A Remembrance of Things Past

After watching the movie, "Seed," today, I thought I'd repeat a journal entry about the day my brother in-law died two years ago that led me to seek the meaning of personal freedom...

3 July 2006. The fact that I’m sitting here is a positive thing. My command of the English language, slightly better than average on the best of days, is less than that today. Although my wife’s brother was not a close friend, we still shared the desire to do well, to give our families what they needed to survive into the future. Unfortunately, my brother in-law is no longer here, no longer living, that is. He died on the 28th of June at 2:14 p.m., after what appeared to be cardiac arrest. Blood clots in his lungs that had traveled from other parts of his body prevented him from being able to pump enough oxygen-carrying blood through him. When I saw him Tuesday night, he was taking very shallow breaths. His wife, Pat, thought he was doing better on Wednesday morning, having been able to sit up. Then sometime after lunch he started coughing, couldn’t catch his breath, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. Pat screamed for a nurse. The staff came in and revived him. They rushed him from the regular hospital room to CCU. On the way, Allan squeezed Pat’s arm and told her he was okay.

Pat called Janeil at some point during this time, probably after Allan was placed in CCU. According to my cell phone log, Janeil called me at 13:37. I was just finishing up a late lunch at a Sonic drive-in. She told me that Allan had been placed in CCU, that Pat was very upset, and Janeil was on her way to the hospital. I asked if I should join her and she told she’d let me know if I needed to come.

At 14:24, Janeil called me to tell me that Allan hadn’t made it. I told her I was on my way to the hospital. She asked me to call David Hale, Mom Berry’s minister in Rogersville, to get his assistance in telling Mrs. Berry about the death of her son. I finished up a couple of tasks at work that would allow me to take the rest of the week off. I then tried calling Dr. Hale’s house and got the answering machine. On the way to the hospital, I called the Rogersville Presbyterian Church office and reached Mrs. Hale (Sarah), telling her that Allan had died and that we wanted Dr. Hale’s assistance to help. I gave Sarah my cell phone number and asked him to call me back after he’d finished a consultation with someone in his office.

I can think of a lot of little details right now, and as usual, do not feel like writing them down, knowing that I’ll forget them in the future; despite their insignificance (like driving with one hand, changing gears with the other that was holding a cell phone and hoping I didn't miss what the caller was saying as I changed gears, especially while driving through the Governor's Drive/Memorial Parkway underpass; telling Sarah that my cell phone battery was running out), they would contribute to my remembrance and full understanding of the day’s events. The only important thing that matters is that Allan died. All else truly pales in comparison.

At the hospital, I wasn't sure where to find my wife -- luckily, Janeil was in the lobby talking with a couple of women from Pat’s church. We went back up to the “Consultation Room” where Pat and her son (my nephew) Jonathan were. I still recall lots of WBC (Whitesburg Baptist Church) folks hanging around, all of them part of Pat’s church family, but giving myself a feeling of being crowded in. Neither Janeil nor I are used to being around a lot of people, especially strangers, when we need time to soak in the emotions of loss.

I wasn’t at the hospital when Pat, Jonathan and Janeil got the news of Allan’s death so I did not see their first reactions. So what I remember most is when my niece, Jana, came to the hospital, looked at her mother asking, “What’s the matter?” and then bursting out loud, crying, "No!," when she found out about her father’s death. Since I’m writing this for myself, I can selfishly tell myself that I didn’t feel like I deserved to be in the room with them. They are such a loving family and I am such a cynical, sarcastic clownish guy, I realized just how little a comforting person I am. I couldn’t look any of them in the eye during that time. I was frozen in place, looking down at a piece of paper with Dr. Hale’s and Ben Cunningham’s (a Rogersville friend of the family) home phone numbers.

“Brother Dick” and “Brother Jimmy” (senior ministers at WBC) came into the room at some point to comfort them and have prayers. So did other folks, Jerry Spain, a close friend of Pat, being the one I remember the most.

The whole afternoon at the hospital was beyond surreal. In fact, I don’t even know what surreal means anymore. I’m sure that it includes the adjective “unfair”. Eventually, we went back up to the CCU room where Allan’s body still lay dead in bed. His 51-year old face was amazingly smooth, devoid of wrinkles. His jaw lay askew, off to one side. He had a several-day old beard. Just as I had noticed the day before when he was alive, he had much less hair on his head than I had seen a few months before (I am more aware of men losing hair, now that it has been shown that hair loss is attributable to heart and blood circulation problems). I thought about touching him but decided I didn’t deserve to.

Later, after Pat had signed release forms (including an organ donor form), I stood in the hallway with the nurse while the rest of the family – Janeil, Pat, Jonathan and Jana – saw Allan’s body in the room one more time. The nurse explained to me that even though Pat had signed an organ donor form, about the only thing they could take were the bones and maybe some ligaments or tendons.

I sit here writing about the day Allan died when I had hoped to be able to sit down and write about the day I spent in Munich with Ann and Jonas – a wonderful memory of walking through the streets the day of the 2006 World Cup match between Germany and Sweden. Alas, death has overshadowed that warm, summer day in Bavaria. I’ll always have dim memories of Swedish wood creatures, American coffee shops (Starbucks and San Francisco Coffee Company), Johannes berries, funny costumes, a phone conversation between Ann and my father in broken German, chasing down a couple of bicyclists in the English Garden in an attempt to return a dropped overshirt, watching surfers in the middle of the city, looking out over the city from the towers of the Frauerenkirche (sp?) by myself while waiting for Ann and Jonas (with an elderly lady telling me her memories of the city, all in German, with me only being able to say “Ja, ja”, and wishing I could say something more comforting), eating ice cream next to polizei cyclists, then cracking a joke in bad taste, seeing the look of alarm/disgust on Ann’s face, sensing something wrong and then hours later having a conversation at the end of the day in the courtyard outside a San Fran ‘Offee House where Ann laid it on the line about integrity, flirting, sex and everything else that that dirty joke seemed to embody (certainly including some of my writing, no doubt).

The rest of this week has been a blur, more so for Pat I’m sure. We spent time on Thursday and early Friday planning for the funeral, visiting Maple Hill Cemetery to pick out plots, going to the funeral home to pick out a coffin and plan the memorial service, visiting Dr. Jackson (Brother Jimmy) at WBC to plan the funeral service and have a “heart to heart” talk about the days/weeks/months ahead. Friday evening, family gathered at the Laughlin Funeral Home to receive friends and family (including Janeil and my favorite couple from Covenant Presbyterian Church, Leon and Flora Trotter; some of Janeil’s coworkers; my former employee, Donald Gaither and his wife Jenny; others who I should remember but can’t). Saturday was the funeral service at WBC and subsequent burial at the cemetery. Saturday night, Janeil and I took my parents and sister on a tour of Big Cove and then had a late snack at Nikko Restaurant – Robert and Anna were such gracious hosts to spend time with us, feeding the fish in the atrium.

Yesterday, Janeil and I sat with her mother at Pat’s house while Pat and the kids went to church. We also visited with Pat’s family. Last night, Janeil and I went to see the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada”. Today, Janeil has been resting in bed watching TV while I have been doing very little else. Watched the movie, “Before Sunset”, which triggered this writing session out in the warm sunroom with the cats sleeping in the sofa across the room from me, all of us listening to the gurgle of the waterfall outside and the music playing from a nearby wireless speaker.

After listening to the accolades that Allan received for his dedication to what he loved – God, family, work – I have pondered my life’s record and what I would be remembered for. I’m not a big participant in any part of north Alabama society so I expect low participation in my funeral, and thus, little public record to go over.

Right now, a small hawk sits in the branches of the fig tree that grows over the waterfall next to our house. The hawk was here yesterday, also. Does it sit waiting to pounce on a bird sipping water from the base of the waterfall? There was a turtle that lived in the upper part of the waterfall – I wonder if it has fallen prey to the hawk. I hope not but if it has, such is the way of life.

Oh wait, there are at least two hawks in the tree. They’re both small so it’s possible they are juveniles. I take it back. There are three. The third one is bigger – brown with a white chest, while the other two are mottled brown and white birds.

The wooded hill behind our house is slowly being divided up into housing areas for humans. We live on the northeast end, in a subdivision built in the early 1960s along the edge of a farm (basically, in unplowable land). A subdivision at the southern end of the hill was built a year ago and now roads from the subdivision are being extended into the woods. Perhaps the construction/destruction is pushing the animals this way.

So what do I want to remember of my life in the days/weeks/years ahead? I have spent the majority of my life since high school performing functions that were not my desires. In other words, my adulthood has been more compromise than personal promise. When Ann spoke to Jonas and me about integrity, she knew very little about my life. In my brother in-law (and in many of my fellow Eagle Scouts), I have seen the example of a person who led a life full of integrity. In the newspapers and TV news channels, in my worklife, and in most other places, I have seen more than my share of people who have exhibited a central guiding set of moral values or desire for integrity different than my own. What I have figured out is that we are born with an internal set of rules that changes very little. I am the same person I remember being when I was four or five years old. I remember looking at kids beside me in kindergarten and Sunday school, being able to pick out those who cared for and enhanced a personal belief system tied to the church. I have no way of knowing how much was nurture or nature. A mixture of both, to be sure. At an early age and even to this day, I fascinate myself with the ability to think thoughts incongruous with a way of life that ensures the best path for a lengthy, safe passage to the end of a long life.