Aunt BJ and Sonja

It's www.fromlefttowrite.com Book Club Day. Our inspiration for posts this month is Anthony Marra's new novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon. The character of Sonja, a strong woman who returns to her native Chechnya to serve a physician in a shell of a hospital reminded me of my Aunt BJ Marshall who served as a missionary and nurse on the Gaza Strip for ten years.

I was eight days old and Mom still had not named me. Mother’s younger sister Bertha Jane, sixteen at the time, came into the hospital with a plan. So shy she couldn’t lift her head to talk to her own sister, she stared at her feet and asked, “Could I please name her?”

            Thus, I became Brenda Jane. The Jane portion carried a long history from aunt to niece in our family and came with a spectacular hand-cut diamond cluster ring which originated with my Great-aunt Jane, who worked for her sister, who was a professional madam. The Brenda portion came from Aunt BJ’s pen pal in England. Always grateful I escaped the Bertha part of her name; I learned years later she hated “Bertha” herself. So after the original Bertha’s death (my grandma/her mother), she changed Bertha Jane to BJ.

This act of naming created a tether reaching across continents in our later lives. Aunt BJ lived elsewhere much of my childhood—away at college, graduate school, seminary and then twenty years as a Baptist missionary—but she provided the only model on Mother’s side of the family for how to pursue a college education. I claimed this inspiration for better or worse. When she came home for visits, I knew she represented a world beyond what I experienced with my mom and stepdad and I wanted to know such a world. While on furlough from Japan, Aunt BJ stopped to visit us in California. Two memories left etchings in my brain from that visit. She had a suitcase full of Japanese silk for souvenirs and to exhibit at the many speeches she would give. As Aunt BJ searched through the suitcase for something, she screamed as though frightened. A big black crusty cockroach dared to cross the boundary between our pitiful existence and Aunt BJ’s world-beyond-our-family, that Maginot Line between my family of origin and the future I saw for myself. On the same visit she declared, “I don’t know why I go halfway around the world to teach the English language when my own family doesn’t speak it.” These memories were etched with a quill of shame.

During my senior year of high school, I applied only to three Baptist colleges, was admitted to all and chose Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky because of its proximity to Evansville, Indiana and the heritage of Aunt BJ attending there.

Southern Baptists had called me to mission work, and I didn’t think I had permission to consider other careers. I never acknowledged the possibility of a link between my call to mission work and my adoration of Aunt BJ—but she was the only college educated member of my family and she was in mission work. I was twenty-one years old before I had psychic permission to be anything except a Southern Baptist missionary. The Baptist church revered missionaries in those days. When any missionary came to speak in a local congregation, the church introduced her as a “real live missionary.” I don’t know whether the assumption was dead ones could talk or missionaries didn’t return home alive.

Aunt BJ served ten years in Japan (1957-1967) and ten years on the Gaza Strip in Israel (1967-1977). Her service in Israel coincided with the Six Day War and upon her return she looked like a prisoner of war—sallow complexion, glazed over eyes and a constant hyper-vigilance. This heroine and role model satisfied my childhood yearning to believe in life beyond the disarray of my family. In spite of my change of plans about becoming a Baptist missionary, Aunt BJ’s influence on my life laid a foundation with bricks called education, faith and service. One role model in the family, even if extended family, spoke volumes when I searched for how someone from our blood line could flourish. While Aunt BJ’s childhood varied from mine, she modeled for me that a member of our family could get a college education and live a purposeful life. It could be done. It had been done. Aunt BJ was solid proof.

Eight Days: From Times Square Naked Cowboy to Mark’s Death

This post is inspired by Rosamund Lupton's novel, Afterwards. As a member of www.fromlefttowrite.com, I received a free copy. Lupton weaves a skillful story of a parent's love and criminal mystery in a medical setting. There was no question about the memory this novel provoked for me. 

After the conference dinner, John and I walked back to the Edison Hotel via Times Square. Neither of us had been in New York for a while and it was great fun to just walk among the crowd on a Saturday night. The Naked Cowboy in his tiny tighty-whiteys strummed away and we stopped to buy a t-shirt for Mark. I have no idea what that t-shirt said or whatever became of it.

            When we walked into our hotel room the phone was ringing. Strange, I thought. Everyone calls us on cell phones these days. My niece’s voice sounded anxious from the start. “Bren, Rebecca has been trying to get hold of you all evening. Call her immediately. Mark has had some sort of accident.”

            I didn’t panic right away. I’m a glass-half-full person who thinks every problem has a solution. “Don’t worry. I’ll call Rebecca right now.”

            Rebecca’s voice sounded twice as anxious. She was driving with a friend from Huntsville where she and Mark were in school at Sam Houston State University to a hospital in Houston. A helicopter ambulance overhead was taking Mark.

“They wouldn’t let me ride in the helicopter with him because I’m not related to him! We don’t know anything except he fell off the back of an ATV and hit his head. I was right behind him on another ATV and I thought he was joking when he got up. You know how he can be. Then he got very angry, almost violent and we knew something was wrong. The emergency vehicles came and they decided he needed to be flown to Houston.”

After exhausting all questions and answers I could come up with, Rebecca said through her tears, “I’m so sorry, Bren. I hope he’s going to be okay.”

“Don’t worry, Beck. I’ll get on the phone with the hospital now and stay in touch until they know something.”

Mark and I in 1996.

The next few hours stretched forth as the eternal nightmare no parent ever wants to experience. I finally reached the neurologist who had already done surgery on Mark. He said Mark’s brain was swelling and they did surgery immediately to relieve pressure. He would give me no further prediction of how Mark was or would be and said he would be in touch as they knew more.

Scared but still telling myself, Mark would be fine, I decided to call an old friend who was a neurosurgeon in Lexington. When I got him on the phone and described the situation, he said, “Get a flight and get to Texas as fast as you can. Yes, I would have agreed to the surgery to relieve pressure.”

I made the call thinking he would give me reassurance, now my panic soared. John began working on his cell phone to get me a flight and a taxi to the airport while I returned calls to Rebecca and family to update them. I shook with fear and chills as I dialed each number. John wrapped me in blankets with one hand as he held his phone with the other.

The taxi drive in the middle of the night through strange parts of New York City would have scared me on other nights. Now I had far greater fears. The driver deposited me safely at the airport. I took a sleeping pill on the plane to force myself to get some rest on the flight. The realization had set in that I would need all the strength I could muster.  

I arrived at the Houston airport about the same time as Rebecca’s mother coming in from Lexington. A friend of Mark’s from Sam Houston State picked us both up and delivered us to Memorial Hermann Hospital. I didn’t have a choice of hospitals and would not have known how to choose, but I learned later that Memorial Hermann is one of the nation’s best and the place where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords will rehabilitate in the coming years. No parent wants or deserves to spend eight days by their child’s side and ultimately lose him but the staff at this hospital made the experience as bearable as they were able.

We scrubbed up to enter the ICU. Only two or three of us could go in at a time. Being very familiar with ICU, I walked in knowing what to expect. And yet. This time my dear Mark was lying there with tubes coming out of every orifice of his body, his head wrapped in bandages and multiple machines attached to him. I swallowed back the hot spit and willed myself not to vomit. I resisted the urge to climb into the bed with him and use every mode of comfort I knew so well from twenty-five years of parenting him.

Others arrived hour by hour. Sims flew in from Oregon, Leah from Philly, college friends drove over from Hunstville, his best friend Patrick Wallace from Kentucky, an elementary school friend and my step-grandson who both lived near Houston. My sisters Ashley and Margaret, Rebecca’s sister Hunter Quinn. And, of course, my dear husband.

John had flown back to Lexington, performed necessary duties with work and house and got to Houston as soon as he could. We had just married in January, this was April. From the moment the phone call came in New York until this day, John has been my tower of strength. Who thinks they’re signing up for death and grief and catastrophic change in their wife three months after they say, “I do?”

So a “crowd of witnesses” had gathered in Houston. By Monday, the neurosurgeon gathered everyone present around a big conference table outside of ICU. The surreal atmosphere hung heavy around us. The people around that table loved Mark unquestioningly. But as the doctor asked and then listened to each person weigh in about Mark’s life and death, I fought the urge to scream, “No! No! Nobody gets to decide about Mark’s quality of life and pulling some plug except ME! I gave him birth! He is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh! Stop it!”

Some shred of humanity or pastoral identity choked those words back. I knew the doctor was allowing everyone to have their say for multiple reasons—I suppose most compassionately to aid in the grief that was ahead of each one of us. Still, I wanted to cling to my baby boy with every scrap of maternal instinct in my being—primal ferocity.

The beeps and blips of the machines attached to Mark became familiar to us. His heart pumped on—young, healthy. His brain activity declined. By Wednesday, my intuition knew the boy I gave birth to was gone. Mark was so identified with his intellect. He once told me the curse of being smart was that “no matter what I become, I cannot exceed anyone’s expectations. If I’m president, my elementary school teachers will say, ‘I’m not surprised. I knew Mark would be something great.’” All that potential gone—forever.

Still, there was my son’s body—a big, beautiful, healthy body. We could not layer waste upon waste by burying his healthy organs with him. I wanted every usable piece of his body redeemed, reused, giving life in someone else’s body. Thus began days with hospital ethicists, doctors, chaplains and social workers. In order to donate Mark’s organs, he had to be brought out of the induced coma to verify brain death. I was scared. What would that mean? Would he feel anything? Would he know anything? My gut stayed tense for days as we each took turns standing by his side, talking with him, touching him, reminding him of stories and place and people we had shared. I couldn’t help but wonder if bringing him out of the induced coma would reveal changes. Could he possibly surprise the doctors? Was there an ounce of hope? So many questions, such medical answers but this was not their next patient, this was my Mark!

Thursday, Friday and Saturday, we continued to take our turns standing by Mark’s bed saying our good-byes—long, surreal, mind-numbing, gut-wrenching good-byes. We stared at the brain monitor—numbers that determined when they could declare the end of my baby’s life. Numbers! Leah and I were the only two in the unit at one point and we both used that moment to sing to Mark the songs we each sang to him as an infant and toddler. Each person’s grief and loss seemed to bury me under another layer. How can anybody, even me, go on with the weight of this grief?

John’s resourcefulness never takes a vacation. He got the idea and cautiously presented it to me that we might want to save some of Mark’s sperm.

“You never know what the future will present, Bren. Will Sims need to use that sperm? Will Rebecca one day want to have Mark’s baby? You never know.”

            The cruel twist is that John knew the pain of multiple miscarriages from his previous marriage and I was too numb to have ever thought of this step. The hospital officially said, “No, we do not perform that service.” John was tenacious. He found a urology intern who was willing to harvest the sperm; John found a sperm bank listed in a free local paper and the potential for future grandbabies toddled off to the bank. In 2006, after the birth of Sims’ son, Tristan, and Rebecca’s marriage to another, we made the decision to discard the sperm. I have never regretted that we saved that piece of Mark for four years.

            Even the cremation plans were complicated. The medical examiner asked John, “Do you mind if your loved one is cremated by an African-American crematory?”

            “Of course not,” John responded.

            “Well, then, it will be a couple of thousand dollars cheaper.”

            Would customer service in a white-owned funeral home have asked if we minded if our son was cremated by white people? Another hidden injustice in our society.

Sunday morning arrived and John and I were in a car with some folks who were taking us to church. Who were those people? What church were we going to? How did this come about? I suppose I knew then, but my memory fails me as I try to reconstruct. The eight days had taken a toll and I began to move robotically through the days. As we drove through the streets of Houston, my cell phone rang. The hospital. “Mark’s brain activity has declined, please come now.”

Saying that last good-bye with Mark’s heart still beating haunts me. The number by which experts make such calls about life and death mean nothing to a mother walking away from her son’s beating heart. As we walked out of ICU for the last time, Sims and I turned to each other and grabbed hold. The agony on Sims’ face etched itself into my brain. Mark, the younger brother, had become the older brother in recent years. Now Sims would live the rest of his life without those phone calls, without the UK basketball trash talk to each other, without sharing wives, children and Christmases to come. The grieving began a new stage.

    We returned to Lexington and started plans for Mark’s service. I’m doing the tasks. I’m walking, talking and sometimes sleeping, but feel strangely numb and removed.

Then my son arrived in a box one day. Just like Amazon or Overstock.com, a package came in the mail. I signed for it; accepted it into my hands and stood there unknowing. What is the next step when I’m standing there holding my son in a box?

Response to "January First" by Michael Schofield

Michael Schofield’s daughter January is at the mercy of her imaginary friends, except they aren’t the imaginary friends that most young children have; they are hallucinations. And January is caught in the conflict between our world and their world, a place she calls Calalini.  Some of these hallucinations, like “24 Hours,” are friendly and some, like “400 the Cat” and “Wednesday the Rat,” bite and scratch her until she does what they want.  They often tell her to scream at strangers, jump out of buildings, and attack her baby brother.

At six years old, January Schofield, “Janni,” to her family, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, one of the worst mental illnesses known to man.  What’s more, schizophrenia is 20 to 30 times more severe in children than in adults and in January’s case, doctors say, she is hallucinating 95 percent of the time that she is awake. Potent psychiatric drugs that would level most adults barely faze her.

I received a copy of January First through my membership in www.fromlefttowrite.com. This is a response to the book not a review.

As Good As It Gets, a 1997 movie with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, tells the story of two imperfect people who find the humanity in each other. Jack plays a jerk with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He eats lunch every day at a restaurant where he demands that Helen be his waitress as he maintains the excessive rituals that assuage his OCD. His relentless need for her presence in his life leads him to help her critically ill son, and they form a quirky but caring relationship in the process. Toward the end of the film, he tries to visit her apartment but finds the disorder there more than his illness can tolerate, so he suggests a walk at 5:00 a.m. Though walking at that hour seems bizarre to Hunt’s character, she agrees. As they stroll along, Jack avoids the cracks in the sidewalk and attempts to convince Hunt that if they walk for just fifteen more minutes the local bakery around the corner will open and they won’t be weird people at all—“We’ll just be two people who like warm rolls.”

That line went straight to the heart of me and ignited an understanding about myself and my family I had not confronted. It forced me to acknowledge that what separates mentally disordered folks who behave in bizarre ways from the so-called normal folks can be a narrow as fifteen minutes and a stop at the bakery for warm rolls. I have spent far too much of my life trying to find, define and perfect normal when our life’s task is simply to find yourself. I’ve turned the corner and I just happen to like warm rolls now.   

RIP Clarence W. Sims AKA The Raggedy Ass Son-of-a-Bitch

Photo by John Lynner Peterson

I have written about my Dad in this space before—like the section on Dad from my memoir here:

And this post about my last visit with him.

Last visit with Dad

 The last few years have been a healing experience for me with Dad. After admitting I love him, I accepted that I would never get what I needed from him as a father. This acceptance permitted me to enjoy him as a human being. He was a one-of-a-kind character.

Dad declined rapidly in the last few months. My half-brothers and I began to talk about his death, burial and funeral service. I knew officiating at the service would be something I could contribute that others couldn’t. I knew the service shouldn’t be in a church and shouldn’t be religious. A one-size-fits-all service by a clergy person who didn’t know him, sounded disgusting. I had to do it. Could I?

I got the call that Dad was gone at 8:30 Monday morning. I started thinking. I determined I would not make comments about Dad that were untrue. I could find lots of positive qualities and decided I would make jokes about his shortcomings. And, once again, my friend Don Lichtenfelt came through with poignant quotes, poems and connective material.

Oh, Facebook also provided some fodder. Dad’s favorite tavern, Leroy’s posted on their page a tribute to him that stated he sat on the corner barstool, ordered a cheeseburger with onion and a 7 and 7. They closed with “RIP Shoestring.” I knew his eulogy had to be delivered from a barstool.

We left for Evansville, IN on Wednesday morning. The visitation started at 4 pm with a service at 6:30. People started arriving. As I stood at the far end of the room, a woman through the door at the other end.

“Who is that?” I asked my half-brother Greg, “She looks a lot like me.”

“It’s Carol Sue.”

One of the Sibs

Oh my, Carol Sue is my father’s first child from his first marriage, eight other marriages followed. I scarcely knew her as a child but remembered she danced as a go-go girl at a bar in downtown Evansville in the Sixties. She’s 71 now.

And that was the beginning of the funeral experience. More to come.

This post was inspired by the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain. The book was given to me by virtue of my membership in www.fromlefttowrite.com. This is not a review or critique.

Being an extrovert or introvert should not come with a value load---negative or positive. According to Susan Cain, the positive value in our culture is decidedly skewed toward extroverts. She and her book are intended to start a Quiet Revolution.

I say, “Have at it, Susan. Please take my portion of the Value of being an extrovert in this world.” Having said that I am forced to admit, extroversion does have advantages and I’m not ungrateful for those. I maintain it also has the disadvantage of having to due the extroverting for all your introverted friends.

I write this post as a tribute to Judy Bartella, Rachel Childress, Rhonda Johnston, Mary Henson, Wendy Wilson (although I think she is a closet extrovert!) and many of my family members. At one point in my life, I felt surrounded by introverts. I screamed at Rachel one holiday season, “I’m tired of doing the extroverting for all you introverts.”

The truth of the matter is that on most days I wasn’t tired of it. I loved it! But when an extrovert is extroverted-out, look out world. In my experience, she becomes a grouchy, bitchy witch until she gets re-fueled.

Cain’s thesis in much of the book is the benefits that introverts bring to the table which are often overlooked or outshined by the extrovert sparkling away at the head of the table. I can agree with Cain on this, I just wish she hadn’t thrown the extroverts under the bus and called us ax murderers in the process. My introverted friends bring great value to my life. Steadfastness, thoughtfulness, calm spirit, peace, good ideas and great loyalty to our friendship. 

Thank you, dear introverts. I bequeath to you my share of all that extroverted work. Hee hee hee hee hee.

The Good, The Bad and the Oh, So Frustrating in Each of Us

There is so much good in the worst of us

And so much bad in the best of us

That it hardly behooves any of us

To talk about the rest of us.

Edward Wallis Hoch

The holidays always provide an opportunity for us to remember all people can be good and bad, kind and irritable, helpful and obstructive, accommodating and frustrating. Yes, even the sweetest among us have a dark side and, woe to you who triggers the dark side of a perpetually sweet one. I hear they are scary.

Treat yourself to seeing the movie, The Descendants, with George Clooney, directed by Alexander Payne. But first, don’t get your hopes up about lusting after George. I know you will think this impossible, but they do attempt to make him look dorky. In those pants and with the running scene, they nearly succeed. Even so, it’s a stretch to believe any wife would cheat on George! Nevertheless, the movie is worth your time to be reminded of the truth of the Edward Wallis Hoch’s poem above.

Every person in the film reveals both sides of his/her character. Yes, George too. It forces the viewer to grapple with moral and ethical dilemmas that we would like to deem easy, clear cut choices. Does being an absentee father make it okay for your daughters to talk to you with disrespect? Does being a friend mean you don’t tell the spouse about infidelity? Without spoiling the film, let’s just say—there are no easy answers when you’re willing to admit we are all flawed human beings.

The reminder I walked out of the theatre with is this: I want to be loved in spite of all my shortcomings so I must constantly remember to put aside the bad, irritable, obstructive and frustrating behaviors of others. Easier to remember than to pull off during the holidays! Renew your strength and just do it!