Monthly Archives: April 2008

in memory of myrln

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My once-husband was my Monday guest blogger, Myrln (AKA William A. Frankonis), who passed away lalst Thursday. In honor of his memory, our daughter asked me to post the following, which she found in his extensive files of his own writings. He doesn’t have to be here to be here.

Lessons from the Wonderground: a Father to his Children

ONE
Try not to hurt anyone, which includes yourself.

TWO
Try to make yourself whole, knowing all the while that’s a lifelong process.

THREE
Be true to yourself, whatever that is at the time, for like everything else, your self changes.

FOUR
Speak out against wrong, however you define it and no matter who is the culprit.

FIVE
Honor children and always listen carefully to them; they are all smarter than we credit them and beyond you, they may have no voice but yours.

SIX
Find and honor all the wonder in all of Nature and in all of yourself, and reconnect, for you, too, are a part of Nature.

SEVEN
Keep close to family, blood or otherwise, for you are, and always will be part of each other.

EIGHT
Remember the dead in your heart, but honor life and the living with your time and attention because afterwards it is too late.

NINE
Laugh often, cry as necessary, fear what should be feared, love deeply, hurt when there’s pain, be courageous, know the holy value of breathing and of everything else that makes up living.

TEN
Find and regularly visit the stillness at the heart of life.
I love you dad.
namaste

a letter to the dead

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Dear Bill,
“..a bit of sun and the touch of love’s hand,” you wrote once in your script about “Myrln.”

That’s what we had yesterday when we gathered to pick up your ashes and bring them home. I know that you will appreciate the plans to temporarily keep them in the old Orville Redenbacher popcorn tin that you kept on your bookshelf. We are making plans to gather again this summer to take you where you found the most peace and comfort and leave you to the gentle rocking of Mother Sea.

It was a beautiful early spring day sandwiched between those wet and gloomy days April often brings. We took you to lunch. Well, we left you in the car while we had lunch. Here we are, leaving the restaurant. Not me, of course. I was taking the picture.

afterlunch2.jpg
And then we went back to your apartment, got a bat and ball and went out into the sunny field to play. There was lots of sun and lots of love. We felt your spirit there with us, popping the ball and chasing it out into left field. I was too warm in the sweater I had worn, so I went back to the apartment and changed into one of your shirts. I hope that was OK. I guess it’s too late if it wasn’t.

“We’re a quirky family,” Melisa commented to a strange look from the funeral director after something she had said.
We all took something of yours before we left (although we will be back in a week or so to manage what needs to be saved from the complexities of memories you left behind). I took the little laughing Buddha as company for the traveling Buddha you gave me so long ago. I also took a little side table with a tiled top painted with two flowers that look kind of like anemones. That is going to become my altar space. I think that would be just fine with you.
There are so many chores I should be doing now that I’m back here with my mother. Instead, it sit alone at my computer and write and cry.. You would understand that.

I wish we had had more time with you — a lot more of Myrln’s magical
bit of sun and the touch of love’s hand

love,
your wacky once-wife, Elaine

“seated on waves”

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For Bill, who will soon be seated on waves.

The Same
Pablo Neruda
It costs much to grow old:
I’ve fondled the Springs
like sticks of new furniture
with the wood still sweet to the smell, suave
in the grain, and hidden away in its lockers,
I’ve stored my wild honey.
That’s why the bell tolled
bearing its sound to the dead,
out of range of my reason:
one grows used to one’s skin,
the cut of one’s nose, one’s good looks,
while summer by summer, the sun
sinks in it’s brazier.
Noting the sea’s health,
its insistence and turbulence,
I kept skimming the beaches;
now seated on waves
I keep the bitter green smell
of a lifetime’s apprenticeship
to live on in the whole of my motion.


Coincidentally, this is a recent one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails.

four-day earworm

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A song from the fifties, I think, keeps running through my head. It’s been there for almost a week now. I can’t find it anywhere on the net, but, of course, I don’t know the actual title. I remember the first line and the tune.
“You’re my first love, and you’ll be my last love….”
Any of you who remember the fifties know that song?
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Cora, who left a comment, I now know that the song is “Soldier Boy” by the Shirelles — which is appropriate, since I met Bill just after he got out of the army and returned to the college where I was also a student.

William Frankonis, dead at 70

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I wasn’t there this afternoon when my daughter gave permission to turn off the breathing machine and my ex-husband, her father, took his last artificial breath. I was home, getting ready for the Hospice nurse’s visit tomorrow to assess my mother.
But I was with him for more than a day before that, when he told me had had an earworm for the past several days.
“Bloody Mary,” he said smiling, as we remembered the production of South Pacific in which we performed together more than 35 years ago, he as Lt. Cable, and I as Liat.

cur-kali.jpg In the back of my smile, I think about another bloody female. Kali: birth mother; death mother, tongue redder even than betel nuts. She had wormed in far beyond his ear.
He understood my fascination with Kali, Lilith. He might have used other names for those forces, but he knew them well. That was part of what we always had in common — our immersion in the poetic power of myth. “Myrln” understood magic. Our son tells me that, for a couple of days before I called to tell him to get on a plane, he saw three crows chasing a hawk. Bill would have embraced that metaphor.
“There’s one thing I really have to do,” he had told me in between dozing off in his recliner just two days ago. “I want to write down how I feel about all those people who have been close to me. I know that I’m a very private person. I know that I’ve played my life close to the vest. I want to tell them how much they mean to me.”
But he never had a chance to write that last piece of his special eloquence. He also never had a chance to enjoy that first day of 70 degree weather after the long dreary winter that he hated so much.
Nevertheless, the depths of his feelings had been expressed often in the many scripts (some performed and some not), memoirs, and poetry that he had written over his lifetime. His original stage play, The Killings Tale, won a audio book “Audie” in 2004.. His adaptations and original scripts have often been performed by the New York State Theater Institute.

Warner Music Group awarded NYSTI $400,000 in 1996 to develop five new musicals for family audiences. The first of those was “A Tale of Cinderella” by W.A.Frankonis, Will Severin, and George David Weiss, made possible in part by funding provided by Warner Music Group and by the participation of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. An immediate success, the award-winning show is available as an Atlantic Theatre CD or cassette and has been re-released on VHS as part of Warner Home Video’s 75th Anniversary Celebration. Vocal Selections from “A Tale of Cinderella” is available from Warner Bros. Publications. The video was broadcast nationwide on PBS stations to an audience of more than 56 million TV households (half of potential US audiences). In the 2000-01 Season, “A Tale of Cinderella” toured all the major cities of New York including Buffalo, Syracuse, the Capital Region, and Manhattan.

His life and work will be remembered by a great many people. But I will remember him as the young man I married in a flurry of passion and possessiveness even though in many ways we were oil and water. We wound up being better friends than spouses.
I will miss his political rants and the books he would send me after he read them. I will miss the father he was to our children. I will miss a friend, and I will always be glad that I was able to be there for him when he needed help so close to the end of a life ended too soon.
ADDENDUM: b!X has posted excerpts from his dad’s willl and it is no surprise that Bill used the same humor, honesty, and creativity in writing his will as he had with all of his other writings.

he can’t go home again

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Myrln fidgets in the hospital bed in the emergency room, where they have him hooked up to various machines that beep and chime and whir.
“I just wanted a few more days. I needed a few more days. I needed time to think….” He looks at me with eyes angry and sad at the same time. He is back in the hospital after only two days at home from a week-long stay for tests and such. I have been with him for the past 36 hours, including this morning when we had to call a Rescue Ambulance because he couldn’t breathe, even with an oxygen tank.
We have been divorced now for twice as many years as we were married. But time had healed our wounds and we had developed a friendly relationship.
“I will be eternally grateful,” he wheezes, “for all you are doing for me now.”
My eyes fill with tears. “No problem,” I say.
“I have to tell you something,” he says. “Even through it all, there was always a little love left.”
“Yes,” I say. “Me too.”
And I’m crying and we are holding hands the way we once did long before I begged him to stop smoking.
Tonight he is temporarily hooked up to a respirator. b!X arrived from Oregon, and his sister and family from Massachusetts. He has not yet been awake for b!X and him to have a little time together. I hope he wakes, for both their sakes.
Meanwhile, I am back on the mountain with my mother, but I suspect will be be leaving again in a day or so.
They will take him off the respirator. He will either breathe or not. Either way, he won’t be going home again.
Myrln, who once blogged here on Mondays, is my former spouse, the father of my children. He has inoperable lung cancer, which has spread to just about every vital organ.

going….going…..

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While my mom fades slowly away, we are dealing with another crisis in the family, and that’s why I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t been here; I’ve been in Albany with my daughter as she struggles her way through the health care systems to get support for her dad when he leaves the hospital.
My role was moral support, source of experiential information, and entertainer of my grandson, who had to come with her from Massachusetts. There was no one with whom to leave him for four full days while his own dad went to work and also monitored the construction process on their house addition.
Other patients came and went throughout those four days that we sat in and out of his hospital room. We watched them being taken to surgery, watched them come back and get going again.
But my offspring’s dad didn’t get up and didn’t go anywhere. His lungs are waging war against hope. We are waiting to hear where he will be going.
And now I’m back here with my mother, and my daughter is back in her home as well. I am worried about her own health, as her commitment and persistence kick in and she continues her long distance struggle to manage her dad’s care (with crucial help from a close friend of his who lives nearby).
I help from here as best I can — checking out a county program that provides financial assistance with home care for eligible elders, local home care agencies, walkers, tub chairs, recliner lift chairs…..
Whatever the outcome of his final tests today, he will need an awful lot of help. And our small family is scattered, each with his/her own responsibilities. But we are doing all we can from where we are, knowing there will come a time, too soon, when we will all be gathering for the final going.