Monthly Archives: May 2015

Memorial Day: stories with my brother

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It is Memorial Day and my brother has come roaring into my mind on his Harley. He is turning it in a small circle and parks it, grinning at me. His white beard is stubbly. He is a large man. The hair on his head is still salt and pepper. It will not turn snow white like my father’s.

He taught math to high school students, coached girls basketball, was addicted to fishing, especially ice fishing on the Mississippi, and died nearly 15 years ago. I miss him terribly today. I am mourning all the men and women who died too early.

When Mom had a heart attack 28 years ago, Les got the word at school and jumped on his Harley as the closest vehicle and tore up Interstate 35 out of Des Moines straight north to Mason City. A patrolman was just as fast but Les didn’t stop. He shouted what happened, and the patrolman went in front of him, clearing the rest of the way of the 2 hour trip. We Iowans love heroic stories. My brother was a storyteller, my father was a storyteller. I’m telling you a story.

My mother survived and lived another 27 years, dying on the penultimate day of 2013, unwilling to endure another Iowa winter. She was 96.

And so they are gone, my mother, my brother, and my father who died 26 years ago at age 82. Les was 59. A clot blocked his blood from going through his lungs.

Mom tippy-toed towards death without complaint or questions over years of lessening. Les left, in protest, in eight minutes. I was there for both of them, as I was for Dad who made up in the month gifted him from diagnosis to completion for his decades of silence during my childhood. We solved problems that stalemated for years. I seem to be the designated Guide to the Gate.

One of Les’s favorite stories was from when we were in high school and in the band. He played second clarinet. I played first flute. Our director was Ralph Drollinger. You know how you always remember your best teacher?

Each year we competed in the statewide Iowa band competition. Sheffield was the runt of the schools in our league, but we had practiced hard and had mastered our piece. Through the morning of the day of our competition, Mr. Drollinger had listened to the other bands. They were larger. They had better instruments.

Minutes before we went on stage he told us if we wanted to get a #1 rating, we could not play what we had prepared. The competition was too good, we had to play something more difficult. Then he handed out an atonal piece we had played only once in a mangled practice.

The piece had no rhythm or rhyme to it that we could figure. It had no melody for us to know when to come in. We had no familiar guidelines.

This man we adored said, “It’s this and we make it or we fall on our faces.” Our little band of players took our places on stage. Jay Crawford on trombone, Nancy Galvin on French horn, Gene Brouillette on trumpet, Sue Foster on oboe, Walter Stover on drums, Les and Karen Davolt on clarinet, Jan Davolt and me on flute, and maybe 15 others.

We may not have known the music but we knew everything depended on how we played it. We counted out our measures to know when to come in against all intuition. I played the flute solo with meticulous passion, surprising even myself. It seemed to be in the right place.

The applause was as loud as our relief was deep when we reached the end. We received a #1. We received much more than a #1. We went up against the big boys, not sure of anything, counted our measures, played our hearts out, and we won.

Les told that story better than I did. It is a story of life where some melody lines end abruptly and where individual players can’t grasp the whole of it at any one moment, but we each have our turn, play our best, and pray it all works.

Les, I miss you. You were to be with me until the last coda. You were to be with your wife and your daughter and your friends.

And this story of loss too soon is repeated with every man and woman who fought and died too early because of human greed, cruelty, and stupidity. It is repeated with every child and innocent killed because we do not rise to do what we are called to do, to live in harmony. We have no excuses. Death will do what death will do, but we have no excuses for hastening it.

 

Bad Husbands Are People Too

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I didn’t set out to marry bad husbands. It was something that happened along the way, and rather like unhappy families are unhappy in different ways, my bad husbands were bad in different ways.

This first I won’t talk about because he is still in my life as the father of my daughter and grandfather of my grandchildren – and because at her wedding he suddenly burst out with an incredible backhand apology in the reception line after more than three decades of silence. It was poorly timed, and was a kick to my heart. I collapsed in sobs in a corner while my third husband tried to shield me from the wedding party.

The second one I will talk about because he had someone track me down a week ago after two decades of silence. He is the catalyst for this blog. I had not known for years if he were dead or alive. I last saw him over 20 years ago in a banana grove on the side of a mountain in Maui.

Husband number two is alive, but dying. We will return to him, but, first, let’s do a fast review of husband number three.

No, first of all, I want to say that I am blessed beyond measure. My life is an astonishment of good things outside of my husbands. The dichotomy between the rest of my life and my husbands is an endorsement for reincarnation and karma. I must have been a real bitch in my past lives.

Husband number three was in some ways the worst because his motives were purely self-serving. He had the power to behave differently. He had options. His decision to lead a secret double life with a woman twenty years younger and to buy apartments in Beijing and San Francisco was calculated and deliberate. I saw how power corrupts, seduces, and confuses. It can make you believe you are above the rules that apply to others. He had never considered that I might refuse to accept an arrangement where he would be with me 50% of the time and with her 50% of the time.

It never crossed his mind I would leave, which I did within 25 minutes of reading the 2 ½ pages of revelations and future conditions that he handed me – oh, so sweetly and with such love in his eyes – in our garden. I left 24 minutes after smashing the glass with my strawberry smoothie into the wall.

It got worse after that, a stunning reversal from his being my soul mate since college, mate for 18 years, and champion. His acts were perhaps those of an angry, hurt, and emotionally immature man, but they were not the acts of a broken man. He had choices and options. He could have behaved better, but chose not to.

My second husband, however, was broken. His violence and rages were not calculated. They answered to an internal skewed gyroscope. He blacked out during his violence, though I didn’t know that until a year into it. They were frightening, controlling, and twice just skirted being fatal “accidents,” but they had little or nothing to do with me, or with us. We actually had times of peace, even as I had to be very careful.

His attempt to let me know that he was very ill came by a circuitous route. He asked his wife to contact a mutual friend from 35 year ago, who found my daughter through an Internet search and sent an email to where she worked. That was a week ago. By now I know that he has Lewy Body Disease, the most common dementia after Alzheimer’s. He also has Parkinson’s.

He cannot use a computer and has trouble with telephones. He was recently moved into an assisted living home in Tucson. They had moved from Hawaii to Tucson, he had bad lungs. He always thought it was his lungs that would get him.

I was given his mailing address. What? I’m to write and say . . . what? What does he remember? What does he know? What does he want from me? Do I owe him anything?

He was a failed yogi who meditated hours a day. Everyone thought he was so gentle. He was not. He wore drawstring pants and flip-flops and yogi shirts. At one time he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. People thought he was so gentle. He was not. He controlled my life and blamed me and felt unloved by me even though he was, though with time he was not. He was beaten as a child by his father and thought he deserved it. He smiled serenely and I heard the electricity snap in his back when he meditated. People thought he was so gentle. He was not. He was living proof that if you are going to mess with intense high energies you better have your psychological shit together or you can become very bad.

Life doesn’t follow nice clean script lines. Am I to write to him and say I forgive you when he may not be able to make sense of that? He did, after all, a decade after we separated (30 years ago now) visit my city and beg to see me. I refused. He begged again. I allowed it. He fell on his knees and begged my forgiveness. I told him the forgiveness he needed was his own, not mine. Did he forget that? Does it need renewing? Does this have anything at all to do with harm done?

Perhaps he just wants me to know he’s wrapping things up, and I am glad to know that, and I wish him no harm though my tongue has gone over the scar inside my lip more often this week than it has in many years. After that first time, he learned how to hit without blood.

The past week has included the resurrection of old memories. Disoriented bats of fear and trauma flew at me, shrieking “remember me?” But they have calmed down now, murmuring in a far back corner, wings folded, returning to sleep – so that the week also became one of reflection on him and our time together – and also, for reasons having to do with the dispensing of art, of reflection on my third husband who made choices consciously and deliberately. (In writing this blog, I may forfeit pieces of art I adore, but I’m bloody well finished with self-censoring.)

Forgiveness. Everyone thinks it’s about forgiveness. But I don’t think so. I forgave husband number two soon after the separation, and I forgave husband number three so quickly that it was almost simultaneous with each harm over several years. I don’t seem to have filing systems that store hate. For disgust, grief, momentary anger, repugnance, yes. Hate, no. It always breaks down when I focus on the individual.

Bad husbands are people too, and perhaps there are different kinds of broken. Some are brittle and snap people into fragments. Others are sloppy and bend people to do stupid things and cruel things – and to become blind and deaf to what is good and what is clear.

It is interesting how people who are not clear themselves often cannot tell who around them is clear, or helpful, or good. Projection is a demon.

Yet, I have become the person I am because of life experiences, including three husbands. Perhaps if enough harm is done, one gives up hate because if you did not, it would destroy you. What a perverse way to surrender to love.

Perhaps I will write husband number two. I sent a message back through the circuitous route thanking him for letting me know and telling him I wish him peace. But as his mind leaves, he may forget that. If I send a note saying that same thing, then he has something that he can hold in his hand. Maybe he can manage to remember the good parts. Something in me would like that.