Category Archives: family

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.

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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.

we tabled it

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My mom and I eat in front of the television set in her little sitting room. She sits in her soft recliner in front of a tray table. I balance it all on my lap.
The kitchen table is littered with boxes of her favorite cookies, her can of fake coffee, glasses half-filled with water, a water jug (we have a really stinky well), her container of pills for the day, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and other assorted objects, including a pair of my reading glasses.
For the more than a quarter of a century during which I lived alone before this, I rarely sat and ate at my table unless I was reading while I was eating. I don’t think we are very different from many people these days. For the most part, we’ve tabled the table.
Oh there are exceptions, even for me. I have a chance to sit with a family and have dinner when I’m visiting my daughter. We even have conversations — this is when we can get a word in among the energetic chatter of my 5 year old grandson.
And one of my greatest pleasures these days is getting together around a table with my women friends, which I can’t do very often because they live too far away. But when we meet, it’s always around a table where we spend hours eating and laughing, talking politics and movies, and men.
And so when the following poem from Jim Culleny appeared in my in-box, I couldn’t help but be moved by it.

Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.


Soon enough, I will have time again at the table.

is that the way it was done?

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Is that the way it was done before nursing homes and hospices, before miracle drugs and transplants, when old folks died slowly at home, their sons and daughters and grandchildren and cousins all taking turns taking care? The frail old ones, dying only from the final stresses of age and gravity, moved slowly and silently, sleeping through most of those last months, last weeks, last days. Relatives came and went, stayed and shared, while the old ones slept and dreamed and waited, and that was the way it was finally done.
But there are only two of us here to keep watch, to take care. Each day she is more tired, asks to sleep more and more often. Awake, she sits sad and silent, eating slowly in front of the television that she can barely hear anyway. I sometimes still hold her and dance with her late at night, when she’s afraid and won’t sleep. Sometimes I sleep with her to make her feel safe. Sometimes, no matter what we do, she’s up and down all night, wants to eat, wants to go home. “Please, please,” she mutters, unable to tell me what exactly would please her.
Someone cracked my rear passenger side bumper, and I have to go and get an estimate so that I can get it fixed. But then what. My brother would have to get my mother in his car and come with me to drop off (and then pick up) my car from the body shop. It is hard to believe that we know no one around here who can help with that chore so that we wouldn’t have to put my mother through that. I don’t even think that there are taxis in this little town. At least I’ve never seen any. I think I’d better start checking that out.
This is not the way it’s supposed to be done — without friends, without extended family, without a support system. But this is the way my brother insists, and I am too tired to argue any more.
I’d better check the phone book for taxi services.
And I’m still purging and packing and planning. While I cook, and feed, and clean, and sit, and hold, and hope.
ADDENDUM:
Whaddya know. There IS a taxi service right in town! Family or friends would be better, but I’ll settle for a taxi when it comes to getting my car fixed.

star child

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No other work of my childhood, and to a very large degree almost entirely at an unconscious level, likely did as much not just to steer me to an eventual appreciation of science fiction, but to an almost innate understanding of how deeply art in general, whether words or pictures or sounds, could implant itself into a person.


So nearly ends a beautifully written memoir by b!X about the death of Arthur C. Clarke and the influence that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had on his childhood aspirations and imagination. You should click here and read the whole Star Child post.
Like my son (and, actually, the whole of our family — my daughter’s wedding cake was topped with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia), I, too, am a lover of the kind of science fiction that not only opens up possible new worlds, but also explores the kind of human spirit that will be necessary to make the best of those worlds.
My first exposure to sci fi was C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra, upon which I stumbled by accident in my Catholic high school’s library. As far as I was ever able to tell, it was the only sci-fi book on the library shelves.
I don’t remember the sequence of my growing love of sci-fi, but I do remember watching Clarke’s movie when it first came out — a night out with my then-husband and another sci-fi fan couple. Our daughter would have been about 5 at that time; I don’t remember her being with us.
But I do still remember the sounds, the visuals, the bone flung into the air that became a space ship, the appearance of the megalith, that last breath-stopping image of the Star Child.
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