Mood: Frank Sinatra, First ‘comeback’, or Middle Years
I Was Transformed
The youngest of three boys growing up, I was frequently denied entry into the older boys ‘clubs’, because, of course, I was ‘too young’. My uncle, Fred, who was living with us at the time, would take me to go get candy or ice cream or see a movie or some such many of those times, quickly becoming a second dad to me.
When I was 17, Uncle Fred became ill with pancreatic cancer and passed a few days short of my birthday. We were living in Alaska at the time and he was in the Chicago area, and I did not get to see him before he passed. It all hit me hard and I would swear I did not smile for a year after, minimized my time with friends and did terribly in school.
My brother Doug had Hodgkin’s Disease a few years earlier and at that time there was not advanced enough medical care in Alaska and he and my Mother spent several months in California during his treatment. Of course it scared the shit out of me to see him looking so sickly and in a wheelchair when my Dad and I went to see them. He beat the disease at that time and recovered well, so that was my experience with cancer. I had expected Uncle Fred to survive and when he did not, those expectations let me down and led me down into depression.
There are things of That Bradmax that I still see or feel in me, but I came out of the other side of that conflagration of depression a different person. I allowed his passing to overwhelm me, having no previous experience with loss of that kind, of someone so close.
In the previous part of this blog, I mentioned that everything that has ever happened to us, every experience, both good and bad, have made us who were are this very moment. I do not remember a lot of that year, as I did not allow much of anything to happen, if that makes sense. I worked in a bookstore and bought mostly fantasy books, and haven’t stopped reading since, and so much more than just fantasy. That was the ‘little’ Positivity that came out of that year. The massive and long-lasting Positivity I was not to understand until Doug passed.
I certainly matured more during the intervening decades, greeted more family members as my oldest brother married and had a daughter, my first niece. I had several unfortunate turns at ‘love’; they were definitely love on my part, but my heart was treated horribly by three women, each several years apart, each teaching me to be less and less open in any new relationship due to trust issues. But I digress.
It occurs to me as I sit and write this that during that year of depression I never turned to drugs or alcohol to lessen that pain or darkness, and for the life of me I cannot say why. At least as far as drugs are concerned, I didn’t have contact with anyone other than those I worked with, so really Han no way to acquire any. Just before my 18th birthday the legal drinking age in Alaska went to 21, I now recall, so the same reason exists for that, as well. But, again, I digress.
I had such happiness with new experiences after I snapped out of that year long depression. I could go into waxing lyrical about how emerging from Darkness into Light that first genuine smile after so long was, but just suffice to say that everything seemed new and wonderful; at this time so removed from that time, it seems to me that, like Forrest Gump one day deciding to run, one day I snapped out of the dark and into better days. It was likely a gradual thing. However, the point is, of course, that I could see with different, better eyes at Life. Even with 9-11-01 and living next to an Army and Air Force base in Alaska, my outlook was to keep those around me smiling. I did try to join the Marines but was one year too old at the time and they would not accept me.
I allowed my creative side more leeway, compiled and wrote a handbook for a group in a local Renaissance Faire (which I directed for the next 18 years), enjoyed running a long-standing pen and paper role-playing game, began writing more than I realized until recently and, as the saying goes, living deep sucking all the marrow out of life.
For a good long while, I looked back on those dark, depressed times and spurred on from them, knowing that Uncle Fred would not want those times for me, but after a time I just kept on collecting the best of memories. Of course, they were not perfect times. There were down times, no money times, sad times and such. I became a Cat Dad, even though I was and am more of a Dog Dad, it because the places I rented did not allow dogs, I became a Cat Dad and have been so ever since, and though I have been very lucky with long-lived felines, a few 17-19 years old, the heart-break associated with their passing happened.
But my God, what happiness those wonderful companions bring!
Things Happen For A Reason, Revisited
Throughout my adult life, I have been able to see connectivity in many of the events that have led directly into others. I have mentioned this before. I know from whence my faith ascribes these events. I suppose they may even be lessons learned and looked for what such wisdom brings. I was not to understand what Uncle Fred’s passing had taught me until many years later, of course. There had been many things in the intervening years, too, that were directly related to how I saw things, but that major one was the loss of Doug.
Family was there and I did not turn inward and away from them.
I did get to see him in the hospital and tell him I love him, not knowing then that it was for the final time. But that was very important. (Funny, isn’t it, how we know the love is there and doesn’t need to be said, but is better that it is said?)
I did get to say a ‘final’ goodbye at his service, with my parents, my other brother, Doug’s wife and her sisters and parents, who I also consider my own.
It is a soul-restoring thing, after feeling as if a part of it has been taken away, to grieve with those closest to the departed. What is truly bizarre, and I believe I will go into this in what looks like must be a Part III at this point, is how what is usually the utter cesspool that is Facebook actually helped to serve as a balm to the family’s pain with people sharing their memories of Doug.
We never know fully how much we impact other’s lives I now know. As well as we know out parents and friends and relatives, we may never understand just how positively they have affected others. How amazing and what a Blessing to have learned just how much Doug influenced other people! If you’d known him, you’d have already known how pretty damned amazing he was, but to know just how deeply a friend and mentor he was, many times likely not knowing himself, was truly a gift that would other never have been opened.
The final thing that I may have learned through this loss that is still so new, even four years on, is that it is truly Love that has taken root while one was alive that never dies, never lessens but actually grows, make the memories clear and strong, so much so that they give pain as much as love, but the pain is because of love of the one gone from us physically. I mean, while alive much of what gives us pleasure is physical, and love is expressed through physicality. Once the physical is gone forever, then the love that has taken root blossoms and grows in the fertile soil of the mind, of the memories.
Sometimes those memories, strengthened by love, even, for a moment, become almost physical again.
