Kevin

Los Angeles, California

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I have a bottle of Redbreast Irish Whiskey. A good bottle of good whiskey. And I plan to drink a lot of it; to do so in memory of these Irish-American men who checked out of life by way of guns. I just don't know what else to do.

Kevin, the contractor, who oversaw the remodel of my flooded and mold-ridden bathroom, then became my friend who came to parties at my home, is gone. I knew he was struggling, and I was worried about him. Now, I realize he was shutting down. And that shut-down led to his ending his life last week. And, once again, my own struggle is to comprehend how that can happen. I rail at the gods. I rail at God. I want this to stop.

I don't know exactly what happened with Kevin, but I do know he had been in a spiral of despair. A Vietnam vet with PTSD demons and not enough support from the Veterans Administration. It was his sense of humor, strong character, work ethic, and engaging personality that created a connection for me and we became friends. He finished the bathroom remodel and, after eleven weeks, was no longer at my home each day. But we stayed in regular contact. He came to a World Series party at my home last October -- a Cubs fan, but that was alright.

The thing is that when people in your life choose to die, it's not about you. But it's hard not to make it about you. And subsequently, difficult to not get out that file that contains all of the people you have lost. Impossible to resist questioning: why.

Holly was with me when I got the news. We were just leaving for Orpheus and Eurydice at LA Opera. And still, we did go. I have learned to hold it down, if I don't have to hold it down too long. And I knew I would be ok because I was with Holly. I am lucky, so very lucky, to have good and caring friends. And Joel who is always there with an ear and a shoulder, no matter how scarily intensely I present my despair. But, in the past four years I have lost people who meant a lot to me. One was a friend whom, I have assumed, couldn't deal with the tragedy that occurred in my life, so she abruptly stepped back. Unless you have experienced this, you can't know how the heart bleeds when this happens. Because you are dealing with insurmountable grief, and then this other grief of loss gets unceremoniously dumped on top of it. I still wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why she lost the connection that had kept us close in each other's lives. You lose parents; you lose a husband in a devastating way, but nothing prepares you for losing someone whose friendship you valued above others. And, you cannot help but wonder what you did to cause this.

I wanted to reach out to her today, but for months she has been silent. My frister, Connie, has said that relationships require effort on both sides. I call that requirement: reciprocal consideration. And as many have pointed out, when you stop being the only facilitator in a relationship, you will learn if you are valued. Perhaps, in this case, it's more complicated than that. For better or for worse, this friend endeavored to advise me at a pivotal point in my life. While grateful at the time, I later theorized that she couldn't handle the disaster that followed. It was almost immediately too much for her, and I think she felt she could retreat behind her philosophy that family comes first. Being a best friend, you think you are like family. But in this case, you are not.

I greatly miss the people who have left my life. I have never taken family nor friendships lightly. Not with my frothers, and certainly not with the fristers. After all, my fristers are the sisters I chose. And they chose me. This can be that once-in-a-lifetime connection. Or, it can be the pain-in-the-ass sister or miserly friend who, after decades, you finally realize has put no effort, nor anything else, into the relationship. You rightly decide to let her go. Still, it's hard enough to release that one, much less the ones who mean so much. It's painful like a death.

We are often told to have gratitude, and I am truly grateful for the good fortune of my friendships. I treasure them. As I twist and turn, I continue to find these friends there for me. Unconditionally, or somewhere quite near enough to that. And I am committed to reciprocate by always being there for them in every way that I can.

Sandra, my frister extraordinaire, has been gone now for four years. I am ending this blog shortly, and beginning an entirely different writing project. A time for that to happen, as there is a time for every season under heaven. But tonight, I am just feeling really, really sad. I miss the ones who have left; both living and dead. I question what I did to make them retreat; or in the case of the dead, what I didn't do that might have prevented them from leaving this life. The root of the answer to both is always the same: that it is not about me, but about them and the choices they made. But still, I keep relentlessly coming back around to the childish and useless thought, that if I did enough for, or mattered enough to, these people, maybe there might have been a different outcome. And alas, I am ruminating in these tormenting thoughts tonight, thoughts that will continue to swirl in my head in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. Irish whiskey, and a prayer for grace, and the clarity to appreciate the memories we made together. I will miss Kevin a lot. I will miss them all, forever.




I Will Remember You

I'm so tired but I can't sleep
Standin' on the edge of something much too deep.
It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word
We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard.

But I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories. -- Sarah McLachlan

Stillmeadow

Los Angeles, California

And so it arrived. It is a coveted book; one in which I've been interested for a very long time. I found it in my mailbox this evening; a padded envelope clearly containing a book. I had almost forgotten. I ripped open the envelope while still parked at the curb in front of my mailbox, and slid the book out. I ran my hand across the jacket, then furled open the pages. The seller was honest, the book was in very good condition; tenderly used. I waited a long time to buy it, but only paid about forty-two dollars for it. Not as expensive as the other books I have been covetously eyeing while searching for a signed copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Books. I carried a heavy one, Richard Russo's Everybody's Fool, to a doctor's office yesterday. As he took it out of my hands, I felt a pang of guilt. Is it still ok to buy real books? It is one of the investments that I have always felt important. It's the product of the 'company' I feel it is vitally important to support: writers. I am glad there are libraries for children and adults who cannot afford to purchase the books they want to read. But for the rest of us, supporting your reading habit means supporting the writers and publishers! Afterwards, donate your purchased books to libraries. It's a win-win. I have invested in a lot of books over the years. I come by it rightly as my dad was a voracious reader, though mostly of non-fiction books. His interests ran along archaeology and history. Mom and I were both English majors, but I was dismayed to find that in her later years she was reading a lot of cat books. More specifically, a series she referred to as The Cat Who books. I shouldn't scoff. I read Watership Down on my honeymoon so very many years back.

Mom also collected cookbooks; mostly purchased on her travels or given to her by my dad. He took a great deal of time choosing the cookbook that he gave her every year for Christmas. While the rest of the gifts sat under the tree, Mom and Dad always shared the rare drink at home, after church services wrapped at midnight on Christmas Eve. Dad would have Mom open her dad-wrapped cookbook. I recently purchased a tall, standing book shelf for my dining room to contain Mom's cookbooks -- and mine, as I too began collecting early in my adult life. There are 217 of them; sorted and filed by author; frequency of use; ethnicity and region.

The book that arrived this week is The Best of Stillmeadow, A Treasury of Country Living by Gladys Taber. I first learned of Gladys Taber back in the '80s, when I began collecting Susan Branch's books. It was the era of Martha Stewart, and I preferred Susan Branch's books about cooking and entertaining to Martha's, because Branch's books didn't make you feel stupid for not raising your own goats, forcing your own forsythia, or whatever... Branch uses quotations in her books and most were familiar to me... except for Gladys Taber. Gladys who?, I thought (a variation on the Cat Who theme...).

In Susan Branch's 3-book memoir, she wrote about finding a Gladys Taber book amongst the books she acquired when she purchased her small cottage on Martha's Vineyard. And so it began. My book is now bookmarked at fifty-nine pages. I am juggling it with the Russo novel which I have not yet finished. Not good at that. Even as an English major with five upper-division literature classes, I could not easily go back and forth between reading material. One weekend, for a course in Mark Twain, I read Tom Sawyer on Saturday; Huck Finn on Sunday. A lot accomplished, although I was speaking in southern dialect by Monday.

Life being what it is, or rather, my life being where it is, it is important to relish these things with meaning: Joel; friends (always friends); salsa dancing; books; music; cherished films to watch over and over. Dodgers baseball; Live from Here (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion), which I delight to find is quite good with its new host; L.A. Opera with training wheels. And more, and more, and more. But right now, Stillmeadow sits on my coffee table waiting for me to turn its pages carefully, preserving its value for whoever next may hold it and run their hand across its jacket, some years down the road. A treasured friend eventually passed on to kindred spirit...