OBITUARY

 

Wilbur Kenneth (or Wilbert Cannut) Huck

1930 -2021

Wilbur Huck was a peculiar man.  (He called himself “eccentric.”)  He was a kind and sweet man who presented himself as cantankerous and kvetching.  A gentle man who could yell and bristle when he felt threatened.  A deeply loving man who could not reach out to make friends.  A literary scholar who wrote little.  A man of great learning who had trouble understanding himself and those he loved.  A man whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate. A Gemini.

                  Will’s parents were Volga Germans who immigrated to America before the First World War.  Each of them went through hardship while getting to the United States, his mother being turned away twice for health reasons, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic with sick eyes.  Both his parents lost their first spouses to the Spanish Flu and brought children into their marriage.  So Will was born at home near Bayard, Nebraska in a house with a large family among whom English, German, and Russian were spoken.

                  As a baby, he seemed bewitched or like a changeling to older relatives. A “wise woman” was brought in to perform a spell to fix his strangeness.  In later years, thinking of this story, his wife wondered if this early bit of “healing” was a response to a child with high functioning Asperger’s. 

                  Will started reading very young, getting his library card and taking out books from the adult section when he was in grade school.  A favorite story of his was the time a woman complained that “this little boy” should not be allowed to check out  Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. The librarian and his mother said that he was already able to read novels and why shouldn’t he?.  His early scholarly attitudes also made him a “teaching assistant” in the two-room school he attended, sometimes being put in charge of instructing younger children.

                  He went to high school in Minatare, Nebraska and then on to Yankton College in, South Dakota, preparing to become a Congregational minister.  A year in the field as a replacement preacher (the only year he ever drove a car) taught him that he didn’t have the social or political skills for the ministry.  (And perhaps having a parishioner drop dead of a heart attack in the center aisle the first time he ever served encouraged that decision.)

                  He returned to school and earned a couple of degrees from the University of Chicago, Masters in Literature and Bachelor of Divinity.  His first job hunt led him to Idaho State College in Pocatello.  Although he looked for work elsewhere, taking a leave of absence to teach at Pacific Lutheran in Washington, he eventually accepted his lot, though with some grousing.  When ISC became a university after he had received tenure, he faced pressure to get a doctorate, pressure he resisted loudly with the help of his faculty union. He was a highly visible character on campus, winning a “best teacher” award while also being hated by some for handing out “the grades they deserve” and resisting grade inflation until his retirement.  

                  He taught a variety of courses including basic composition and upper division literature.  Among the lit courses he taught were British, American, Women’s, 20^th Century, and the Bible as.  He also invented the first film studies courses at the college.  As a professor, he always found new books to share, new movies to show.  He despised and rarely used anthologies and textbooks, preferring “real books”.  Ironically, his one major publication, The Modern Short Story, was an anthology, edited and with commentary and questions by himself and William Shanahan.  As an expert in film, he was called as a witness in the 1974 Idaho Falls censorship trial of Last Tango in Paris.

                  Beyond the classroom, he ran the writing center for a few years.  He also spear-headed a team that created a long-running film program called Cinema Six, offering one of the only ways to see foreign films in Pocatello.  And as a long-time member of the Speakers and Artists Committee he helped bring great culture to the intermountain campus. 

                  On that committee he worked with Huldah Bell (ne: Hanson) and they became great friends.  In August 1971 she introduced him to her niece, Kakie Hanson, who had just graduated from a California high school and come to Poky for college.  After Huldah’s birthday party that October, this rather feral young woman followed Will home and started something.  Two years later they eloped without telling Kakie’s parents.  She was 19 and he was 43 at the time they wed in the Bannock County Courthouse.  Their union was a scandal which both of them ignored.  It paid her tuition through her Masters program.  Although living with another person, especially such an eccentric one, was rough and tumble for both of them, they eventually grew into their relationship, in spite of her being a Boomer and him being a member of the Silent Generation.  Will supported Kake through her schooling as well as her mental health struggles.  Kake wound up caring for Will through his final years of vascular dementia. 

                  Not that Will would have noticed these facts as a “balancing.”  He didn’t approve of what he called “a debit-credit morality.”  The concept of “things balancing out” within relationships, whether with other humans or God, was not part of his weltanschauung.  He gave what he could to people and his god and accepted what was given, be it a feast of love or a famine of friends.  There was no “this for that” where connection was concerned.

                  But where money was concerned, he kept his eyes on the scales. The man never met a penny he couldn’t squeeze till Lincoln popped a tear.  Until his death, he was living with furniture he inherited from his mother.  He believed in guerilla consumerism.  Until his dementia, he did all the household shopping with clipped coupons.  When Kake took on the financial tasks Will had performed most their lives together, she realized how much he had cared for her by shouldering that burden through the years.

                  Will picked up their shared burden when he took early retirement from Idaho State University in 1990 after 33 years of teaching.  In late 1989 he visited Kake in Central Oregon, where she was teaching at the community college and, after two days of shopping, bought the house that he would die in thirty two years later.  He moved to Bend in September, 1990 with his entire personal library which eventually grew to about 10,000 volumes.  Over a retirement that lasted (almost) as long as his teaching career, he read, watched movies on television, and enjoyed traveling to see art, theatre, and film.  During the school year, he supported his wife by taking care of the shopping, cooking, clothes washing, taxes, bills, and outdoor flowers. 

                  From 1976 until 2016, Will also cared for the household cats, first the beloved golden Max, then ferocious five-pound Rafferty, followed by the most-revered June Jhumpa (rescued from the Deschutes County Humane Society)  and boring old black Sasha.  In 2009, after years of argument, Will allowed Kake to purchase a poodle puppy with whom he promptly fell in love.  Birdy and Will have been caring for each other ever since.

                  Will is survived by his wife of 48 years, Karen “Kake” Huck. He is preceded in death by his parents, John and Effie Huck, and all of his siblings:  Hermina, Mable, Hank, Jacob, Elmer, Sam, Frieda, and Bill.

                  The funeral will be streamed live from the Trinity Episcopal Church Youtube site:  .https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxl0n_Mp4Je0f9oApiqxCdw?   

Bring Out Your Dead

 

Wilbur Kenneth Huck was pronounced dead by on-call hospice nurse Flora at 3:45 p.m. Sunday, December 26, Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.

Bereft of life, he is no more.  He has gone to sing with the choir invisible and shall soon be pushing up the daisies in the Pilot Butte Cemetery and sometime in the fall a bronze representation of Birdy will watch over him through time and eternity or someone in the Mad Max future pillages the graveyard and melts down her sculpture into canon balls.

OK.  If I gave a fuck about SEO as I did for the two long years I wasn't able to run my funeral/wedding celebrant business well enough, I'd be expecting an  editorial comment about how the preceding sentence was too long but in argument I must say I was profoundly influenced by the book All the King's Men when I was in high school and emulated the paragraph-long sentences of Robert Penn Warren.  And of course (right arm flourishing upward) Shakespeare!  and Dickens, in the form of memorized passages of A Christmas Carol.  What I mean is, I had long, complex sentences in my head long before I wrote Sentenced to Venice.

Even as my friends surrounded me with loved during the last couple of weeks it was wretchedly hard dealing with the piss and shit and sadness about same and cleaning and loving him and hating the process and being really fucking mad at God for putting as both through this kind of ending.  

And Heart and Home Hospice failed me at the end.  It's nobody's fault.  Everybody did the best they could but it wasn't good enough.  The week before Will died our CNA caregiver and I both knew he was dying.  I had been promised by Nurse Karen (who left Heart and Home for a better paying job) that she would be able to accurately predict approaching death and I'd have someone coming by every day.  Nurse X. was telling me, "Oh, I'll come by twice next week."  This the last week of his life.  How come Jen and I knew and Nurse X didn't.  I feel some crankiness with her, although she was very professional and caring during her visits.  However, I asked her to find me a volunteer and she said, 'After the Holidays - hard to find somebody now.'  I assume she had to follow certain protocols and was doing the best she could.  I felt caring from all individual hospice people but I cannot recommend the business.  Their protocols or Nurse X's interpretation of them gave me insufficient support during Will's final week.  They never gave me "the booklet" about the end of life -- no one offered it to me.  People seemed to expect me to know what to do.  One nurse seemed surprised I'd never changed a diaper.  Basically, I felt abandoned and neglected, even though Nurse X wrote a text to me saying "If we are to a point of daily visits then we will be there for you daily."  My whole experience with them speaks to me of corporate bullshittery -- the people hired seem caring but overworked and underpaid and the protocols left me desperate and gasping my last week.  Why?  Plus nobody from Hospice took the time to explain, orally, how to use the medications until after I started having trouble with him fighting me while I tried to change and clean him.  I never got their death booklet.  "What to do until the reaper comes."

December 16:  Hospital bed moves in.  Pastor Noah Heinrich is there to visit with Will and also support me in a time of transition. 

Nurse X visits.  I ask about getting a volunteer to visit me.  She says that she will ask about it.  DOES NOT GET BACK TO ME ON THIS ISSUE EVEN AFTER WILL DIES.  DOES NOT SAY SHE IS SORRY.  Not that I'm pissed off or anything.

 He helps me bring up the pad from the couch downstairs. I covered that with sheets and blankets.  During the night I would wake when I heard the metal on the hospital bed to find he'd uncovered his long, bare legs and seemed to be trying to get out of bed.  I would ask him what he wanted and he wouldn't know and he'd lie down again. 

December 17:  At 5:34 in the morning after an extremely restless night, I posted a call for help on Facebook.  I knew we were in the very last phase and knew I couldn't get through it by myself OR with the support of a Hospice that seemed to be abandoning me.

I FB posted that the phase Will and I were entering, with me sleeping on the floor beside his hospital bed, was much harder than I thought it would be.  Friends come through with food, dairy-free ice cream, visits, phone calls.  Awesome group, the people I know, now that I know how to know people who are awesome rather than people who abandon at the slightest sign of discomfort. 

December 18:  He has a shitstorm in bed.  After working with him for a half hour I finally contact Nurse X who contacts the oncall who contacts me.  SHE is absolutely wondeful, Nurse Keyara.  I yelled at her about lack of support and she calmed me down by doing proper listening techniques ("I understand what you're saying") and I apologized to her.  

 I got friend visits and food and fed my relationship with weed so freely I stopped getting high.

What I didn't get was a call or Facebook message from my pastor!  And I got hit with rage spurt and I made a decision to use a communication method I dislike but one which seemed appropriate in the given situation.  I triangulated (which probably turned into a quadrangle or quintangle) my rage, telling someone else about it (and using all my Irish fucks which I give freely).  I didn't receive any message from him before I went to bed.

I exchange the couch pad for the mattress on the single bed I bought from Target. 

I text Pastor Noah repeatedly but it isn't until late that night that he is able to respond, having been out of cell phone range.

December 19, Sunday:  He makes it to the bathroom with me holding on to him, holding steady his 113 lbs.  He is dying and he is insisting on getting to the bathroom, I'm sure because it is less trouble for me.  More friends visit.  My pastor calls and apologizes.  I forgive him and accept his apology while noting that it did happen that I felt abandoned by him.  From that point on he calls every couple of days.  Unfortunately, he tends to use his Digby O'Dell voice and I want to say "talk normal" which I will if he continues to use it.

December 20th:  Will sleeps almost all day.  Visit from Nurse X.  She tells me she'll come twice next day.  Why do I know he's dying when she doesn't?  I have a partial night away from the house but it's snowing so heavily that I head back after a nice dinner.

I contact Holly Pruet, a Funeral Celebrant I've met and hire her to create a Eulogy for Will. 

Fucking reSupply doesn't show up to move the marital bed.  I engage in some explosive messaging (that anger still finding targets) and the next day I hire College Hunks Moving Junk.  Yay -- quick, profesional, showing up when they said on Thursday.

December 21 Tuesday:  Jen calls in sick.  She will not be able to come back to work until Friday morning.

The new Nurse's aide, Rachel, comes to change and bathe him and he lets her because she's awesome instead of scary, like the Tuesday Dec. 14 cna.

Pastor Noah comes for his final visit.  He has a great talk with Will during which Will says that he is ready to die, that he know that he is dying, that he is ready to go to heaven. The wonderful Pastor Noah is talking about Paradise and an end to pain and I ask Will if he wants to go be with Birdy and June Jhumpa and he says "yes."  I tell him I love him and he says he loves me.

And I want to say God Bless Pastor Noah.  We have very different Christian theologies, but we both believe in doing the work and he does the work.

 December 22, Wednesday:  

I am on a zoom call with Holly Pruet when thin almost-a-ghost Will Huck appears confused at the door of the bedroom, having climbed over or through the rails of the hospital bed. 

At 4:00 in the afternoon I am blessed by a visit from the Trinity Episcopal choir.

December 23:  another visit from Nurse X who blithely says, "We'll see you for two visits next week."

December 24:  Jen is able to give me three hours so I run an errand downtown and then return early because of the snow.  I watch some of the evening service but am not feeling all that much like welcoming that baby who was probably born in spring anyway.

December 25:  I call the hospice because I've let him go too long without changing.  The lovely oncall person arrives and we change him and he fights us.  I fear the last thing my spouse said to me was "no no go away" while pushing me with his hands.  I assume he suffered a cluster of more strokes at this point in time.  Once he and the bed were clean, he didn't change position until he couldn't.

I spent the day putting all his remaining clothing (except a couple of pieces I will keep and a couple give away).

December 26:  Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.  

When I woke up I saw he was in the same position.  I took his hand and noticed his fingertips were blue.  He had a fever of 101.  I'd been giving him morphine with aloprazolam for about 36 hours after a nurse finally told me I could do that (oh, my...I could have used so much more information so much earlier).

 I called Hospice.  On-call Nurse Flora said she could come after she dealt with three other clients in LaPine.  

Jen gave me a few hours to have lunch on Sunday.  I went to Greg's Grill and had a steak.  I returned.  Jen left.  Hospice nurse Flora arrived and we cleaned him and she notice a fever of 103 and said he was dying as she sat there.  We changed places and she stood with her hand on his heart and I held his hand and watched his face as he died as I was telling his spirit or driver or whatever was left that I loved him.

 

Archeology - Oh My Fuck

 

So I was  bagging his old clothes to take them to The Shepherd's House because everything in these bags has plenty of wear left in it -- the man was a clothes horse.  I'm having him buried not in his Donna Karan suit but in his Barcelona bought black leather jacket and black jeans.  When he bought that jacket (for $400) without calling me he scandalized the wives of two other couples because he spent money without asking me.  As if.

 

 

 So it's important to understand that Will and I had separate closets, though we slept together, I always changed downstairs.  (He had purchased the house in part so that we could have separate areas...and I haven't had a separate area inside this house for months now.)  Anyway, I hadn't looked for anything in this closet for.... ever...until this summer, when I found my Jr. Miss dress in it.  Yesterday I pulled a bankers box out of it and found, in the usual mess, a treasure trove of family portraits buried along with old playbills from the 80s, a file folder full of sermons, some ticket stubs, letters from yet another woman who got angry with him and bolted because he didn't communicate correctly, and our old, 1992 sexual agreement.

Young Scholar, Wilbur Huck

 

 

 

And, in the very back of the closet,

 

 

The  surprising thing is where he kept this, not that he had it.  I think he hid it from me in a fruitless attempt to "win" our ongoing silent discussion about his sexuality.

 

Shitty Morning / Answered Prayers

 This post was started Saturday.  Shitty Saturday.

We moved him to a hospital bed either in time or past time.  So much shit pouring out of him this morning and he was so uncomfortable.  But at least it didn't start till I got up.  He may be able to get out of the bed but he shouldn't try to walk without help or he'll fall and be in real pain.  So I kept cleaning him and thinking I was done and then more shit.  But in the "end" it's my fault.  I didn't give him his anti-diarrheal yesterday because it's a gelcap and I thought he couldn't swallow.  I did manage to get two down him after the sixth time I cleaned him and put a fresh chuck under him.

On the plus side, I've been praying for a gigolo and out of the mists of time I got a call from someone I knew in high school.  (He played Oberon in the senior play.)  He asked how I was and I unloaded on him.  Then I asked for his story.  It was a pretty West Coast American upper professional class story of success and sadness.  And it reminded me that I never want to be married again.

---------- Tuesday morning -------

Several friends stopped by over the weekend.  AND my priest finally contacted me with a prayer and apology for missing what was happening with me (even though we're fucking Facebook friends and he had the same ability to get my original post in a timely manner - which tells me I'm not his top 15.  Or is it 8?

I feel surrounded by love and care.  It's still hard, but some of the emotional heavy lifting feels shared.

And I made an important decision yesterday.  If my old friend is not dead by Christmas, I will not be going to New York to see Hugh Jackman.  There's no way my sister can manage what's happening now plus not being with him as he dies seems an ignominious end to such a long and loving relationship.

I remember 4 or 5 years ago a one-time friend of mine telling me that it was good for an acquaintance (who had had to have her demented spouse institutionalized because - Alzheimer's) to stay on her vacation when her husband was dying in the care home. I thought at the time that it was a reasonable choice, but not something I could do.  Up until two days ago I thought my thinking had changed -- I thought I could leave him to others.  But I can't leave him to unpracticed others.  There's too much care involved now.  And I love him still and don't want him afraid.

Eulogy

 Something I want the Celebrant to mention in the Eulogy, "They had instant compatibility:  he was big, and she could swallow it."

 A friend of mine thinks I've been in the anger stage of grieving.

Photo by Andre Tan on Unsplash

 

 

 

 

 

Patient or Sweetheart?

Photo by Paola Chaaya @paolitta

I may have accidentally hastened my sweethearts decline on Tuesday when for a minute I held his arms down as the CNA was trying to clean him.  He was screaming "Stop, stop!" and "I'll kill you, I'll kill you."  I was treating him as a patient.  Then my heart kicked in and I told her to stop, that I'd rather he be dirty than terrified.  My heart is still attached. 

And, come to think of it, how can he still have so much shit in him if he's not eating?  I know he's dirty right now but it's still dark outside and he's asleep and yesterday I cleaned up three shitcidents and I'm not ready until I hear him stirring awake.  Then I'll get him up, get him into the bathroom, strip the bed (again).

I've asked for the hospital bed to be delivered today rather than Monday.  

I'm moving two chairs into the garage and/or taking them to Goodwill on Friday.

Yesterday Sucked and yet . . .

 Yesterday I experienced a huge grief spurt (chest pain, sick to stomach, weeping, inability to think) when the hospice nurse told me it was time to bring in a hospital bed. So next Monday, our marital bed of 48 years will be picked up and hauled away in the morning and a hospital bed brought in in the afternoon. I am in my house alone with him except for my respite times. I am fortunate to have our caregiver here for 17 hours during the week. I have been praying for the Almighty to take His turn with my spouse and it looks like he's answering but it's still not going to be easy watching the love of my life starve to death.

This is the one time in my life I wished I had children so I could have someone in the house with me while I'm going through this.  

One of my church friends told me I can call people and ask for what I need.  She said, "What do you need?  And I thought for awhile and said, "a gigolo."  In my "wicked" past, I usually had at least some Other whom I used to deal with my anger, despair, and need to be thought attractive.

I've always believed in a God with a sense of humor.  This morning I'm recalling that the most money I ever made for a poem - $250 - was for winning a contest with a poem about dementia.  The poem was later published in the anthology, Beyond Forgetting.  The jive-ass muthafucka in charga da whole universe got it some fine sense of irony.  However, as angry as I have been at the Eternal lately I must thank it for the helpers I'm surrounded by, especially for the Facebook spousal caregivers group.  Several of the folks this morning posted that they were going through the same thing.

DEATH PICKS UP MY AUNT, HULDAH BELL

Absence is always too soon for someone.
Standing at the door, discussing
fat peonies on the porch or leftovers
boxed to carry home, the body remains
among the things it knew.  While there outside,
already in the car, tired of making small tal,
the mind is waiting, leaning on the horn.

This lengthy last discussion disturbs
those who remain behind, still busy
with the party.  "Just go or stay,"
we whisper to each other, wink-grimacing
our disapproval.  Such fragmentation
disrupts our practiced tales of war
and marriage told with brandy
and that second piece of cake.

 

 

And yet, yesterday also gave me joy in the evening when I met for the last time this year with my Exploring Faith Matters - EFM - class on Zoom (because - ice).  This class is absolutely wonderful, albeit small, and I always feel joyful when we have a deep theological discussion, as we did last night.  SOoooo - I have much for which to be thankful even as I grouse and complain about having to do the work of caregiving until the end.

AND, I am working on realizing that this is a powerful privilege...watching someone die as one's heart is ripped to shreds on waking every morning.  And I mean that kinda sincerely.  I was a hospice volunteer in the 90s...so I am a bit prepared for all that's happening.  And it is a common experience that isn't talked about a lot.  Sigh.  Always look on the bright side of life.

Hospital Bed

 I've just put in an order with The Arc to pick up our marital bed on Monday morning so that a hospital bed can be delivered Monday afternoon.

He is so weak now.

On Sunday he came out to sit in his wingback and suddenly made a face.  

"I've dirtied myself," he said when I asked.  I asked if he needed the movable toilet and he said "No, I've already."  So I spread some newspapers under his feet, got his walker to help him stand up, stripped his dirty clothes off him, cleaned his butt, got a fresh nightie on him and then got him to the bedroom where I got some pullups on him.  

In some ways, this is a privilege.  If I can hold that in my heart.  To birth the love of one's life into the next world.  

Advent.  

Ralph Richardson and Denholm Elliot

On the plus side, I had a wonderful time watching and talking about the movie Holly and the Ivy last night with the Trinity Film folks. Great family Christmas story from a play written in 1951.  Beautifully filmed and still very theatrical, it presents a family drama of Christmastime revelations as a Parson (played by the great Ralph Richardson) comes to realize he might be spending too much time with the congregation and not enough time with his family.  Written by Wynward Brown, who had a parson for a father.

ETA

 Estimated Time of Angelization:  2 months or less.

 

 

Bath

 

Rubber ducky, you're not the one.

 

 

He barely tolerated a bed bath yesterday.  He started yelling at the CNA to "Go away!" and she tried to sooth him but at that moment, I was the only one who could.  So I went into the bedroom to the head of the bed and told him that he was sick and that he didn't want to go to the hospital, did he?  So he was going to need to tolerate having himself cleaned up. He never took off his nightie but she was able to get all the old shit off his private parts.  I kept telling him I loved him and that he was sick and I used the ugly threat of the hospital to help him "be brave" about being touched by a stranger.

But it's done.  She'll be coming once a week for the duration.  The last time he got into the bathtub, months ago, he couldn't get out by himself.  I stepped into the tub behind him and put my arms under his armpits. He also pushed with his arms and I finally got him up, showered, and out.  Since then I've tried to clean him after the shitcidents but I haven't always been completely successful.  

Will has always been very private about self care.

Frail

 He woke me at one this morning to help him get out of bed to get to the bathroom.

When I guided him there, I felt how tight the skin was across his ribcage.

My goal now is to keep him from pain and anxiety and to keep myself from becoming any crazier than I am.

He weighs 114 lbs now.

Yesterday the hospice nurse and I went over what was happening inside him clinically as he is shutting down.

How can my heart keep breaking.  It should be done by now.

Bring on the liars, lovers, and clowns

Elaine Stritch who originated "little things"

 "It's sharing little winks together,
Drinks together,
Kinks together,
That make marriage a joy."

-- Stephen Sondheim, Company 

 The death of the great American genius, Stephen Sondheim, hasn't so much saddened me in itself as made me nostalgic for all the wonderful musical shows Will and I attended together over 41 years.

I remember a review called Side by Side by Sondheim which played in San Francisco at the Marines Memorial Theatre in summer of 1978.  (I know the year because I have a subscription to Newspapers.com and chased it down in the San Francisco Examiner.)  We would have been staying down the street at the Hotel Beresford, an old place that had special rates for teachers.  While I remember little of the actual show, I do remember the deep enjoyment I experienced being with my sweetheart, listening to the sophisticated lyrics, believing, as I did then, that we were having the same experience as we listened.

Now I understand that we probably weren't interpreting the lyrics or the evening in the same way.  But whether or not our minds were processing the cognitive aspect of the evening in the same way, I know we were enjoying being with each other and the performers.  

Will was never as sophisticated as I thought he was and I was never as emotionally mature as he hoped I was.  Nevertheless, we've always cared for each other, even without understanding what makes the other tic  (sic).  The Sondheim song with which I most identified was another one from Company:  

"I've got those
"God-why-don't-you-love-me-oh-you-do-I'll-see-you-later" Blues,
That"Long-as-you-ignore-me-you're-the-only-thing-that-matters" Feelin".

In the summer of 1981, after we spent time in Los Gatos and San Francisco, we drove to Los Angeles to see Sweeney Todd where it was playing at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  We were both so excited to see the show with its original cast of Angela Lansbury and George Hearn.  I remember best the moment when Sweeney slits the first throat and raises his blade high as lights blast on to catch the blade and the drops of blood sliding from it as the great whistle blows.  Wow!  And the music, so terrible and beautiful.  I remember at the time being amused that many of the people in the audience were of the same class and power as the folks Sweeney was butchering.

Ad from LATimes, August, 1981

Two other Sondheim shows Will and I enjoyed together were Assassins (Artists Repertory Theatre, 2006, Portland) and Company (Ethyl Barrymore Theatre, Broadway, 2006).  

Will stopped going to the theatre and to the movies in 2014, during our second-to-last trip to New York City. He got sick on that trip and was too tired to go out at night.  I look back now at one decision I made -- to go to a play without him  because he freaked out and thought we were going to the movies but it was a play and "too expensive".  I was so upset with him (because I still didn't understand the dementia) that I let him walk back to the hotel himself.  

That was the last time I let him alone on the streets of a city.

 

Of course my first Sondheim was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  I overplayed the album I took out from the Los Gatos library. I also and watched the movie whenever it played on television so I had a few of the songs memorized.  I can still perform much of "Everybody ought to have a maid" and "Miles Gloriosus:" the Braggart Soldier.  

Buster Keaton in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

 

 

 

Creative Writing Assignment

 I've been taking some memoir writing workshops. Below is a piece a turned in to Eileen Casey along with her feedback (in red).

 

photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Prompt:  Write a ‘someday’ piece, imagining what it is you most crave is suddenly within reach. Find an object/detail which epitomises this ‘someday’ feeling. How would you react?

 

“Always look on the bright side of death:
Adjust before you draw your terminal breath.” --  Eric Idle

 

I am waiting for the Reaper, that slacker!  Sometimes I picture him as Bengt Ekerot, the white-faced actor in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal.  More often, I see Death as the John Cleese-voiced puppet in The Meaning of Life:  the Grim Reaper with his pointing skeletal hand.   And I yell at his black-robed, scythe-clutching figure, while tapping my Shinola watch:  “What the fuck!” LOVELY...GREAT VIBRANT OPENING. I'M 'IN'....

He’s late, you see.  Going on six months now.  In December of last year my spouse was accepted into a local for-profit hospice.  In order to get federal funding, they needed to claim he had only six months to live. So now Mr. Death is late for his very important date.  And I’m ready for him. 

I’ve been ready for him since the mid-Nineties, when I volunteered with a non-profit Hospice. For two years I was part of care teams that included a nurse, chaplain, social worker and family members.  Though most of my clients lived only a short time after our teams were involved, my last continued on for six months.  Joe, like my spouse, matured past his hospice sell-by date.

Because of my work duties, I was unable to be with Joe during his last hour.  But as soon as I could leave the college when I was giving a test,  I jumped into my Toyota Corolla and sped across town to Deschutes River Woods.  When I got to the mobile home he shared with his wife, I found the Hospice nurse in Joe’s bedroom.  His old body was completely naked. 

“I just got him undressed.  Would you like to help me wash him?”

The body was thin with knobbly joints.  The skin was very soft, except for on his fingers, rutted from decades of guitar playing. ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS DETAIL He was almost hairless.  As I passed the washcloth over him, I felt his body temperature slowly changing from warm to cool.  Soon rigor would set in but as the nurse and I cleaned the corpse, the joints were still easy to move. 

I wondered if this is what my own husband would look like when he died, though at the time he was only sixty-four.  He is now ninety-one.  Ninety-one going on three.  He has late-stage vascular dementia.

So I am prepared and will use my past experience when the Grim Reaper arrives.  While I know that widow-hood will be hard after a fifty-year partnership, I believe that what we’re currently going through now is harder. 

Well, what I’m going through. 

My sweetheart seems perfectly content.  He is a hummingbird,  living on the sugar in hard candy and clear Ensure.  I don’t think he knows what he’s lost or what we’ve lost together.  He doesn’t wake up and go to sleep with grief.  He probably doesn’t think about what it’s like for me to wipe shit off legs I used to kiss.  He sleeps much of his day.

And I look ahead to the beginning of my freedom.  Look ahead to the horrible morning when I wake up beside a cooling body, smelling the final release of fluids in our bed, a smell I already know.  When I will cry for an hour or two and then wash his body myself, touching with love the great bones that are now barely contained within the fragile skin.  When I will call the Hospice, the Funeral Home, and my Priest.  When I will finally have no one to take care of but myself.

HI Kake, I have to say. This IS among the best pieces I've ever received in all my time on this course. Honestly, I wish this piece were mine, it's excellent. You really won't have any problem publishing Kake, once you decide on what type of book you want to write to full fruition....diary of this time recounted here? I mean I don't need to tell YOU, when you have this much talent, this much courage and inner nous, knowing how to pace, where to take me in the emotional sense, honestly? This piece is of the standard I don't see too often. I can't fault it and in a way I wish I could. For now, I'm a very keen reader of your work, Eileen

 

And now this new thing

 So yesterday morning he was up, getting some hard candy, just before I went into the office.  He said there were children in the bedroom.  I got him back into bed and he was okay.

Then, when I got home, he talked about seeing his niece running around in the back yard, "Elmer and Esther's child."

I did not think hallucinations would be part of vascular dementia.  I thought they were associated just with Alz and Lewy-Body.

Nope!

Destination F&*#d!

(Concept of the destination mentioned above stolen from the brilliant comic, Ozzy Man)

Thanksgiving Thoughts

A meme created by a member of a Facebook spousal caregiver group.  I have Cam McIlreavy's  permission to post.

Bad Theology, Good Laughs

 So my good friend Diana and I shared a laugh on Saturday when I started into my theologically atrocious theory about why Will is so far past his Hospice sell-by date. It's dumb theology because I don't really think the Divine Mystery is an old dude with a white beard nor that Death looks like a Monty Python puppet.  Nevertheless, in my imagination, neither Charon nor the Divine are looking forward to my hypercritical beloved's travel over the Styx or entry to Heaven (yeah, yeah, yeah -- I'm totally mixing up all the texts.  So sue me.)

So here's Will on the boat.  "Yeah, can you steady out your polling?  This is a kinda crappy boat for such an important transition.  Couldn't you have polished the brass a little?  Really, it's kind of a mess."

And here's Will chatting with Gabriel:  "You call this a Heaven?  Warner Brothers created a more interesting heaven in Green Pastures. With better singing.  I mean, yeah, you say that's a heavenly choir but don't you think Jesse Norman did that hymn better? As for halos, I have to say that mine is a little small and it has a couple of spots on it so if you could show me where to turn it in. . . "

Thank you, Diana, for being able to enjoy dark humor with me.

A Strange and Glorious Gift

 At 2:30 this morning we were both in bed awake.  I was trying to get back to sleep after getting up to pee.  He started talking.  

 "It's okay if you go upstairs.  Do you want to go upstairs?" 

I told him, "We are upstairs, sweetie."  I hugged him.

"You're a good person."

"Thank you, sweetie.  I love you."

He had a long visit from Pastor Noah yesterday.  Will was in bed and Noah talked with him for almost an hour.  I didn't listen to much of it but I think there was a lot about the afterlife and about Will being a wonderful person.  Maybe it was Noah who got Will into the lasting good frame of mind.   But what a gift he and God gave me last night.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

 

 

 

Crap

 Don'tcha hate it when a friend turns to a stranger?

I had a really good male friend for four years, someone who I thought I could be a guy with.  Then at one point he tells me I'm beautiful.  Then I get a hard on for the sound of it and go all girly for like a week and tell my therapist how happy it makes me to be thought attractive by someone.  Then we have a brief (two letters, one zoom) flirtation, and then he gets involved with a woman and now he's cut me off.

I thought it was her.

It wasn't.  It was him.  And he actually showed her my letters without checking in with me first.  I would have let him

I believe I've suddenly appeared to him as a slut.  And now he's no longer my friend, after calling me his best friend.

On a day when Will is sleeping or pissing or incoherent.  On a day when I am low and the hours are long and I needed a friend and I lost one.

BUT, I didn't cut myself. I contacted my therapist.  And I texted him proof of his complicity when he started acting (like other men in my life) like he had nothing to do with it.

I'm so sad and angry.  

---------------------------

That was yesterday, Saturday.  It's Sunday morning.  Still crying.

One of the reasons this has hurt so bad is because of the whole slut-shaming thing.  I believe my friend has fallen into stupid patriarchal thinking, of which I thought him incapable, that there is only one type of sex and that female sexual desire is dangerous.  

I feel like Job.  Yesterday was already a bad day.  I'd been missing Birdy so much.  Then when my friend called from the road, on his way to Bend, telling me he no longer wanted to see me, he couldn't see me as a friend now that the whisper of sex had passed between us, it was like someone had shot me up with radioactive salt.

Have you ever had that experience, on the xray table?  I once did.  I forget what it was for (my guts?  my back?) but I had to have some strange fluid pumped into my body first before the machine took its pictures.  For a few seconds my whole body felt locked into a low, hard cold flame.  That's how I felt yesterday.  I don't know what the neurotransmitter load was, but my whole body felt frozen into shakes.  My skin was hot then cold then like metal then like concrete.  My stomach hurt and my chest felt like a rock was pressing down on it.

Oh, well.  I was very angry in texts to my friend yesterday until at the end I forgave him.  I have to forgive him.  He can't help being a dick in this way.  He doesn't have the bandwidth.  After all, he's just had one woman, now a second in the offing and I've had many sexual experiences.  He's in love and love makes people stupid.  

And, as I was writing last week, I am insecurely and ambivalently attached which means that one of my core issues is a violent emotional reaction when someone leaves me.  I have a mental short-circuit that makes rejection feel like the other person is saying to me, "I'm sorry, I have to kill you now."  That is, abandonment raises an invisible background terror based on certain events in my toddlerhood.

The last time this happened to me was with a female friend in 2001.   She was a person I loved and to whom I thought I could say anything.  I was wrong.  She moved out of town and then wrote me a letter saying that I was "too much" for her and she ended our friendship.  Twenty years later and I still feel the hurt beneath that old scab.

Add to all this that I also found out this week, by going to a Christian writing conference online, that to get accepted by a publisher one has to have a "platform" and be a successful writer before one writes.  And that just made me tired.  So tired.  I can't do that.  I don't have the strength.  So I've decided just to write enough for a few friends to see if someone can understand me and accept me as I am.  Or will I lose ALL my friends once I tell my story?

OK.  It's now 6:15.  Will woke up, walked to the kitchen for a handful of hard candies, and has gone back to bed.  I said good morning, he said good morning.  He smiled.  I hugged him.  I asked if he was getting up.  He said, "I don't know."  I told him it wasn't even 5:30 and he should go back to  bed.

And here I sit, on the fucking floor over the fucking heat vent, thinking about how funny it is that my world has BEEN BROKEN once again.  That a reality, a friendship I had believed in and thought solid --

well, EVERYTHING SOLID MELTS INTO AIR.

fucking commies knew something

TIME LORD

 I was finishing my lunch with some scoops of avocado-based ice cream when he walked into the dining area in his nightgown, without his glasses, sat on one of the new chairs and started talking about building something, but he wasn't going to keep working once he went back to school.  He kept talking about organizing "things" and how the windows were really good for the house (I could tell he meant a selling or buying point).  Then he mentioned going back to work again and I reminded him, kindly, laughing in that "we're all in this together" way, that he was retired.

"You must have been dreaming that you were still at work, " I lied.  "You get a pension!  

 He began talking again about "getting things together" and then said, in a very loud voice and looking at me with gigantic blue-grey eyes, "I came here from Chicago!"  

Downtown, Minatare, sometime in the present

I was baffled, as I was during much of this conversation, although whenever possible I was smiling and nodding enthusiastically.  The he asserted that he "comes back here every summer" and pointed at the deck and called it "the porch."  Then he mentioned his siblings, saying something about how something we had done or were doing was better than the things they were doing.  

And I didn't tell him they were all dead, that he is the sole survivor of that big three family family.  That rivalry is still alive in his mind. As he spoke, wearing his red plaid nightshirt over red plaid flannel pjs, he looked a bit like an L.L.Bean Lear, his white hair wild, his big-boned once 6'2" frame now shrunken to 118 lbs.

Downtown Bend, sometime in the past

 

This is the first time he's confused Bend with Minatare.

His eyes were watering, either from emotion or allergies.  He was looking out at the overcast sky, heavy with clouds, but occasionally lit through the cracks with patches of bright sunlight.

He's back in bed now.

Happy Anniversary

 It's an unreflective cultural practice to write "Happy Anniversary" when someone posts an announcement of their wedding anniversary on Facebook.  So I wasn't upset with my friends when they left that comment on my feed after I re-posted an old newspaper announcement celebrating Will's and my previous anniversary.  In my mind's ear I hear each anniversary in the voice of Paul Harvey:  "Karen and Wilbur Huck - 48 years together (pause) on the road to (pause) forever."

Monitor publicity shot of Bob and Ray with Tedi Thurman

I listened to Paul Harvey in my youth, even though I knew his right-wing political opinions didn't link with my Dad's leftish views.  Anytime I was doing a physical activity that didn't require mental concentration, I listened to talk rather than music AM radio. When traveling in the car on the weekend, the folks would play Monitor Radio (NBC) which offered a mix of talk and popular (non rock) music.  I remember sitting in the back seat behind Dad and hearing the weekend mix of news, celebrity interviews, and music.  (Sitting behind Dad was better in the winter when the car windows were closed.  If the windows were opened and he wanted to smoke a cigar, he bit and spit off the end and it would come in through the window beside me.)  The best thing about Monitor was that it introduced me to Bob and Ray.  These brilliant comics were also regularly featured on Comedy Time on KGO.

Memories of radio, the Hot Medium.

I've been marinating in the past as I get ready to go to my 50th high school reunion next week.  Fortunately, my younger sister is willing to stay here and oversee Will's care for the time I'm gone and our regular caregiver has shifted her other clients so that she can be with Will for 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening so my sister can go out or just hang out downstairs, should she so please.  Today I'm finishing building a twin bed for her (no, not Ikea -- Target) so she can inhabit the room next to Will's.  Winston is going to stay with his former carer.  I'll have to tell her that he now sings a lot.  Maybe that would be a good nick-name for him, Sir Singsalot!

This week I've been online with 27 other new students at my Canadian graduate school as we listened to several of our future teachers introduce themselves through zoom.  As an old, white person, I am in the minority of the new students.   I feel rather nervous and very excited to be taking two semesters of Hebrew Bible with a scholar who is also the new dean.   I think she looks like Bibi Andersson from the early Ingmar Berman Films.

That I have much to excite me doesn't alter my experience of everyday grief whenever I take full cognizance of what's going on in my life and all around me.

Life is so strange.

Memoir Class

 I'm taking a memoir writing class for "people over 55" - oooold people, in other words.  I share below a piece I wrote for the class.

 HE'S GOT LEGS

David Clark

@thethinblackframe

I fell in love with these legs almost fifty years ago.  My swift approaching fiftieth high school reunion reminds me that I met their owner just four months after I left California for college in Idaho.  He was a professor and long-time friend of my aunt, Huldah Bell, who ran the student union.  Before she introduced me to the tall, skinny, wildly-bearded professor, she told me, “He’s odd.  I think you’ll like him.”

 

In those days I knew I was looking for both sex and love, though they needn’t have been conjoined.  I followed the doctrine of free love and believed, as young people often do, that every individual I liked and respected also at least understood and respected the same doctrines I did.  In my newfound college freedom, more than 800 miles away from my parents, I was ready to try out my liberty under the liberal eyes of my auntie.

 

I assumed that when Aunt Huldah introduced us, she was giving me the AOK for whatever I felt like doing with him.  Only after I turned 19 did I understand that "Assume makes an ass of you and me."

 

Anyway, I was ready to give my heart and body to, well, whoever walked into them on the right legs.  And he’s got legs.  (Sound Effects:  Cue ZZ Top.) So when Huldah introduced us, I immediately crushed on the eccentric professor.

 

I sometimes watched for him from the window of the University News Bureau where my dad had wangled me a job.  Most of my time there I clipped stories about University students from Idaho’s myriad local papers.  And once I secretly looked up his news bureau file to find out his schedule so that I could “accidentally” bump into him.

 

But when I was left alone at lunch, I’d watch out the window at times I knew he would be between classes.  I hoped to see him walk across the great grassy rectangle centering the oldest campus buildings. He had a unique walk, his long back curved in a scholar’s stoop around an armload of books. My aunt called him a walking question mark. And rather than his whole leg moving out from his hip at once, his knees led the lower legs so each step ended with an almost invisible little kick.

 

It wasn’t long before I was wrapping my short legs around his, at first in deep secret, and then legally.  Once we let people see us together, we occasionally heard Mutt and Jeff comments because of the steep height differential.  But we fit together just fine horizontally.  And when we walked holding hands through Pocatello, Berkeley, Venice and the other places we’ve lived and visited, he never outpaced me, but matched his steps to mine.

 

And now I am washing shit off them.  He is standing, one arm on my back as I kneel beside him, wiping away another accident.  There is no fat left on these legs, just muscle and heavy bone beneath frail skin.  I knew to slide Vaseline under my nose before kneeling so I don’t gag.  And now I am wiping my old love’s ass, wiping bits of dry shit off his old legs as tenderly as I can.  He groans above me as I push on his thighs and think about how wrong I was at twenty about the meaning of Love.