b!X has set up a way for those who knew Bill to express their remembrances. Go to www.myrln.com. There’s an email address.
W. A. Frankonis condolence page
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Category Archives: death and dying
“seated on waves”
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.
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
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
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.
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
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…..
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.
a deep sleep
It’s six o’clock on Sunday. My mother went to bed around midnight last night, and she’s still sleeping. That’s 18 hours.
We tried to wake her up, but she only mumbled something about her whole body aching. We check her periodically to see if she’s still breathing, the way new parents do with their new baby.
I take a shower and wash my hair and make sure I have all her medical information is ready. In case.
What if she sleeps through tonight. Do we take her to the hospital. Do we just keep an eye on her and wait until she wakes up by herself. If she does. What if she doesn’t.
These are questions, but I write them as statements because no one has the answers. It’s one day, one hour at a time.
I spent hours this morning, while she slept, shredding old bill statements, throwing out things I’ll never use and probably no one else will, packing up more books to take to the library, and filling bags of odds and ends for the Salvation Army.
I am letting go.
Is she, also?
———————————————————————————————————–
She woke up at 8 pm, weak and disoriented. I got her to take her meds, and then I fed her some Jello. And then some homemade turkey soup with pastina. A cup of her fake coffee and a couple of cookies later, she felt better. It’s now after midnight, and she’s still up and weepy again. My brother is watching tv with her. I need to sleep, because I’m sure that, when she’s finally ready for bed, I’m going to have to lie down with her.
What do they do with dementia patients in nursing homes who won’t go to sleep and want to go home?? That’s not a rhetorical question.
what the hell is that on her head?
My mom is sitting down at the table having a cup of her fake coffee. AsI look down at her, I notice a thick smear of something light green stuck in her hair. Huh?
So, I touch it. It’s sticky. I smell it. It smells minty. Aha!
Toothpaste!
I have to admit it. I laughed a lot.
She has a spot on her scalp that always seems to itch her. When she tells me about it, I put Scalpicin on it, and that helps. I guess this time as she combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she picked up the first thing that looked like an ointment tube and rubbed it on the itch.
The last time she rubbed something strange on her body, it was on her lips and they swelled to the point where I had to take her to the doctor’s. As far as anyone could tell, it was an allergic reaction to something, and I think she had been rubbing her 30-year-old Lancome cream on her lips. I cleaned out her beauty lotion drawer and it hasn’t happened since.
She always seems to be fidgeting. Mostly she takes sheets of Kleenex and folds them into squares and loads her pockets with them. She insists on having tops and pants with pockets. Sometimes I miss emptying a few when I do her laundry. Even if I use those scent-free dryer softener sheets, those little bits that stick to the clothes are a bitch to pick off.
She would love to fold blankets and other larger squares, but she has a torn muscle in her left shoulder. Not only can’t she raise that arm, but the whole shoulder is painful, even though she’s had a cortisone shot. After Thanksgiving, I am going to arrange for a physical therapist to come over and help her with that arm. I think I finally found a place that is certified for Medicare.
Very often, she snaps. No, literally. She snaps and unsnaps those closings on the tops I buy her so that they are easy to get on and off. Last night, she was desperately trying to snap closed the edges of a very old pillow case that she had long ago sewed snaps on to keep closed. (I guess she’s always been obsessed with snaps.) When she went to sleep, I resewed the ones that were coming off and sewed on a few additional snaps so that she could have yet another snap-happy fiddle thing.
Actually, I found a site on the web where you can buy fidget things for people with dementia. Other sites suggest these stress-reduction toys. My mom will not fiddle with toys. She will only fiddle with things that are familiar to her; things that she has used in her role as wife and mother. Safety pins are one of those things. She finds them and pins them to the inside of her slacks. The other day I found her picking her teeth with the point of a large safety pin. She has a drawer full of various dental picks that I bought her. But she uses a safety pin. Sigh.
I spend a lot of time Googling for ideas on how to calm my mother, since her fidgeting is associated with her nervousness and anxieties. As a result, I sent for a really soft furry teddy bear and made a sweater for it with a Polish logo. You’ve heard of Polar Bears? Well, this is a Polish Bear:
I thought that stroking the bear’s fur might relax her. I thought the Polish theme would attract her. Nope. She knows it’s a toy. Cute, but no cigar.
Well, I tried.
In another day I’m planning to try to leave to go to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving. Actually, I’m going no matter what. I don’t know how my brother is going to manage, but I’m leaving enough food, clean underwear, desserts etc. so that my mom will have whatever she needs. He just has to make sure that she gets it all.
I can’t wait to see my grandson, who has been unofficially adopted by the guys in the local firehouse that his mom takes him to visit periodically. The last time he was there, they gave him a piece of real fire hose (including nozzle) and a door chock (whatever that is). His firefighter suit, of course, is compliments of Grammy.
He wants to be a firefighter when he grows up. Also the owner of a tree-cutting service. Or a road construction worker. Or some kind of para-medic/rescue worker.
I think he’s going to spend Thanksgiving rescuing his Grammy.
8 1/2
That’s eight and a half hours in the ER. We left at 5 p.m. It’s now almost 2 a.m. I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I’m sitting here eating baba ghannouj with a spoon and drinking V-8 Fusion because it hurts when I chew because I had a tooth extracted yesterday.
Mom was severely dehydrated and we couldn’t seem to stop the diarrhea. So they took all kinds of her fluids for testing, stuck a hydrating infusion in her arm, X-rayed her and did a CAT scan of her stomach and intestines. They didn’t find anything that we didn’t already know was there — nothing that would be causing her to spend so much time sitting on the commode. So, just in case, they gave her an antibiotic and we loaded up on gatorade on the way home.
And just to make the day complete, as I was rushing around making sure I had her health insurance info and stuffing extra clothes for her in a bag, along with a water bottle, kleenex etc. etc., my flip-flop caught on something sticking out of her wheelchair and I did some damage to my second toe on my left foot. No time to worry about that, right?
At the hospital, my toe started throbbing; turning purple. I had the option of signing myself into the ER too and have my toe X-rayed, but that would have left my sib to deal with my mother all by himself. My toe hurt and looked gross, but I could bend it and move it, so I figured it’s just a bad bruise. I opted to tend to the reason we were there in the first place.
She is supposed to consume nothing but ginger ale and gatorade for the next two days. If she refuses to drink — as she has been doing midst fits of dementia — it’s back to the hospital and back on the IV.
I’m wondering how they ever manage situations like this in nursing homes. It took two of us to manage the care of one of her.
I’m still hungry. But I’m also tired. I don’t know which need I’ll fill after I post this. Either way, it’s been a hell of a day.
diarrhea, diarhea, diarrea
It doesn’t matter how you spell it, google will find it.
And my mother has had it for four days now. We called the doctor today and will be bringing a sample to the lab for testing.
Nothing has worked to get it under control. I’m trying to make her drink Pedialite, but she’s not very cooperative. Right now she’s up combing her hair with a toothbrush. I’m making her some chicken broth with cut up baked potato. That’s supposed to OK for her to eat.
We’ll soon see.