August and Everything After

It's the tail end of August, but today it was cool enough in Chicago to wear a sweater over my short sleeves. Tonight, after much wriggling, resistance and gnashing of teeth, I did some writing and began to make a plan in my mind.

I can't help but think back to last year at this time. I started the September Blog Challenge, began a class on novel writing that helped kick my book in gear. I even outlined the entire book in one feverish session on a caffeinated Saturday. So much was coming together.

And then my Dad's death slammed into it like a car through a plate-glass window.

Greetings from Griefland

I read this piece last night at the very first Story Lab Chicago.  It was such a great night and I had a fantastic experience doing a live show for the first time.  It's a little tough posting this here, because I wrote it to be read out loud and I think a lot is lost without hearing it live, but for my friends and family who couldn't make it to the Black Rock, here's what I did:

“Grandpa died.” 

I have wandered into my brother’s dining room late Thanksgiving morning, blinking against the sunlight into the middle of an earnest conversation between my little nieces:

“Grandpa B died!” says Claire, age three and a half .  She takes a scoop of oatmeal and lets this fact settle over her younger cousin Evie.  When you’re three and a half, there are few opportunities to be the authority on things…Claire is taking this opportunity and rolling with it full speed.

These Sudden Ends in Time Must Give Us Pause

Somewhere between three and five hours after writing my last post, my dad died suddenly.

In the bizarre grief world that followed, my words haunted me. The fact that as I was blithely typing away about the little time we have on this Earth and reassuring a former classmate that all was well, my father was living his last hours, alone and far from home.

Even though he had no reason to know his time was short, my dad was a morbid bastard. My brothers, sister and I planned his funeral services from handwritten instructions on paper from his familiar and favored yellow legal pads. A teacher of literature, he had chosen poems for my brother and I to read. For me, it was Year's End by Richard Wilbur, which I post here in memory of him and in honor of all of the students he touched.

Year’s End by Richard Wilbur : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Don't Wait Too Long

I tore out this picture of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from last week's New Yorker and tacked it up above my desk. 

I did this for two reasons. 

We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For -- Saying Goodbye to Senator Kennedy

I was up way too late last night dicking around on the computer when the news came that Ted Kennedy had died. 

It was certainly no surprise, as he had announced his brain cancer well over a year ago.  And this news didn't come with the searing shock of Senator Wellstone's plane crash 2002, or the unexpected loss of Senator Simon a year later.  But as CNN ran the tributes, I still had that odd feeling of blinking into the abyss after Gandalf.

More than 10 years ago, my first job was answering constituent mail in a Senate office.  One letter was from an older man whose wife was in a nursing home.  His Social Security and pension were not enough to pay for her long term care, and they had nearly depleted their savings.  Medicare doesn't pay for nursing homes and Medicaid wouldn't step in and cover the cost because they still had assets -- basically their home and whatever money the man had set aside for his own later years.  His choices were to deliberately make himself poor by selling the house and spending-down his assets or...what?  Abandon his wife?  Move her to a "cheaper" facility? (good luck with that)

Remembering that letter last night sent me cringing through the journal I kept as a 23 year old to read what I wrote at the time:

Friday, I got so fed up that I had to take a walk to calm down.  My fantasy was that I would encounter Senator Kennedy or Senator Moynihan in the halls of the Russell Building.  And they could take me aside, and reassure me, and tell me that the country -- the world -- can be the way we see it.  And that I could go back to my desk energized.  Feeling like what I do does matter and that sooner or later, the mood will shift, and we will do everything we can (a lot) to alleviate people's suffering.

But it didn't happen that way.  I ate some candy and went back to work.

Now that Senator Kennedy is gone, I certainly don't expect the nation to start some version of the slow clap, culminating in riotous applause and health care for all. 

But what I hope doesn't get lost in the praise and lamentations is that we voted for change, so we have to embrace all of what change means.

It's so easy to feel small and Hobbit-like when we lose someone like Senator Kennedy. He was a great and flawed leader. But Ted Kennedy wasn't magical. 

We have to find new ways to acheive the vision he and others had for us.  Getting distracted by Hitler-moustached pictures of President Obama and endlessly interviewing the guys packing heat at town hall meetings isn't the way to get there.

I am honored to have shared some time here with him.