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Dad’s Family


My Aunt Peachy is 101. She is the youngest of my Grandma C’s family, dad’s mother. She’s lived in a care facility for the last ten years after a fall took out her hip. Up until then, she lived on her own. She even drove though she’d shrunk so much she had to sit on two or three thick telephone books just to see over the dash. Don’t ask me how she managed the gas and the brake.

Peach is a former special education teacher and she is a writer. She’s gone back to college more times than I can count. She was still auditing courses at Loras College around the time of her fall.

She writes a fairly regular column of sorts for the local paper where she tells stories about “the olden days” as Dee would call them. Although Dee makes no distinction between my personal “olden days” and those of her grandmother and great-great aunt. Anything that predates her is olden.

This week Peach wrote about her auntie, Sr. Mary Lucian, coming to visit from the convent in town. In big Irish Catholic families back then, it was common to have a child or two dedicate themselves to the church. In fact some families even designated the children and forced them in that direction from an early age. I don’t remember Sr. Lucian. I am fairly certain she was dead before I was born. She was Grandad Fagan’s sister at any rate. Among his children, no nuns were produced though all his daughters were educated beyond high school and became teachers or nurses. My Great-uncle John was the only one “called” to God. I can’t imagine a poorer choice on the part of an omnipotent being, but who am I to judge worthiness, eh?

Peach mentions both John and Matt in her article. They were the two youngest boys but still a bit older than she was. John was a terror, and I remember him clearly though we didn’t see him much after he retired from his parish in Cogon, Iowa and went south because of his heart problems and asthma. He died the summer before I graduated from college and I clearly remember being forced to attend his funeral. I only went for a chance to mentally cuss his lifeless body. He was a mean old man who never missed an opportunity to take pot shots, but he was crafty too because he always managed to be out of earshot of the other adults when he said something to me. No witnesses meant it was my word against a priest’s. The last conversation I can remember having with him ended when he said,

“Do you know how fat your are?”

I was fourteen and plenty aware of what I looked like. We were in the living room at Aunt Peach’s. I’d been reading and he wandered in and found me by myself.

Peach was the only one who didn’t take crap from John. She was the only one who didn’t address him as “Father” either.

There are stories aplenty about Fr. John in my family. I have always doubted that he was called to the church as much as he was told that was what he was going to do though I could be wrong. He was not the only short-tempered, dismissive angry priest I encountered in my younger years. Most of the stories about Fr. John stem from his alcoholism. He was as devoted to the bottle as he was to the Pope.

During WWII he was stationed in North Africa. He was an Army chaplain who earned the nickname “Foxhole Fagan”.  Not on account of his fondness for his own skin, but as the result of rolling a jeep over a foxhole while he was drunk.

He officiated at the wedding ceremonies of both my parents and my dad’s older sister and her husband. On both occasions male members of the family were sent looking for him as weddings seemed to bring about the need to go on a bender starting with the rehearsal dinner. My mom’s mother was livid when my dad’s younger brother, and best man, Jimmy, showed up to the church late with a much worse for wear priest in tow.

I don’t remember Fr. John as a drunk, but I do recall hearing that he gave up the bottle at the insistence of his superiors who sent him off to dry out a few times before a heart attack finally convinced him to give up the demon drink. For all of my conscious recollection, he was a sharp-tongued, wick-witted old man who never seemed particularly pleased with the life his Lord had allotted him.

My Uncle Matt was a different matter. I heard stories of a wild and rebellious youth because he and his father did not get on, but the fellow I knew was jovial, sweet and tender. One of my favorite childhood pictures is of me and Uncle Matt when I was about three years old. He had a habit of stopping by every couple of weeks with a bag of Brach’s root beer barrels and sitting just long enough to have a cup of coffee with Dad and catch up before heading back to his home that backed up to the city golf course.

At the point where my memories of him begin, he lived alone. His wife – who I never knew – had died during a trip to California to visit relatives. She had a heart attack. There was at least one photo of her setting out in the dining room, I think. Their daughter was grown and gone off to college when I was younger than Dee is now. Uncle Matt never remarried or kept company even as far as I know, and I remember being quite surprised to discover he’d been married and his wife had died. I was very young when I learned about it and who knows how I rationalized a man having a daughter without ever having a wife. Perhaps I’d been watching too much television. Motherless and fatherless families abounded in the tv wasteland of my childhood. I wondered at his cheerfulness. How could he be so loving and happy when his wife had died. Even my widowed grandmothers and great-aunts sometimes seemed … distant. We had a widowed neighbor down the street whose husband had committed suicide and, though she was a lot like Matt in that I never saw her without a smile or heard a harsh word from her, she had a sadness about the eyes.

I would stop in to visit Matt after he went into the nursing home where my grandmother (his older sister) lived when I was in college. He’d had a stroke and couldn’t communicate very well, but he always had a half-smile and a squeeze of the hand in lieu of a hug.

Dad looked a lot like Uncle Matt in his later years. After he gave up drinking and embraced the idea of life – finally – he even had Matt’s gentleness.

My great-aunt is the only one of that generation left. When she dies she will take all these memories that make up my extended history with her. For years, my cousin and I have talked about the need to sit down and record, but in the meantime, Aunt Peachy writes for us.

Anniversaries, Firsts and The Privileged Few


Yesterday was the first anniversary of my dad’s death. I knew Mom had taken the day off, but between appointments and whatnot, I didn’t get an opportunity to call her until the late afternoon after Dee got home from school. She sounded shaky but assured me she was okay.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I did okay today. Went out to the cemetery in the morning and had lunch with Auntie before her physio. People have been calling on and off, and I saw neighbors. It wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be. Now I have all my firsts done.”

Getting through “the firsts” is a big deal. I actually didn’t know that the assorted holidays and anniversaries of this and that had a designation until Will had been dead for a half a year or more. I am not sure I really needed to know it either. I have learned a lot of terminology that is death or widow specific that probably hasn’t aided me as much as it was intended to, but that is another story. People are always proud of themselves for having crossed the mile marker which is year one. Year two is a whole other matter, but I didn’t mention that. Another thing I don’t think is helpful is telling survivors about the pitfalls to come because, in my opinion, it can lead to self-fulfilling prophecy situations. Best to let others go through their own ebb and flow without planting any seeds.

Rob inquired after Mom as we sat having tea after dinner and dishes were done. Tuesday is late dinner because of Dee’s dance, and we got home to find that Rob had supper waiting. He even did the dishes after – that’s a digression, isn’t it? I related Mom’s pleasure at having jumped the year mark and the fact that no one had forgotten her on this anniversary.*

“No one called me,” he said.

“Me neither,” I replied, “and I even managed to not remind Mom that she not only didn’t call me on the one year but she forgot the date and mentioned it a week or more after the fact.”

“Well,” Rob mused, “I’d kind of alienated all my in-laws at that point by marrying you.”

Before the first year was up. A point of fact that is less relevant as time goes on. Though it doesn’t completely go away, the fact that Rob and I continue on in spite of the hand-wringing makes the objections irrelevant in the face of reality.

“Well, they were all gracious about it none the less and seem okay now except for Indy. But she has issues of her own that are probably more at the root of things.”

One of Shelley’s sisters is a cross between CB and BabySis. She has never been anything but kind to me and Dee but when we have been out of sight and earshot, she has wailed and railed a bit. She is one of those people who no matter how removed she is from the epicenter of tragedy, will try to make it all about her anyway. It’s hard wiring but a hard childhood and substance abuse don’t enhance the trait  – in a desirable manner anyway.

This got us to talking about last days. The whole death-bed scene. And Rob brought up my personal fingernail on blackboard issue – the people who don’t show up because they want to remember the dying person “as they were”.

“Who the fuck do they think they are that they get dibs on the pristine memories?” I asked. It was a rhetorical because Rob just smiled and shrugged. We’ve had this particular conversation before and with no satisfactory conclusions drawn by the end.

At one point the memories drifted past the popular idea that the dying should be treated to a running monologue of non-stop chatter from the bedside babysitters. I understand the rationale. We live people harbor the belief that the dying person is alone, frightened and finds comfort in being connected to the land of the living even if they can’t interact or acknowledge. I wonder about that myself. We are told that people are waiting for guides to come and lead them away, but what if those last hours are filled with important instructions or lessons and all we are doing is making it harder for the person to pay attention? And what if dying is as much work as every other aspect of life?

Rob assigned shifts to Shelley. Her nephew played the guitar for instance. Her mom read to her from a book on proper nutrition for cancer patients.

“I wonder what Shelley must have been thinking then,” Rob said.

I actually just finished writing about this in the last chapter of the memoir I was working on. Will’s brain damage was so extensive that he simply couldn’t receive or make sense of information in any form. I didn’t know this for a fact until the autopsy report months later, but I suspected it, so I just didn’t bother to speak. I carried on long conversations with him in my head. If you’d have walked in on just he and I, you would have wondered at the utter silence and the fact that all I ever did was rub his chest or hold his hand. But my reasoning was that he was just as likely to read my mind as he was to hear and understand what I was saying.

Dee brings home a reading book every night that she must read and discuss with one of us. Her current discussion obsession is making what the teacher told them was “self-connections”.

“It’s important to make self-connections,  Mom,” she reminded me tonight when I tried to ask her about something else in the story.

But she’s right. Self-connections are where we learn and grow.

*Not sadiversary or deathversary or any other of the Hallmarkish terms.

Blogging from the Charmin Washroom


This is something The Bloggess would get picked to do because she is weberatti and because she believes public washrooms are zen zones, but apparently Charmin is looking for unknowns to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas manning their Grand Central Station washrooms* and then blogging, tweeting and otherwise letting the known universe in on the wonderliciousness of it all.

This is how toilet tissue is sold in my native land and one more reason to not admit I am from there when we move overseas. That and the whole terrorists might kill me thing.

“It’s pays money,” I told Rob.

“But you have to live in the bathroom, right? It’s a 24/7 thing.”

“They’re paying $10,000,” I repeated the money thing because I didn’t think he’d heard.

“To live in a bathroom that thousands of who knows where they’ve been people are walking in and out of to take care of any private function you can imagine every day for five weeks!”

“For $10,000,” I said – again – “And you get to blog about it and tweet and make YouTube videos.”

“In a bathroom where people piss and shit,” he was really stuck on the negatives. “Do you have to eat in there too?”

“Well, I would imagine they give you breaks,” I said, not really knowing and not really sure. It’s in America after all where “reality” is carried to extremes.

“You want to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, no.” Okay the money, the blogging and the attention would be interesting but there is the whole toilet aspect to consider. He had a good point there. If I were 22, homeless already with no immediate job prospects, this might sound like a better opportunity.

“I’m not going to live in a bathroom in Grand Central Station for 5 weeks,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a family thing,” I said.

“So you want to go to New York for five weeks by yourself?”

Already I can’t picture Rob and Dee for five weeks on their own with me checking in via an iPhone. I think this kind of technological upgrade would be necessary in order to pull this off when you are not a homeless 22-year-old college drop-out without prospects but the Charmin people would have to foot the tech bill or that $10,000 would be eaten by the expense. Which I guess is why they are looking for bloggers as we tend to work for free when we aren’t paying people for the privilege of providing Google with content they can turn around and sell.

“No, I can’t be gone for 5 weeks,” I said, although in the corner of my mind where all outlandish ideas are given more than a cursory once over, wheels are spinning. The three of us in a washroom? Living in Grand Central Station? Better than Balloon Boy Family tv. And it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where two kids run away to the Metropolitan Museum and live there for a while. I wonder why Grand Central Station? Why not the Met or MOMA. I could live for 5 weeks in a Museum.

In the end, I decided that even with my allergy reduced sense of smell, I couldn’t live in a public washroom for any length of time. Not even the luxury Charmin potties.

*Updated-Times Square. Luxury porta-potties in Times Square. My bad. Check the link though because they look pretty up-scale. Still, outdoors? They must be looking for people willing to camp. Can you camp in Times Square?