Today it finally hit me that my brothers, my sister, and I are orphans. Eric still has his mother, but the rest of us are parentless. We’re all fifty or thereabouts, so it’s not like we’re now helpless and terrified. I find it incomprehensible more than anything else. Though Mom and Dad died for nine…
Grady Harp review of Ghosts and Ballyhoo
October 17, 2013
Grady Harp has reviewed Ghosts and Ballyhoo on Amazon. Five stars! Thank you, Grady. I was going to write a post about how Mom’s death has left me in a state of hyper-irritation. Most of what I see and hear strikes me as unbearably trivial. The radio spews out the same set-piece political bitch-fests that…
Mom’s stamps
October 15, 2013
Mom went into the hospital in April. She stopped eating two weeks before her surgery. Dad died on February 23, 2013. Like Mom he stopped eating the second he heard the doctors tell him he had to eat. Six months ago I resigned myself to losing Mom. She duplicated Dad’s death, except that she took…
It grew back
October 9, 2013
Two years before he died, Dad was told that he had a mass in his abdomen that needed to be checked. We didn’t know this until after he’d died and we saw his medical records. Instead of having his mass checked, Dad went on a plant-slaughtering spree in his yard, chopping absolutely everything back to…
Is it harder when there is no love?
September 24, 2013
In his piece “Saying Goodbye,” Walter Russel Mead describes the death of his beloved mother, who died September 16, 2013. He writes the following: My siblings and I are immigrants in a new and forbidding land. We have been swept from the balmy seas and friendly isles that nurtured us into a windswept, harder place….
Detox
September 22, 2013
I did it. Through sheer willpower, I’ve broken the last of my really bad habits. This was one of the most corrosive. It’s been several days now, and I’m still clean. The detox worked. After changing so much about myself that I didn’t like, I couldn’t stop going on a particular Website and fighting with…
Why the Beard?
September 19, 2013
I’ve been asked again why I don’t shave off my beard so I can look younger. Well, looking younger isn’t important to me. I’m fifty-one. It’s okay for me to look fifty-one. Currently, shaving isn’t a priority. I always hated shaving. You women should try scraping your face every day with sharp metal. I was…
How could she do that?
September 9, 2013
It isn’t clear if Mom will be able to come home. Although she’s beaten lung and ovarian cancer—there are no tumor markers in her blood—she’s refusing to eat or exercise. This is making her weaker and weaker, of course. I understand why she’s doing this. She’s very angry at the loss of control. All she…
Trees were unclean
September 2, 2013
My father hated trees. In his world, trees were unclean. He hated the leaves they dropped, and he hated the shade they provided. To him, shade connoted sloth and secrets. Shade trees in your yard meant you were lazy and had something to hide. A moral, upright man had no trees. The lawn of a…