"Normal" Life

A short note about things other than paralyzing grief :)

I finished my bloody project last night.  At 3:30am.  Thankfully I only had to wait for the bus for 25 minutes and ended up taking a different one towards the train instead of directly home, since my bus never came.  I was delirious from staring at paper for that long, but at least I watched Sicko, The Bucket List, and six episodes of Scrubs.  Sweet.  At least I did something useful with my time. 

Incidentally, has anyone SEEN Sicko?  Of course there's always more to any story, and reasons behind reasons, and untold stories and facts and such.  Lies, dirty lies, and statistics, as the saying goes.  But that movie was appalling.  Michael Moore talked about socialized health care in France.  He said well of course it must suck then.  No- wait time is short, treatment is good, health of residents is better than in America.  Well of course the doctors must be paid badly.  No, a GP has a nice home, Audi, and three children, but he doesn't get paid exorbitantly either. And most average days doesn't have to even deal with money, nor does he have to turn away people.  So the general population is crippled by high taxes, right?  No again.  So what's the catch?  Of course there is one, somewhere, but Moore doesn't show it- he does however nullify enough other possible catches that you're left wondering- what the HELL are we doing over here?

Of course he had a number of stories about the denied treatment of 9/11 volunteers without insurance, and the denied treatments, tests, medications, and care of many others whose insurance companies rejected their claims or the coverage altogether, and who died even though being given high hopes of survival given proper medical attention.  There was even a drugged up woman still in hospital gown put in a cab and dropped off at Hope Rescue Mission because she was mid-treatment and found to be with no insurance, this in LA.  Rebuttal?

I need to address the other concerns in my life at the moment but I'll be back soon.

Congratulations to Brian Wack on being my 100th reader.  Sweet.

Dealing With It

...and we're back.

"I Miss you more than I should, than I thought I could, can't get my mind off of you"

We spent so much focus and time on eating whenever food was available (and the few times I actually felt hungry), sleeping wherever floor or couch or extra bed was available, sitting around staring blankly into space, pre-arranging funeral, slide show, obituary, and the like, that there really I think wasn't time for anyone to take it in and really grasp, understand, GET, what was really going on.  Our mourning was as much for her pain and suffering as it was for her impending death, and it was watching her whither away (and how it affected everyone else) that hurt the most.  Watching the people you most admire in your life- uncles, parents, brothers and sister, brought to their knees by the experience is something that rocks you to your core.  Seeing both old friends and family, and strangers alike sobbing at seeing the state she was in, was difficult as well, and not only because part of me wished I could have every one of those moments of the day with her myself.

It wasn't until afterwards that I could focus on the more self-centered mourning of feeling sorry for myself that she was no longer there, that I couldn't share any more moments of my future with her, that she would never get to meet Tiffany's mom.  I continually am in such disbelief that she's gone that I am stuck in a feeling of wanting to lash out at whoever keeps telling me this lie- shut up!  But its me, and its the truth.  I see all the events of the future in a fresh new light- things I imagined sharing with her, moments I had already created in my mind, I now have to reconstruct with here presence erased and her memory inserted, a memory that I know will fade frighteningly fast.  

Going through events that perpetuated the acceptance of her passing was terribly hard.  It felt as if I was making it happen, making it real, by going to the wake, as if not seeing her there looking better than she had in days would keep it from actually being so.  I hated, despised, (strongly disliked, Mom) that I had to attend my grandma's funeral, that I had to pick up a box of her funeral programs with her face on the front, and that staring at that face I quickly felt her transforming from person into memory.  In many ways I wanted no part of the dubious honor of pall bearer,  escorting her around for her last day above soil, but of course I would have had it no other way.

Saying goodbye was the hardest part, and I had to do it many times.  First, when I came back to Chicago for three days, when I thought might be the last time I'd see her alive.  I had to get on the train and leave town.  Coming back, I was shivering with dread by the time Nathan my brother picked me up from the train because I knew I was on the way to watch her breath her last, and it felt again as if I was setting the wheels in motion to make it happen just by my coming with that very expectation.  I said goodbye to her in small ways every time I left the room, when I went to bed at night.  I said goodbye to her as I entered the room around 4am that last night, and again when I finally left the room much later.  But the goodbye when I walked away from her casket the last time, tore me apart.  The last time I felt I'd ever be in her presence again.  Knowing again that it really was for real.  Visiting the grave of my grandpa I had seen many times, with a freshly opened hole next to him, as she was about to lay next to him again after all these years.  

I've accepted him as a memory to be shared with her- but now I don't have her to share that memory with, and that I have not yet well accepted.

Keeping Vigil

First, I have no idea why that bloody text in the last post is so big.  

My goals for the weekend include finishing this infernal project and possibly watching Pan's Labyrinth.  Today I went with Tiffany to a strip of furniture and art galleries between Chicago Ave. and Ohio St. on Franklin St. under the El tracks.  Cool stuff.  Some of it ugly too.

Back to my Christmas Break.  I spent four hours one of my grandma's last nights on earth holding her warm, slightly swollen hand:

She would wake up every 5-10 minutes enough to either moan softly about her pain, halt breathing a little bit, or even open her eyes and look around.  She was still able to talk and see at this point so it was nice spending the time with her.  I was there in case she woke up and needed something, or just didn't wanna feel alone.  She would start awake and I would squeeze her hand and say "its okay grandma, Carl's here."  And Tiffany would chime in "and Tiffany", at least until the last two hours where she fell asleep :)  Until the last half hour, I was dead awake- guess a lot was going on in my head.  Grandma would drift back to sleep.  Once she said "don't you ever sleep?" and I said I needed to watch her get her beauty sleep.  She said "oooooh do I need it bad..." as she went back to sleep.  Another time she opened her eyes and almost sat up because she was startled to see me sitting at her bedside intently watching her sleep.  "Oh Carl you scared me!" She said.  I said many prayers for her, for myself, and all of my family during those hours- not much else was going on then anyway except the background music CD on repeat that ever 45 minutes would make me think it was raining outside.

The other night I spent with her was not under as positive circumstances as before.  That was Friday, and just five days later on Wednesday of last week, I spent a few hours up with my cousin Christine.  (She was the pleasant surprise of the entire week+ experience because I spent a fair amount of time at least in her vicinity and enjoyed it a lot.  I miss her and the many WalMart pizzas we all consumed.)  That day grandma was essentially non-responsive, breathing very heavy and labored, pausing for anywhere from 3-5 seconds between every breathe, so long that every five minutes or so Christine and I would look at each other across the bed waiting for another breathe wondering how many seconds to wait before jumping out of our chairs.  

Thankfully that necessity never came.  I dreaded the possibility something happening on my watch, both because I felt like people would think I had done something wrong, and because I felt I would feel guilty for being there with her when she passed while no one else was.

My mom was the one *lucky* enough to have that experience, alone too, two days later around 3:40am Thursday night/Friday morning depending how you're counting.  We had been keeping 24 hour a day vigil for a week and a half between my dad and Uncle Tony at the hospital and everyone else at Aunt Roe's the week after that, and it was seldom that there weren't at least two people with her with others awake and roaming around.  But perhaps its how she wanted it.

To be continued...

My Emotions and Thoughts.

I'm going to begin each entry with a song quote, and try and include a picture also, I decided.

"Through You the blind will see, through You the mute will sing, through You the dead will rise, through You our hearts will praise, through You the darkness flees, through You my heart screams I am free"

First, do you think anyone has ever copied "Scrubs" and labeled every one of their blog entries "My _____"?  Okay yeah, clearly someone has.  I guess I won't then.  Or I might.

Well we're back for round two of stabbing yourself in the heart.  I'm hoping though that writing all this STUFF (I would say "garbage", but my mom hates using that word that way)(and she also hates me using the word "hate" all the time, so I'll say she strongly dislikes it...what was I talking about? oh yeah-) hopefully writing about all this will help me work this all through, help my family members know that someone else is feeling the same way as they might be, and also help anyone know what I'VE been feeling and thinking, since I haven't been terribly talkative about it all thus far.  So here we go.

I'm back in the midst of school, with a Structures (Physics of connections and materials and load-bearing) quiz on Monday and a Building Science (construction techniques meets technology) quiz on Tuesday, and yet I have a project due on Monday whose requirements couldn't be more difficult to grasp if they tried.  I won't bother attempting to explain.

The easy thing about being back at school is I have plenty of distractions begging me to focus on them.  My time is short, and I spend most of the rest of it pretty wisely, either with Tiffany or doing something productive.  I'm also removed enough from South Bend and everyone there that its easy to ignore or even deny the experiences I just had.  So I worry I'm not going to process it well enough or soon enough or just plain shed as many tears as I should be or need to.  I think some visits to her freshly dug grave at home will help that.  Wow.  Say it with me.  Her grave.  That's hard.  Amazing, really.

The thing is, half of December and half of January just flew by in a whirlwind of traveling back and forth between Chicago and South Bend (okay Niles, or even Goshen) and it turned into one long day.  I can't imagine how it was for my dad- he probably stayed up most or all of the night most days for about two weeks.  It just doesn't make it feel too real.  Its like waking up on New Year's Day from a long night, and staring at all the New Year's Day signs and logos on tv all day- you see it, you know, but it doesn't really register.  It takes weeks, even months, of writing the date every day on paperwork, homework, whatever, before you can start writing "08" without thinking twice or even writing over the 7 with a big black 8.  That's how it feels.

I think this is going to end up being really long so I may 

need to split it into two parts.  I'll split your mom into two parts.  That's what she said.  Thanks Michael Scott...sorry I got off track.

Before I sign off this post, here's a picture of the rose from my grandma's burial bouquet, sitting in the fresh snow that she didn't get to see.  One flower for each of the 19 grandchildren.  Which annoyingly I didn't get to drop down into her grave on top of the casket like in the movies because it was too cold for us to have the graveside ceremony outside.  So we had a grave-nearby-in-a-heated-building instead.

My Grandma.

"I wanna start it over. I wanna start again. I want a new beginning. One without an end."

"I am free to run, I am free to dance, I am free to live for You, I am free, yes I am free!"

Being a pall-bearer is the most dubious honor of all time.

I struggled with the best way to begin this entry.

The first coherent thought I had yesterday when my eyes peeled open to the chilled darkness of my room at 6:30am:


*Today my grandma is dead.*


Sometimes I remind myself gently, like to a young forgetful child to pick up their toys. Sometimes its a feeling that slaps me across the face when I least expect it. Like a smack on the wrist when you reach for the cookie jar, I think about something I'd like to share with her, and the truth hits me. Other times it feels more like I'm sitting in the corner of my padded white room in the Psych ward, gently rocking back and forth repeating it to myself softly.

But whatever combination and frequency of these I use, nothing but time will set in the reality that she's gone. Only the repeated experience of wanting what I can no longer have, and getting used to thinking of her as a memory to revisit rather than a person to visit, will accustom me to what transpired in a month that felt like one continuous day. Only now am I waking up from the daze of it all, and the hardest part of it is that waking up doesn't make the bad dream go away.

The positive side is that I spent the last five day with 30 members of my immediate-ish family, sleeping and eating around the clock wherever space and food were provided, and scarcely leaving the house. I have friends to support me and a girlfriend who was there with me from beginning to end, and if she wasn't there to get on the train with me as I left South Bend, I would have been a wreck. I have a life that I'm happy to go back to and a graduate program that will more-than distract me from my thoughts. Its an experience I'll never forget, yet one I don't necessarily want to relive.

I have no regrets and yet part of me wishes I had been so much more selfish with her time in those last days she could still talk. But all I can do now is be happy with what I had. Glad that I had moments like this picture on the wall in front of my desk.
More on this whole experience soon- don't want to overwhelm.

Catching Up Part 3.

So NOW, here I am. I started a 3-year Master's of Architecture program at University of Illinois at Chicago, just blocks west of downtown Chicago. I live in Lakeview/Wrigleyville, a block from Wrigley Field. I have no car, I take the bus to school. I have no money, but bought a re-dick-ulously expensive laptop for school. My girlfriend Tiffany moved here from Houston in August, just the same time I started grad school. She moved two blocks away, with some girls from LaPorte (very near South Bend), and she works in Substance Abuse Prevention in Evanston (north, where Northwestern University is).

I spend almost all of my time engaged either in school or Tiffany (I didn't say engaged TO, hold your horses) and if I have a few minutes free time I'm hopefully talking to my family, visiting my family, playing guitar, reading something, fixing something, taking apart something, or involved in some Apple-oriented activity. That covers a lot of things.

I have a lot of plans for the near and far future, and hopefully you'll start reading about some of them here. As it is, it takes all my energy and time to stay on top of school (I got a 3.66 last semester!), spend enough time with TIffany (she hasn't moved back yet) and get enough sleep.

My plans for the year include daily prayer and reading the rest of the Bible my grandpa gave me shortly before he died, finishing my list of currently 85 movies to watch, and making a website that'll generate enough money that I can earn a living wage while in school. Wish me luck.

Currently I'm trying to catch up on some missed school work and remind myself a hundred times a day that my grandma really is gone...which doesn't seem to be working as well as I'd hoped.

Catching Up Part 2...

Guitar school took three months, I came back home and failed to find any jobs in the business in Chicago. So I took a job as a Designer, glorified furniture salesman, for high end retailer Walter E. Smithe. For three months, until I realized I couldn't make any money.

I worked a sweet evening job that involved my ipod and a huge Mac doing photo editing for an up and coming dot com in Chicago, and made some cash buying and selling U2 tickets. Finally I landed a sweet office job doing customer service and data entry for an auto financing company. Oh wait that was the corporate version of working McDonald's drive-thru.

After a kick in the pants from a seminar at an organization called Landmark Education, I set my sights on what I wanted for my life- a job in the guitar business, a girlfriend, graduate school. Within the next three months I got a guitar repair job for the nation's biggest guitar repair shop on the near west side. I decided to volunteer for something, because I never do and my friend asked me to, and met this girl Tiffany, who just under a year later moved to Chicago to be with me. And finally, I got to applying to Architecture grad school. I was *this close* to applying to Art Therapy schools, but my brother's suggestion that I'd be good at architecture, and a Psych prof's advice that it'd be best for me because I could be creative there, led me to where I am now.

Catching Up Part 1...

Well here's round one everyone. This is the grand recap to bring you up to speed on where my life is before I get into the nitty gritty. Most will be much shorter than this :) So far we have about 100 people tuning in, or at least saying they would...

I graduated from ND in '03 (December) after following my Uncle Al's advice to take an extra semester and finish my art degree on top of Psychology. After getting turned down to a bunch of Social Psych grad schools and taking that as a sign, I discovered the wonderful world of Lutherie, a fancy name for guitar building and repair, thanks to my dad synthesizing my interests.

So I moved to Atlanta March of '04, after driving 19 hours straight to Houston, then through New Orleans and Montgomery, "on the way", to visit friends, notably best friend since 5th grade and current roommmate Josh. There I lived with my esteemed Uncle Dave and his lovely wife Liz and their beguilingly handsome son Zach. We played lots of one-on-one basketball and drank lots of sweet tea. Yum.