4.17.12 I can't stop because

4.17.12 I watched every move she made -- Rhonda Dove

Rhonda Dove, I watched every move she made

I watched every move he made and I tried to drink in his presence. He was tall, with very black skin and round eyes that shined and showed no trace of sanity. His deep voice towered over everyone else’s. It rumbled and he seemed to always be in mid-joke and mid-laugh. I sat on the comfy couch in the corner and I felt like I had almost retreated into myself and I tried to observe the behavior of the adults in peace. I tried to drink in this man who always seemed so close and so far.

He was patting one of his many friends on the back and was telling him about the big money deal he was putting together and he slowed to a dramatic whisper and then erupted in a laugh and as the man smiled sheepishly I knew that my father had his wallet under his control. The king of fools I thought to myself…the king of fools.

“Rhonda! Come here!” I jumped as if I had been hiding in a closet and had just been discovered, yet I was in plain view. “Hey man, I want you to meet my daughter.”

I knew that it was my time to act. I would play the role of the perfect daughter to the perfect daddy and I would smile and the man would say something like “Reed…I didn’t know you could make such a fine little girl.”  And I would feel embarrassed to stand there and have some stranger assess my looks and use words they used for the women who ran through the house trying to get to the pool. In the 70’s they used words like… “fine little mama”  and “fine little fox”  and I would want to run from the room. But, I just stood there in my shorts and halter top and eased backwards back towards my sanctuary until I was needed to play my role again.

It was a bright sunny perfect Los Angeles day as almost every day seemed to be and I was spending it with my daddy. And so I slid back into the corner with doll in hand and watched him and watched them continue with their drama.

The door bell rang and I was eager to run to the door to see who the next cast member would arrive. I had seen this lady before, she was my father’s friend and use to be girlfriend and she had on a pretty red dress, no doubt to show up the other ladies who would filter through. Some man ran up to her and grabbed her on her behind and she pushed him away and hurried to my dad to tell him that Harold had touched her on her ass. I could hear his voice above the rumblings of chatter and he told her that if she didn’t want to be touched she shouldn’t have come to the house with that tight red dress on. Her face snarled at his words and she acted offended, just like they all did. He told her to sit her fine ass down. I took notes in my brain…note to self…never wear a tight red dress!

There was always wine flowing and cigarettes burning and as a special surprise they brought out a big platter with green stuff and set it in the middle of the room. I inched over to my dad and asked him what it was. He told me they were going to smoke it. I just nodded as if I was cool enough at 10 to know what that meant. By now the house was buzzing with excitement women in and out, men rolling up to the house in their newest toys for the ladies and me sitting very still trying to understand the motions and emotions of this strange land and people.

That day I met catholic priests, attorneys, pimps, entrepreneurs (of some kind or another) and women of unknown occupations. And as different as they were they were all beating to the same drum. Thank goodness for the lessons my father taught me and the beats I learned never to play.

4.3.12 I don't think she had moved all day -- Rhonda Dove

Rhonda Dove, I don't think she had moved all day

           I don’t think she had moved all day, because the house was dark even in the sunlight. I didn’t hear her little girl barking orders and smacking the cat. The garage door remained eerily still. I peeked out my window every hour to see if I noticed some change in the house next door, some semblance of life. There was nothing. Across the street on the other hand there was lots of movement. They were loading up the very large camper; it appeared that their whole extended family was going on a trip or something. I wondered if they wondered if she was okay. I asked my mom again what she had heard yesterday to see if I could get some important information that could give me a clue as to whether I should be concerned or not.

            What if they were dead this time? I speculated deep inside myself. What if my indecision to call the police was costing them precious minutes that meant existence or non-existence? I looked out of the kitchen window at the front porch; I went out the side door to see if I could hear something. I imagined a horrible scene maybe he hadn’t just beaten her this time. Maybe… I silenced my thoughts, how silly I was, it was around 2:00 pm and I am sure they had just slept in today. Or they had left early this morning before I drove up. Why wasn’t my mom concerned?

 “Maybe we should call the police?” I finally asked her. “They are always fighting,” she said quickly between the break in the television conversation. “I think I am gonna call.” I said aloud as I paced the floor. I wish I didn’t know the horrible way he treated them. I wish I could relax in my house and not worry about my neighbor. I wish everyone else was worried then it wouldn’t fall on me.

I couldn’t wait for my Spring break to end I thought, so I could go back to my college on the beach. But, there too my neighbors were always fighting. I heard the lady being slammed against the wall one time. I placed my ear to the dry wall and I could hear the escalating drama and I just listened until the push and then the lowered voices and then the door slam. He must have left because I could hear her crying in peace. I wished that they weren’t always drinking beer, and fighting, especially with their adorable little boy in tow.

Today, I wanted to be a little more courageous. Today, I wanted to make sure she was okay and that someone had looked out for her little girl this time. There was a big fight yesterday, and everyone says that they heard him beating her and they heard the baby saying “Don’t hit my mama!” They said he left and that there was no commotion after that. I finally imagined that they were dead on the living room floor and as I walked across the room to grab my phone I heard the familiar creaking of their garage door. Today I dialed anyway…

4.3.12 We feel guilty when someone dies -- Margaret Robbins

Margaret Robbins, Words Unspoken

We feel guilty when someone dies because more often than not, words are left unsaid.  In a negative world, we sometimes do not do enough to tell people how much they meant to us or how much we appreciated them.  With both of my grandmothers, I was lucky enough to get to see them one more time before they moved on from this world. Yet with other people who are important to me, I worry that we will not get to speak the words unspoken until it is too late.

            I remember July 2004, when I saw my grandma Eemie for the last time.  I remember the debate as to whether I should go see her or whether I should go to an event that involved me seeing a certain boy who had caught my eye.  As soon as I got to her nursing home, I knew that I had made the right decision because I could see Death on her face.  She looked at me, and without either of us saying a word, we both knew this would be the last time we’d see each other.  She seemed to feel sympathy for me, knowing that even though she felt ready to go, I would miss her.  We had the usual small talk, and I filled her in about my first year of teaching, which had just passed, and my Master’s degree in English and Gifted Education, which I was just finishing up.  As we were about to part, she looked at me and said, “I love you, Margaret.”  I answered back, “I love you too, Eemie.”  Words were still unspoken between my paternal grandma and me, as there are words unspoken in any relationship.  Yet, the words that were the most important to speak were spoken that day.

            One month later, my dad got a call from the nursing home, asking whether or not to send Eemie to the hospital for treatment.  It was the day before I was to graduate with my Master’s Degree.  My dad had to go on his first instinct, and he said, “The selfish part of me didn’t want her to die that weekend.  So, he sent her to the hospital.  Marita, my dad’s stepsister, is a hospice nurse and initially told my dad that he had messed up by sending Eemie to the hospital and that he should have let her go.  However, the nurses and Eemie’s children alike acknowledged that she had a number of good days after that.  It was just the week before her death that was hard.

            As we were preparing for the funeral Labor Day weekend in High Point, North Carolina, one of the nursing home nurses came to talk to us.  “You know, she was ready to go.”  She was a middle aged African-American woman, and her calm and kind voice sounded like honey.  “She told me that she saw Herbert and Mary and her other brother, and that they were standing outside next to a car, waiting for her.”  My initial reaction, cynically enough, was that the nurse was telling a lie to  make my family and me feel better.  But then I realized that if it had been a lie, she would not have known the names of my grandma’s siblings.

            My Eemie had the typical affluent southern woman’s funeral: well-attended, especially by older ladies with frosted hairdos and starched and pressed suits.  Many of these women remarked at how beautiful my grandma always looked.  While this was true, I wished this wasn’t the only thing we remembered about them.  I think part of why we feel guilty when someone dies is that we don’t like to speak ill of the dead, and we don’t like to admit that the person had actual, human flaws.  My grandma was a mean spirit at times, and she loved to gossip.  However, no one seemed to want to gossip about her at her funeral.

            My Gran and Patty drove up from Chapel Hill to go to the funeral.  Unbeknownst to Gran at the time, her own funeral would be less than four years later.  I also remember the last time I saw my Gran, my maternal grandmother, on her nursing home bed.  She was asleep for the first hour that I arrived at the Duke nursing home, after I had spent some time in Chapel Hill visiting two of my best friends from high school, one of who drove in from Virginia. It seemed depressing to drive all the way to North Carolina just to see my dying grandma, so I decided to combine it with a weekend of my old writing camp pals, Hollie and Laura. 

            While I was waiting for Gran to wake up, I couldn’t help feeling slight dismay at the fact that Fox News was blaring in her room.  My grandma was as liberal as southern women of her generation came, so I would have thought that CNN would be her network of choice, or at least ABC.  But these days, I thought, she perhaps isn’t as picky.  I remembered back in December, when we spent Christmas Eve 2007 moving her from her assisted living home in Raleigh to her nursing home near Duke University in Durham.  When the EMTs first wheeled her in, my dad and I were waiting for her.  I had her favorite stuffed bear waiting for her, and she demanded to have her radio.  She had not been able to sleep without her radio in forty years, since her husband, the man who would have been my paternal grandfather, died of an unexpected heart attack.  I promised to bring her radio soon, along with other goodies.  My dad told me I had handled her well.  I had done my best, but it was still sad for me to see my feisty Gran, who had been an Executive Director of the Girl Scouts, reduced to a pouting, child-like elderly lady.

            When she finally woke up during my visiting weekend in February, she recognized me immediately and seemed like her sharp self. She said hello and apologized for sleeping so long.  I insisted it was fine, and told her about the weekend I had spent visiting my old friends.  I then continued with small talk: I was teaching all gifted reading and language arts classes at my middle school, and my reading bowl team was advancing to the state level in two weeks.  I had a roommate, and we were getting along well.  And then, of course, she turned to her usual favorite topic:

            “Well, Miss Margaret Ann, we need to find you a boyfriend.”

            I decided not to remind her that I used to have a boyfriend, but we had broken up about a year and a half ago.  Instead, I said, “well, yes, but I think those things have a way of happening when they are meant to.”

            “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said wistfully.  I think she was sad that she wasn’t going to get to meet whomever I was going to marry, even though she had met my sister’s law school boyfriend, the man who would later become her fiancée.  Eemie had met Lane, the boy my sister dated in college, and we were all content to let her think they were going to get married.  

            We continued to talk for a  while, and then, I let her rest.  I was glad I had gone to see her before driving back to Atlanta that evening. 

            Two weeks later, my mom and my Aunt Pat had to fly to North Carolina, even though she had just been to visit her the weekend after me, because Gran had taken an unexpected turn for the worse.  I offered to go, but my mom said she thought it would be better for me to stay and be with my students who I was helping to coach for the state reading bowl tournament. (That, after all, was a situation I could control).  That Friday afternoon, once we were settled in Athens, I had a hunch that I should call my mom.

            She picked up the phone.  “Gran can’t really talk much right now, but I’m sure she would love to hear your voice.”

            “Hi Gran,” I said into the phone.  When I did not get a verbal response, I began to understand the reality of the situation.  “Hi Gran, I love you,” I said, seemingly to the dead air.

            “She smiled,” my mom said into the phone, and I was sure she had shown a reaction of sorts.

            About an hour later, my phone rang, and I recognized my dad’s number.  Because we were about to take the students to dinner and because I knew what the call probably meant, I decided to let it go to voice mail.  We had dinner at the Grill, and my young students enjoyed hamburgers and milkshakes without being vaguely worried about what the food would do to their physical health.  I missed those days.  Zach swallowed his hamburger wrong, and him mother ran over because she had the faint worry that her son would choke.  She was as white as a ghost, and as I looked into that mother’s eyes, I figured that if one person was meant to pass away, it should not be a young child.

            When we got back to the hotel, I called my dad.  He told me that my Gran had indeed passed away while my mom and my Aunt Pat had stepped out for dinner.  Apparently, people do that a lot: they wait and die when people are out of the room, as if showing a sign of respect.  “Well, I know people can say things about her, good and bad, but she tried really hard to be a good grandma to me, Patty, and my cousins,” I told my dad.

            “Well, she was a very strong woman, and I see a lot of strong and smart ladies on the Ruffing side of the family.”

            “Thanks, Dad.”  Somehow, Dad knew what I needed to hear that day, that week.  At her burial, when I really cried for the first time, my distant cousin would remind me that my Gran still lived within me.

            That evening, I asked the other coaches if I could go to bed early, and they understood.  I wasn’t particularly sad, as I have been preparing for this day for months and cried more back in October when I first heard she was sick.  I just needed time to process the information. 

            Even though my Gran had moved on from this world, I was glad I was able to have my last conversation with her.  Now, four years later, I wonder whom else I need to have my last conversations with before we leave this world.  I am only 31, so unless an unexpected freak accident occurs, I will probably be here for a very long time.  Both of my grandfathers died young, but both of my grandmas lived to be 88.  My parents are in their sixties and are in relatively good health.  Even though I know I have a long time, I have this deep down fear that words will remain unspoken for too long.  Right now, in my life, I have a couple of friends who are important to me with whom I am not on the best of terms.  I am praying for an opportunity to arise for us to spend time together and, hopefully, rekindle our friendships.

            I have learned that life is short in the span of the entire universe, and it is important for people to know what they mean to us. Even though I don’t talk to some of my friends as much as I would like to, I still make sure that I remember their birthdays. My grandmas were not perfect, but I still made time for one last visit with each of them.  We should be careful of the words we speak, because we don’t want the apologies to be the words we never speak.  The fewer harsh words said and words unspoken, the fewer regrets we will have.

4.3.12 We feel guilty when someone dies -- Stephen Ritz

Stephen Ritz, We Feel Guilty When Somone Dies Because...

            We feel guilty when someone dies because…

            Well, because we struggle with a deep sense of survivor guilt…the heart-wrenching acknowledgement that… “It should have been me.”

            Right…?

            WRONG!

We feel guilty because what we are really too ashamed to admit is, “Thank God, it wasn’t me!”  That thought loudly resonates throughout the fiber of our being like a plucked guitar string.  That thought endlessly reverberates across the collective consciousness of humanity.

An admission like that, true as it might be, just ain’t pretty by societal standards, no matter how you slice it.  So we stuff that dirty little secret into a teensy-weensy, plain-papered box so as not to draw any attention to it.  Then we compartmentalize and ship it off to some far away land in a darkened corner of our unconscious…tucked away behind some imposing, sterile, steel industrial sized door, from which nothing can escape…

At least that’s what we delude ourselves into thinking.

Many of us live our lives beneath the reach of our own radar, sleep-walking through each waking moment of our existence.  We sometimes stumble upon moments of crystal clear consciousness, not really knowing what to do with or about them, thus we retreat into our less mindful self-indulgent personas content with the safety and comfort that ignorant bliss delivers.  Like happy idiots we drift downstream softly propelled by the undercurrent of massive denial, oblivious to impending doom…death…the ultimate cataclysm. 

Death personifies that absolute lack of control that each and every one of us truly has…that we have so much difficulty coming to terms with.  We do our damndest to defend ourselves against that stark realization…against abject fear the vice-grip that so immobilizes us during our weakest moments.

James Kirk may have popularized the notion, “Space, the final frontier”, but he was dead (pun intended) wrong.

Death is the real final frontier, the place to which everyone gets a free ticket whether or not they want the admission.  The irony is deathening.

So, we feel guilty when someone dies not because we are saintly, but to whitewash what would otherwise expose us as fearful self-absorbed, self-indulgent creatures...too afraid to recognize the darkness within, the acknowledgment and acceptance of which that would truly emblazon the pathway towards enlightenment.   

4.3.12 I don't think (s)he had moved all day -- Trevor Scott

Trevor Scott, I Don't Think She Had Moved All Day

I touched her hand. She flinched suddenly, trying to pull it away, but lacking the strength to make a committed move. She resolved to allow me to settle mine on hers. I could feel her energy through her vein ridden hands. These were the hands that once held me as a child; the hands that spanked me when I was naughty. Hands, with spittle applied, hand- combed my hair in place.

I could feel her blood circulating slowly. She never got excited anymore. Fear grasped me for a moment. Is this what I have to look forward to? Is this to be her genetic legacy to me? I caught myself feeling selfish and dismissed the previous thought because this was not about me.

She stared straight ahead at an old fire policy posted on the wall. I was seated next to her bed in a simple room that she was unable to make her own. Her taste and style were sadly missing, a fact that surely bothered her. A variety of medications watched her from a plate on the bedside table. An open bible next to it with the bookmark showing, its pages gently fluttering from the over- head fan. Seldom did she blink. So I watched the policy with her not sure what to say. Eventually, bored, I looked upon her again. She ignored me. I looked at the cheap paisley nightgown buttoned up tightly to her neck. That was so not her. Some staff member had fashioned her into a clone of what existed here. She did not belong. I knew she had to be screaming inside. I was helpless to change her fate.

Surprisingly her skin was almost wrinkle free, probably due to the nightly Shea butter she applied for decades, but age still existed there. It was mostly in the eyes that for years held a calm sagacious spell on me. The other traitor was her hair, once a thick black mane but now reduced to white silvery strands of snow, the final betrayal.

The attendant said she had sat like this all day, to them death was imminent. In silence I took part of that journey with her for words still escaped me. Instead, I sat with memories hoping that somehow I could magically inform her of all the joy she had given me, and the gratitude and deep respect I felt for her. She showed me love that her own daughter was unable to. She defended me when mother flooded me with abuses wounding my heart and stomping it with shame. She had survived them all; my brother taken by addiction because his stomping was deeper than mine; little Gracie, dropped in a fit of rage never to recover, quickly to fade and wilt away. I was all she had left and now she was unable to take care of me and I of her. I looked at the bible beside her and cursed the protagonist for rendering her with beliefs that he was unable to deliver on. She did not deserve such an end. I always thought she’d be there or at least be taken in sleep when the time came, but not this, not this kind of silent death.

I placed my hands on hers again. This time she did not shudder but seemed to accept it without protest. I smiled.