I painted a blue gorilla

I painted a picture of a blue gorilla,
I painted the background in with a glowing orange
the face of the gorilla has a kind expression, anthropomorphic, winsome eyes
even though he is almost purple and the background is on fire

I worked on it again, wanting to make his face more fearsome,
the more I worked the more empathetic his expression, the softer the look in his eyes
god, I should quit working on this gorilla

the essence of time

one ephemeral line
the problem maker
    the problem's taker

keeps us in line
  times us out
   restarts the clock

foe and friend

recycling line
   orders our days, reorders our ways

set in its days
one ephemeral line
 ....----______^^^^^~~~~~~

the compressor decompressor
the composer decomposer
the unexpected guest
the uninvited guest
the host
the mc, if you will

the ephemeral line

Reflections on the last day of July, 2012

I taught at my arts center in the Summer Camp program all of July.  It was invigorating and healing, energy giving and energy taking.  It was a welcome relief from days of grieving with no seeming purpose to the grief anymore.  It was a getting on with it and a keeping up with it.
I have missed writing and making sense of my thoughts by organizing them into somewhat inadequate words that sound, even to me, like wallowing.
Seems like I can only do one creative sort of activity at a time, if I teach art for hours everyday, I don't write. Nor do I cook very well. Teaching uses everything up.
I take some pleasure in cooking, not in following recipes, that is why I hate holiday cooking.  I call it stress cooking.  I like listening to fresh ingredients and then following my bliss. I am just beginning to do that kind of cooking again, after Daddy passed in late February I could not really cook for a long time, to get through it I went back to cooking the comfort food sort of meals I made for my children while they were growing up.  I am finally recovering the blissful end of the day cooking.

Now we deal with the settling of Daddy's affairs.  Some of those affairs we had to deal with right away, like taxes. And what is this "we" stuff?  Mainly it was one of my brothers and one of my sisters.  And all of them but me have been there physically to settle things.

I am feeling the need, finally, to go back and physically touch those things too.  And that feeling turns on a dime.

The Serendipitous

All the backyard critters are in hiding, as I am.  There are workers tearing up the yard next door with their loud machinery, taking out the bad plumbing and putting in the new.  That perfectly landscaped yard next door has been completely un-landscaped.  And the neighbors, renters like most of us in this Googletown, must have been so disheartened by the disruption that they have left their upholstered living room-like lawn furniture out in the mounding dust and dirt, uncovered and unprotected. I bet they throw it away.


Last night when the team of plumbers finally stopped their noisy man talk and loud work for the day, the animals crept back in - the doves asking for millet, and all the other feathered and furred critters, waiting, while I replenished the sunflower seeds and peanuts.


Ahhh, the juxtaposition of the temporary, the human made, like the plumbing and the landscaping and the yard furniture, to that of Mother Nature, who is constantly reclaiming her place, wherever she can, whenever she can.


Our yard "proper" had nothing in it when we moved in.  The rooftop of the tiny 1926 bungalow was canopied by the precariously heavy branches of two enormous oaks. The backyard was bordered by a variety of singular trees: one struggling eucalyptus, an overgrown avocado, the ancient and dying olive, and a lone long-needled pine. The yard itself was nothing but packed hard dirt with no topsoil.  I have steadily worked the soil. I planted grass in the front yard for the sole purpose of giving the soil something to hold onto. I planted an herb garden and some succulents around the patio in the backyard. Then I watched, and I waited, to see what else in this old downtown yard would come back. The plant life did come back - wisteria, jasmine, ivy, wild grape, morning glories, passion flower vines ... the geraniums, the blackberries, the bird of paradise, three rose bushes, a wispy fern, four different ground covers, several native wildflowers.  And, so came, the Naked Ladies.


Naked Ladies are beautiful-tall-lustrous-rose-pink lilies on  leafless-long-bare stalks that have their day in the sun for a short season in early August. Unlike the gorgeous blue scrub jay, I didn't have to lure it to the yard.  An older neighbor had told me not to plant anything along that side of the front yard, that there were special flowers there. She dug into the earth to show me their bulbs.  It took three years of waiting to see them bloom, all along the fence row. 


It brings me joy, this serendipitous piece of earth that I wait on and tend.
As I grow older, I tend to and wait on my own body, mind, and soul - looking towards a time when it will come into its own season of full serendipity. 

early morning 2/21

Where are you going Hugh Little?
    shoving off from this coastline into fathomless seas
When will we lose you beyond this horizon?
How will we safe passage to yon distant shore?

So long dear Hugh Little,
    our strong and sure captain through to the end.
Now our turn to helm this vessel
    gathering loved ones safely in.

two kinds of alone

for a married woman, I think, there are two kinds of alone

that alone when he has left for his day and you are done taking care of his needs -
the working around him so as to not get in the way
then finally - you regard your own day, your own needs

and that other alone of the no one there to share the glass of wine and broken bread
no one to warm the side of the bed you snuggle into when he gets up before you
now, it's an aching hole of absence in the empty spaces of routine

that alone when you finish your part in the hub of the working day and are home alone -
having an hour or so, alone, before he comes home, hungry, world weary -
home alone in that room of one's own
to fix yourself a spot of tea and feed the birds, the greedy squirrels, the mean jays

and that other alone when the sky is never blue, really, a blue you can trust
or the rain all feels like the acid kind, biting cold
and you wander, and you wonder why you were always needing so much to be alone

there are two kinds of alone that I have seen,
I had a vivid dream that I was left with the final kind
so I try not to need the other one too much

banana slug

OH! banana slug !!(/////////=~~
dragon-like-bright-yellow-slime
beneath the redwoods

testing the waters

wish there was a way to test the waters,
it has never been,
     so much,
my way,
     too much.

I prefer to stand at the edge of the pool,
bend one knee, arms out-balance, other foot-swish the water-swueshh
dive in, Nothing was Considered

age has made me more cautious,
less precocious,

age has made me say no
before I say yes

wonder where I would be today
if in youthful days, All Things were Considered

thought I had mastered
making the best of iffy decisions
making the most of Fool's gold

although I never mastered the art of walking away from
without a quick look back

three chords and the truth

you know me, wear my heart on my sleeve me,
too much to wear on my sleeve this year
and most days I'm saved from it by teaching art, making art, pushing a cart

I write about what my heart can't bare,
or bear
I em-barr-ass myself.

"there's no other way to write"
my fairy-goddess dixie chick flaxen haired writer friend says

"there's no other way to write"
so I do, "to get used to it," I tell my son who scorns my lack of dedication to the task
prolific science fiction writer, he

my love is tall and strong but not XL

Back in the day, one like yesterday
                    only it WAS back in the day, 1975
there was a big orange down coat, XL

My love would say, "I will put you right here, in my pocket."

And when "little One" was born, he put "little One" in the snuggly on his chest and buttoned up the orange down coat around the both of them and I would put my hand in the pocket and off we would go.

My love is tall and strong and very slender and he always buys his coats XL

swimming at Makaha

I remember the icy cold and churning ocean of Makaha
        that first time
plunging in naively, as if he was that same Poseidon as that other
        of the sane Atlantic
I had to turn my back to him and kick hard with flippered feet
       
I turned over as I swam away from shore
         with arms already tired and shaky -
         pinged by tiny stinging jellies
as the bottom of the sea dropped out below me

I swam out and out and out to see the dolphins feed and play at break of day
          but they did not come that day

Colder than all hell, I turned back to swim to land
          I had forgotten
          the torrent waiting there for me in between
 that deep Poseidon and the safety of Makaha's shadowed land and sand,
           that churning surf around the rough and scrappy lava boulders


       




             

The Backyard Wildlife Show

Backyard critters, I am feeding them, watching them, luring them out of hiding, in my little downtown yard in the heart of Silicon Valley.  Who would have thought that feeding the birds would lead to such?  I will blame it on our rental agreement which does not allow me to have a kitty.  When I started feeding the birds I got a kitty, actually two, by default.  They come by to watch, and occasionally to spar with each other when their schedules of territorial patrol intersect - those kitties!  They come by to sit on my patio in the comfy chair or to crouch behind the giant rosemary bush to watch the backyard wildlife show.

My bird feeding attracted the squirrels, of course.  One family we call the Hoovers.  They clean up everything but leftover cornbread - CA snobby squirrels.  We have grey squirrels and black squirrels.  The black squirrels live near the top of the giant redwood tree that is in the yard right behind our car garage. The grey squirrels live in the eucalyptus tree high up over the recycling bins. And regardless of what you think of squirrels, and I know what you think, they are incredible acrobats and they perform and posture and fly through the branches.  They loosen the avocados so that they drop to the ground and I can collect them. If I am fast enough I can collect them before the squirrels gnaw into them; they gnaw into them in the same way a cat gnaws into a mole, with just one bite.

My bird feeding lured the crow couple who live in one of the huge live oaks that uniquely canopy our little house. Lord and Lady Crowley, we call them.  Their babies all ended up dead in the driveway at various stages of infancy last year so I justify feeding them to preserve their bloodline; crow welfare, some would say.  I select special raw peanuts in the shell for them at the Farmer's Market every Sunday.  They watch me from outside my windows as I move from room to room inside the house, going about my daily routine, and they alert me to other animal intruders in the yard.  Like the kitties, like the possum.

First time I saw Br'er Possum was when I was dragging my suitcase around to the backdoor after being dropped off by the SFO airport shuttle at the end of my last trip back to the Southland in February.  It was about noon and there he was - as bold and as fat as a possum can be - right on the walk beside the giant rosemary bush.  He waddled off into my flower bed when he caught sight of me. Br'er Possum has become a regular midday visitor, he just nods in my direction now, boldly strolling up to the back screened door.  The Crowleys loudly alert me to his presence with a persistent cawing like none other.

And remember the mysterious case of the missing garden croc?  I leave my crocs right beside my back door, ready to step into as I go out to work in my little garden. One morning one croc was missing.  I found it while raking leaves a few days later.  It was half buried under the purple blooms of morning glory vines, just beside the old olive tree that grows at the back of our yard.  The olive tree overhangs the car garage and is all covered with the morning glory vines. When the olives ripen and drop, the crows eat them and fight over them with their long lost crow cousins who come over uninvited. One of my own cousins, I think he is an Episcopalian now, suggested that I make the crows martinis. (Good Southern Baptist girl that I am, I have never had a martini. My husband says it is time to remedy that and, he says, I am probably the only good southern baptist girl left who has not had a martini.)  After fishing my missing croc from the tangle of vines with the rake a rather large raccoon lumbered out, limb by furry limb, from inside the hollow in the trunk of the olive tree. She raised herself up once, then twice, on her hind legs. She waved her forelegs, shifting from foot to foot on her back legs- menacing at me, then she headed off towards the busy sidewalk in the front of our house here, downtown.

Our yard was nothing but hard-packed dirt when we first moved in.  I have coaxed it back to life.  With the coming back of the wild grasses and dandelions came the little sparrows. I fed them until others of the feathered kind began to arrive - little hooded juncos, red breasted robins in the Spring, tiny yellow finches fluttering the grasses, hummingbirds zipping in and out of my lavender, doves in pairs cooing in the evenings, and the bird I most wanted - the CA scrub jay.  This bird is as large as a GA crow and as bright as a tropical sky with highlights and lowlights, shades and tints of azure. The call of the scrub jay is distinct and a little eerie in timbre.  Its behavior is more aggressive than the crow!  The scrubs come to visit every morning and afternoon.  I love to see them swoop in, dropping from the sky, scooping up as many peanuts as they can into their beaks at one time, two or three - dropping one, trying again - greedy greedy greedy, then swooping back out again.

compost and zen on Easter Sunday

You have to become zzzzennnnn about it.

Okay, so I can zen it for awhile if I can avoid it.  I can zen it when I am drinking my morning coffee and listening to Morning Edition.  I can zen it while I am involved in my work and while I am cooking.  I can zen it until I have to talk to it, and hold it, and try to look at it with compassion and understanding.  I can zen it when I am not taking it personally.  When I act like a man and stuff it, I can zen it.
 
When I put it in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and leave it there until it rots, I can be very very zen.  Then I take it out to the garden and dig it into the soil around an ailing plant, and it is there on my knees that I pray for a heart changed and a perspective changed, for, if you will, true zen.

monday monday, ...just get through it

Tuesday I will get back to it

today, I will be, mostly, a bum

I will sit and not harass myself
I will not make a list.
I will not do the laundry
I will not do a dish

I will not check the mail, neither mails
nor take care of the males, neither male
today they can mind themselves

but if my daughter should call I would linger over a cup of tea with her
maybe share a tear or two, and a whine or two

today, I'll just get through it
the monday blues

what it's like, the missing of someone

like a paper cut
like milk left too long steaming for your coffee
like the pot hole in the driveway
like the faucet dripping in the bathroom in the middle of the night

like the smell of sausage and eggs on Sunday morning
like cutting grass in a field of Spring onions

that's what it's like

Catching a Blackbird's Wing

Choosing to live after having to let go of someone is a difficult thing.
It is the overcoming of inertia. It is the dragging forward of the right foot, then the left foot.

"No!"  I command myself.
"Don't sit down, and Do Not Lie Down!"

Pressing forward and away from this ache in my solar plexus, I received the gifts of comfort.
Comfort threefold:  a song, a photograph, and children's works of art.

the song:  Gulf Coast Highway by Nanci Griffith
the photograph: Texas Bluebonnets
the children's art work:  little renderings of polar bears under the auroras

Angels on the Head of a Pin

There was one common desire that took precedence over all others, and it became an answered prayer.  This desire, simply stated, was that our Dad would not be alone during his labor of dying.  I believe that the eight of us - his children and our spouses, and the nine more of us - his grandchildren, and, in their own tender way,  three of his very young great-grandchildren, too - we were all united in this longing and commitment to Hugh Little, and to each other, that he would not be alone in his last journey.  Daddy's own brothers were heartened, I believe, and their wives, by our steadfastness in physically being with him.  It was not a decision that any of us even wrestled with, it was as natural as breathing, it was all we could do.

My youngest son is the very new father of the fourth great grandchild. He lives far away from SC, in CA. He was the last of the grandchildren to travel to be with his Granddaddy. He observed how much like the beginning of life this end of life is, and not in the obvious way of likening it to childbirth and labor.  What he likened it to was how, as a brand new parent, you watch the baby.  You watch the breath, you can only be comforted by seeing and hearing the breath.  It was just like that, watching the death of a much loved one and being comforted by the sound of his breath.  It was like the soothing sound of the ocean's rhythms while wading in the shoreline surf.  We all listened as the time wound down, to the changing of the breath, and finally to the very last breath.  That very last breath, it sounds like the very last breath, and then he left the flesh.  That leaving, it is so vivid.

I do not know if it is the way I want to die, with so many people in and out and all around me. There was a beloved throng around my Dad from almost every early morning until nightfall, every single day, from the beginning of his days in the hospital through all his days in the beautiful Hospice of the Foothills.  His youngest brother, who is 75 years old, remarked, "Hugh has always been such an extrovert."  I think Daddy savored all that company more than his offspring did!  He had three pastors in the room at one time on one day. Other days there were Baptist deacon visits followed by Presbyterian elder visits, along with so many accompanying warm-hearted women!  And those hospice nurses - in and out and in and out of his room- they were watching us watching our Daddy.  They showered him with attention and tender mercies.  They showered us with love and understanding.

We all had our own part to play, our own times to be there and our times to be away. They were short times, those times away.  At the end it certainly seemed orchestrated from on high, the way he crossed over, the way he passed from our hands to the hands of the eternal.  How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

"HELLO ANN!"

It is Saturday morning and Rory and I are savoring his delicious soy lattes. He creates his lattes one at a time using very specialized, hand-powered and fine, craftsman made, coffee composing tools.

It was after this kind of early morning weekend coffee savoring time that Rory would say,
"Now, it's time to call your Dad."

I would take my tiny cell phone out to the quiet little patio beside my herb garden and pull my chair right into the warmest rays of sunshine before entering one of my Dad's phone numbers. I would have to try one and then another of a variety of phone numbers I had for him.  If I was lucky, I reached him.

"Hi Daddy!"
"HELLO ANN!  HOW IS EVERYBODY?  LET'S SEE, WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME I TALKED TO YOU?"
"Last week, Daddy.  What's going on in SC?  Did you have any of that snow from that system in NC?"

We would talk on and on and he always had very current comments on politics, on his new church, and about his special lady friend.  He asked about each of my children, wanting to be told specifics, not just a general, "They are all fine."  He told me a few stories he had already told me.  I told him a few stories I had already told him.  Finally, I would ask how he was feeling.  He would say, "I have been a little bit tired, I take a nap after breakfast and a nap after lunch."

That was all he would ever say about his health.

In the last six months I had been getting calls late at night, in CA, from him.  These calls were made in the wee hours of the night in SC.  He sounded disoriented when I answered and, I could tell, he was surprised to hear my voice on the other end of the line.  A couple of times he would relate to me that he was glad to have finally gotten home, that he had been trying to get home but had gotten lost.  These were calls I did not know what to make of and by the end of the call I had halfway dismissed them.  I let myself believe, way far away from him in CA, that he had woken from a dream and had reached for the phone just to hear a familiar voice on the other end.

Now I am having dreams.  I dream that I am driving a huge white Buick sedan that belongs to my Dad! I am navigating perilous roads in the darkest hours of the night at high speeds!  The roads end abruptly on the edge of  ravines!  I am driving in a unfamiliar inner city!  I am lost in a maze of narrow streets, trying on-ramp after on-ramp, each under construction with unmarked dead-ends!  My Dad always appears at the end of  the dream after I have wrecked or lost his car.

I am knitting a prayer shawl for myself that is similar to the one given to my Dad while he was in the hospice.

The wife of one of the elders in his church knit a prayer shawl with yarn the color of the Pacific waters of Hawaii.  Her husband related how she had prayed for the person who would wear the shawl with each stitch.  When I entered Daddy's room at the hospice in the early morning hours I would find this shawl lovingly tucked around his shoulders by his hospice nurse.  Later in the day I would wear it as he often became too hot with fever to wear it.  We buried him with this beautiful shawl wrapped around his shoulders.

I think when I finish this shawl that I will wear it in the garden where I sit in the sun sipping weekend lattes with Rory.  My Dad was not one to go around holding trespasses against a soul.

In the Middle of the Night

I had nightmares for years after my mother died.  I am older, much older now, and of a certain age. I am of that supposed age when a woman has the ability to take death as a matter of fact, in the middle of the night, in the river of my dreams.

In the aftermath, there are the folks in a rush to get over the hurdle of not knowing what to say to me, and they throw out this pat phrase: I know you are glad he is out of pain.  Yes, of course I am, I am, I am.  And that makes me mad, then sad, then madder than hell.  Anger, here it comes, in the middle of an encounter with anyone who doesn't know what to say, in the middle of the bridge of a regular day.

Anger, here it comes, in the middle of the night, waking up shaken up, sweating from a nightmare.  I am old enough to recognize this classic stage of grief and old enough to look that anger in the eye and stop it before I spit in someone's eye, when it's day. But anger waits behind the curtains and lashes out inside me in the middle of the night, in the river of my dreams.

Too Much of Nothing

My Dad had a girlfriend when he died.  My Dad was 85, he had been married twice, and twice widowed.

His first marriage, to the mother of all five of us, his children, lasted 26 years.  It ended in her death from the colon cancer that consumed most of the last five of her 47 years.  She was a good and fun loving young woman, with a laugh that filled our home. She was one of those baby boom Moms. As the oldest child, I remember that she was sometimes overwhelmed by the care and concerns made by that quick succession of four babies in five years. She was a fairly calm woman, some would say a very calm woman, with two perfect little girls and two rambunctious little boys! She gave us the gift of a little golden-haired baby sister ten years after the rest of us. That made all five of us.

My Dad's second marriage came on the heels of the death of our mother, a little over a year after.  Our stepmother was 39 when she married our 50 something Dad.  I think that because he married so soon after our mother's death, and we (his children, maybe because of our religion or because of the times we lived in) had not grieved, or been allowed our grief, and we never fully bonded with his second wife.  She was a good grandmother to all of the nine grandchildren.  She died too - too young - at age 64, from brain cancer.  She and my Dad had been married for 25 years at the time of her death.

To understand my Dad you must know this, he loved his work in research engineering, he loved the life of a family man and husband, but most of all, he loved church work. It was more, but it included, his escape from the family on a regular basis.  And who could argue against church work as opposed to golf rounds all day on Saturday or rounds of drinks in a bar.  During the Vietnam War era he wrote a few conscientious objector letters for young men in the church. It was church work that came into the living room in the evenings in the last few years of the 1960s and stayed until late at night.  It was church work mixed with politics and Peter, Paul, and Mary.  The only time I can ever remember when we, his children, were more front and center than church work was the year we lived in Brussels, Belgium. The American church that we attended there was so socioeconomically wealthy, extremely educated, and non-evangelical, that it didn't have any work for the laity to do.

Our mother was a Southern Baptist pastor's daughter from Tidewater Virginia. She was raised somewhat liberal and democratic, and "high" Baptist, and there was plenty of church work. She was born and raised on church work, mostly of the appropriate women's missionary union ilk and Sunday School teaching to young children. His second wife was a church worker, like he was, and had never been married. She was a professional banker in high standing with the community, she had an invalid mother, and she did church work to get herself out of the house at night and on the weekends. He courted this lady friend while they were doing church work on the same committees. They did so much church work during their twenty five years together that you could say church work defined their marriage.

After his second wife died at the beginning of 2006, our Dad was 78 years old.  He was long retired and all the children and grandchildren were grown, and busy, and lived in Atlanta, or California, or Hawaii.  Away, we were away. He was painfully lonely and alone in his little country community. It was the 'too much of nothing' that would make a man sleep all day, and "sleep on nails."

After his retirement, my Dad and his second wife built a log home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, in South Carolina. They joined a little country church filled with good country people and they got very involved in church work, like I said. At about this time my Dad began to be concerned with the state of his own precarious heart health and the fact that he had brought this wife far from the city life she loved to the country life she had embraced, for him.  He was worried that he would die suddenly and leave her all alone.  He was worried about her, because, we, his five children, had never truly bonded with her, our stepmother. Now, I am going somewhere with this so bear with me.

It was not a surprise, really, that within one year after our stepmother's death my Dad developed a crush on a woman just barely older than me. I am not one to judge another's spirituality - it is probably why I became my Dad's confidant - yet how this girlfriend and my Dad connected was a puzzle and a concern to me.  It certainly had nothing to do with church work.

This girlfriend did not have great physical beauty, but she had a charisma and an inner strength stitched and bound through a lifetime of female hardships and struggles.  According to the stories she told my Dad, she had endured brutal abuse as a child.  As an adult, she had been in one relationship after another, none worth the working out or the holding on to. She had survived one horrible Frida Kahlo type accident, survived because of her philosophy of never giving in and never giving up.  She had stitched and bound these struggles together in a story she told and sold.  She ascribed to a spiritual concoction that allowed her to accept the universe and her survival on her terms. Her many philosophies were nothing like the sure 'faith of our fathers' that had sustained my Dad all of his life.  My Dad bought her stories of hardship and, I think, began to let his faith become a little frayed as he built his life more and more around this new woman.  It was so unlike him, and she pulled at him to stay away in the country for her just as we were trying to get him to come back to the City to be closer to us, to be closer to his doctors.  I still do not know if this woman's heart toward my Dad was sincere.  In my heart of hearts, I feared it was not.  He was very true to their friendship and his intentions towards her were very pure.

We siblings had to make many hard choices for our Dad as he lay dying.  He had never been a man to let others make his choices. One choice decision we had to make for him pertained to who should visit him in the hospice and who should be there when he had visitors.  We stipulated, because the tumors in his brain were rapidly increasing and growing, and because his physical condition was rapidly deteriorating, that he could only have visitors if one of his children or his close family were present.  There were really no visitor hours, or even off-hours, when one of his children or a close family member was not present.  These were not the terms that his girlfriend could understand or accept.  At the end, Daddy needed to see her and be with her, and I called to ask her to please come.  They had their time together, with one of his children and a couple of her children present. It was just hours after this time together that he died.

I told one of the teachers in a school where I teach art that my Dad had just died and that was why I had been away all month.  She told me the story of how her Dad had died, and that he and her Mom had been married for 59 years.  She said that she and her siblings had not been enough for their Mom after her Dad's death and that her mother died a few months thereafter, of a broken heart.

heisman trophy

my husband said, you have been back a week, you have quit stuttering

Stuttering?

yes, stuttering, that thing you do when you are with your sibs

Oh! Stuttering!

These Gray Days 3/1/2012

My Dad died a week and a day ago, at 11:42 PM on 2/21.  I was with him, my sister Ruth was with me, with him.  All of my siblings, except my one brother who lives near my Dad anyway, moved to Seneca, SC and camped out at his house, for almost a month.  It was a month lost to us and seared into us.  It was a month when the five middle-aged Hugh Little siblings would be together as we had not been together since the late 1960s in the old house on Powder Springs Road in Marietta, GA where we all, mostly, came of age. It was the first time we had all shared so much home space since the years before our mother's death of cancer at the rather young age of 47.

February 21, 2012, RIP, Hugh Little

It had been a little over three weeks since we got the call that our Dad had suddenly (though not really suddenly, more like gradually, except the finality was sudden) lost use of his legs while eating out with friends (though not really friends, just the girlfriend) on Saturday evening, 1/28.  I got the news that he had been taken to the ER at Oconee Co. Medical Center the following morning, on Sunday 1/29.  It was his heart, he was admitted to the Critical Care Cardiac Unit. We just knew, and expected, that it was his heart. So on 1/30, at 4 AM, I left my home in Mountain View, CA to board a plane at SFO to travel to ATL. I thought I knew what we were facing.  What we were facing was that our Dad would have to accept that his independent lifestyle, his living alone, and driving his car, would have to end. My return flight was for 2/19.  This was surely way more time than I would need for the decisions that would need to be made.
 
In the ATL airport, I was sitting outside of the baggage area, I was waiting for my oldest son from Dallas, TX who was flying in to be with me. He was on a later flight. We were being picked up by my daughter from Marietta, GA. The three of us were driving up to SC to see my Dad, to meet my siblings there, to figure this out.  All five of us siblings, there, and two of my grown children.

In the ATL baggage area, while waiting for my son, while talking on the phone to my daughter, that's when the call from my daughter was interrupted by a call from my sister, Ruth, reporting on the news that she had gotten in a call from my brother, Paul. It was a call that would transform my life and shape each day through 2/25, the day of my Dad's funeral.  It was the news that a CT scan had revealed that our Daddy's brain was filled with cancer tumors and that, indeed, his whole body was filled with stage 4 cancer tumors.  That was on Monday, 1/30 at 7:30 in the evening, in the ATL airport, near baggage claim.

On Thursday, 2/1, Hugh Little, my Dad, was moved to a room in a really beautiful hospice, the Hospice of the Foothills.  It is located next door to his church.  Both his church and the hospice are built in that nouveau Craftsman style, and they are a beautiful 15 minute drive down a two lane country road with just one turn off, that twice crosses over Lake Keowee, from his log home on Lake Keowee that he mostly built, to the hospice. It is a hospice that he had donated quite a bit of money to be built, after his second wife (not our mother) died with in-home hospice care, in the home where we were camping out.  It was a room he would never leave in this life.  It was a room where my life changed by the hour as I, we, stayed with him as he quickly and slowly slipped away from us.

So now it is over, he has safely crossed the River Jordan.  And it is chilly and cold.

This short story of the dying of Hugh Little is a long one.  This is just the beginning, the first installment.  It is a story with intrigue, and ins and outs, and days without hours, and hours without end.  This is just the overview, the explanation.  It is in this way that I will work out these gray days.