2012 Good-Bye

I need to say goodbye to 2012.  It was a year I kept saying good bye, but the words never fully connected to my brain. I have been stuck in a circular grief that I have refused to acknowledge.

 It started with the impending demise of the company that Dean had left his job of 28 yrs.  He took a huge pay cut, but the opportunity of working close by, great benefits, and more time off was a dream.  It wasn’t long before he was laid off and the Company’s future was looking grim.  The company went bankrupt and more than the loss of income the loss of insurance was overwhelming. My medications without insurance were over $1500.00 a month. The only sensible decision was for me to take an early retirement. I would be able to purchase health insurance and have approximately 60.00 left for a pension.  I dutifully followed all the rules of retirement, sending my letter of resignation, not stepping foot on school grounds for thirty days, handing in my keys.

I loved my job. I loved my co-workers.  I loved the kids. I was devastated and in some fuzzy state of denial kept saying, it will be fine, I will be fine, I am fine. I wasn’t fine. I kept moving and when my son and daughter-in-law began talking about selling their small house on the lake. I became obsessed with buying it. It was a perfect for us to purchase, small and warm with an incredible view. We would have to put our home of 26 years on the unforgiving housing market. My husband had acquired a new albeit temporary job as maintenance in a factory in Grand Rapids.  It paid well.  He also worked seven days a week.  

I began sorting, clearing, removing twenty-five years of living.  Truckloads left, and sentimentalism was blocked off by the ultimate goal of selling. The world map and early nineties movie posters were scraped off walls replaced by subdued paint.  The shag carpet that I had pulled up so long ago then earnestly painted lay scratched and dirty,  sad reminders of chipped dolphins and earth symbols weeping for children long gone. The toys in dusty boxes, covered in cellulose insulation, rows and rows, piles and piles, of silent innocence, unwanted, discarded with childhood.

 Reality is no longer being someone’s daughter and the knowledge that you have for most purposes been retired from motherhood. Two pivotal identities pushed into the recycle truck.

An automaton feverishly working blocking out the present until my replacement child Maude, my dog from her birth ceased to breathe. Grief erupted as I stroked her fur, holding her paw, as violent sobs wracked my body.  Every mistake, every loss, every unspoken truth pelted me.  

I need to let go and say goodbye to my parents, my job, my house,  my motherhood, my dog.  What a wonderful life it was and so much more to discover.

Greetings to 2013 I am ready to begin again.

Moving my Brother

Slowing down speeding up where is the middle? Do I want the middle? Forever obsessed, possessed, by  repetitive neurons I can only embrace their bombardment. There must be a positive  searching in impossible places for lost items, frozen with anxiety but propelled  with purpose to conquer the virus ridden computer, soulfully searching for lost feral cats.


This legacy of life,stuck in rewind incites  macabre events such as the digging up  the grave of my two day old brother, born in 1966 and relocating him to the rural paternal family cemetery. My mother would hear the cry of my long dead sibling in the months before her death, grieving over a baby she never held and only saw in a lace edged picture, still in his white coffin.  I have not found theses photographs yet, hidden somewhere under newspapers, under my father's disintegrating clothes, under acrid black rice from generations of rodents. 

There was state paperwork.  A mortician, had to be present. a gravedigger and both cemeteries notified. It was November the Danish cemetery where my brother was to be relocated was apparently closed for the winter.  They were not happy with our plans and charged us accordingly.
It was cold and the Funeral Director had warned us that most likely there would be very little left to exhume. Surprise, it was a five hundred. pound engraved vault with his name spelled Michel. A few relatives watched at the Catholic Cemetery across the street from a middle school that had just let out. The lone gravedigger, breathless had  used a series of improvised pulleys and physics  to elevate my brother's cement sanctuary.  It was trying to rain, maybe the earth thought someone should cry for this long-dead boy.

The Danish Lutheran Cemetery was on a dirt road in a pastoral setting. A simple white church stood sentinel over the graves of  of Hansens, Petersens, Christensens I could understood my mother's wish for her baby to forever rest here. I saw my brothers gathered around the new grave, loudly discussing the exhumation. One brother was visibly intoxicated waving his arms bellowing in his pseudo-Shakespearean voice.

 I wanted to erase this scene and create a peaceful exchange for this fortunate boy who entered heaven without sin. I had brought my mother's favorite Ford handkerchief  with a small portion of her ashes placed inside like a hobos treasure,  pictures of her family tied amidst the grey remains. A few of my father's cinders were tied in a plastic baggie  to complete the final destination.

 The funeral Director watched this all and said technically it is only the baby buried here.  The cemetery board was concerned about how many remains laid in one plot.  My brothers were asked to help with the descent of the casket. My oldest brother fell down and we all gasped and sighed in relief  as he stood up.

My inebriated brother began to fall  and in the evil recesses of my brain I wanted him in the grave, no longer disrupted by his bi-polar, alcoholic, pedophile ass. It was not to be as the good, kind brother who had rescued me years before intervened
.
 No one said a prayer, no one cried, but I knew it was complete.  Michael was no longer alone. My parents were with their innocent child, the lucky child.    No longer  to weep as he forever rests,  safely wrapped in my mother's, in his mother's love.