping us off to see the latest shoot-em-up or Lone Ranger film? It was the only day my mom had access to the family car. Did they also have ‘private time’ with our dads? Yuck! Parents shouldn’t have sex! Gouge that image out of my head! My dad was perfect, my mom had her faults but I don’t want to think about them playing kissy-face even though I know they did it at least three times. (They miscarried a baby in between me and my brother.)

I’ve often wondered how much different my life would have been if I’d had a second sibling, a brother closer to my own age. Would we have shared friends, done more things together than my older brother and I did? As kids we did our share of ice skating, sledding, playing board games and hanging out in the woods behind our cottage growing up but by the time he was a teenager with a large posse of friends we grew apart. Then he got married right out of high school, moved a good distance away and they spent the next few years popping three babies into the world while I finished up high school and started college. I don’t think my brother understood me at all during the entire 1960s when I dated a lot but didn’t get married. I’m pretty sure he thought I was freakish for not having the same goals that most of the girls he graduated with did---the big wedding, babies and a nice house. He even told me once that I was too picky. It’s not that I didn’t want those things and a white picket fence I just had other goals as well.

Boy, has this post gotten derailed from the original topic I started writing about. Oh, well, that’s probably a good thing because my little I’m-sick-of-life temper tantrum wasn’t getting me anywhere…and they never did. As a kid my mom had little sympathy for my tears and she discouraged my dad from showing empathy when I cried. And clearly empathy was his first reaction to any sign of discomfort anyone around Dad was experiencing. Hardened by life, I never saw her cry. Around her ninth birthday her own mother had died and my mom got separated from her siblings to earn her keep working in a boarding house. She was a product of her times---a child during the last world pandemic, a young woman living on her own during the Great Depression, a mother during WWII and, boy, did she come out the other side of all that societal stress a strong woman.

Looking back, people all tend to put on rose colored glasses and think past generations had it easier than we do in real time. We romanticize. We generalize. We gloss over. And some day in the far future people will look back at 2020/21 and do the same thing. They will romanticize our pandemic driven stay-at home orders and generalize it to the point they'll only remember the closeness many families were able to achieve during this time---the TicTok videos, the zoom choirs---like the fun stuff they portrayed in all the USO movies of WWII. Pain always lessens with the passing of time. People in the future will gloss over the political unrest, too, that we are living through and only remember those among us who get through it stronger and more principled than before---the political heroes yet to rise to the top. Until then I’m taking two aspirin and living in a house of silence for a week which has always proven to be cure for what ails me right now. Sensory overload. My media block out will be akin to my mom sending me to my room until I quit feeling sorry for myself. ©

The snow now piled at the top of my driveway

Snow along the sidewalk to my front door. I just shoveled what I could reach off my shrub.

The path I shoveled on my deck for the dog to get to his pen.

Snow in the dog's pen. That fence if 3 foot tall.

 

And last but not least my front mailbox and the path I shoveled to its back side. All photos taken to remind of what I'm leaving behind if I start missing this house next winter.