What Happened to Deborah

Dammit I’m not one to poke around online and see what is going on with classmates from high school, but I was looking for an old friend and ran across a class roster that mentioned a classmate of mine was dead. Not the one I was looking for, hell, I haven’t even thought of her since high school.

It doesn’t say what happened to her, and I don’t know anyone who would know, so I Googled her name and got nothing. She might have died before there even was a Google.

Deborah J. was my first school friend, and we started first grade during the early years of desegregation in the South. Our teacher had just come back from maternity leave and asked us two girls to stay in for recess to do some makeup work. That is when Deborah and I made friends, during that recess period. When the teacher returned and caught us giggling, she accused us cheating.

I don’t even think we knew what that was, cheating, but Mrs. S pulled out a wooden paddle and called us to her desk. She looked at me and said I could go outside. She didn’t spank me. I waited just outside the door, out of sight, and I heard the three loud smacks she gave Deborah. The little girl came out of the classroom, stoic, but when she saw me waiting for her, a smile stretched her face. I didn’t understand why she got hit and I didn’t, but I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with her being black.

No one liked Deborah, not even the black kids. Everyone told me she was just too damn mean. She might have been mean to them, but to me, she always had my back. She’d also sit behind me in class and braid my hair over and over again. She was studious and didn’t like it when any of the kids misbehaved in class, so maybe a bit too straight laced and strung up too tight. But a cheater she was not.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about the paddling since it happened. The knowledge of her death brought back that memory. I’m just realizing now that the teacher had probably been on maternity leave for a couple of years as pregnant women were not allowed to teach back in those days. I’ve read they had to take two years off for that.

So this day she returned and kept us in for recess? Her first day teaching in a desegregated school. Deborah, I think, got spanked for more than just being black. She got it for having the nerve to make friends with a white kid.

That is what happened to my friend Deborah. May her soul rest in eternal peace.

Tainted Holiday

Today makes one year that Candace died. It doesn’t seem like we could ever really celebrate another New Years Eve knowing that it’s also a death anniversary.

We will, though, I know, because my dad was buried on my birthday years ago. I have been able to celebrate birthdays without thinking too much about that.

Some days I feel like I’m swimming against the current. Today is one of those days. My mind seems broken and cluttered. But not completely. There is a tiny voice somewhere in the chaos that keeps saying, it will get better, it will get better.

Time, the beast that can be so cruel to our bodies is the same thing that heals the mind.

I want to give a great big thanks to Jette and Chip for managing Holidailies and all of the other bloggers there who participated. This project helped make this season a little brighter.

To my regulars, I want to thank you too for sticking around, for your comments, and just being there. You’ve made my entire year better. Every one of you.

Now go pop some fireworks. I’ll be listening for them.

Shopping Basket-Case

I’m really good at hiding my emotions. Maybe I learned it while growing up, always trying to hide the fact that my father was an alcoholic. These days people can talk about that openly, and it’s healthy to do so. But it wasn’t like that when I was a kid. We talked about it at home, just not in public.

In high school I was showing off a purse my dad had brought back from a recent work trip in North Africa. A friend of mine who had known me since first grade exclaimed, “Your father? I never knew you had one!”

Not only did I have one, he lived with us.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t talk about him. My dad did not really exist socially in our town. He’d go to the bar rooms in another town, was friends with everyone there. He worked overseas, so even professionally he didn’t exist where we lived.

Don’t jump the gun and think I’m repressive. I’m not, I deal with my shit as it comes. It’s just that there are partitions. On my very worst day I can “act” like my normal self. This is a skill polished while working in the hospitals. We had to have these emotional divides, leave our personal messes at home and the hospital messes at the hospital. It is the only way to survive, for medical professionals as well as the patients.

Yesterday though. I was about a hair off from having to be taken out of the grocery store in a straight jacket. I can almost always see something coming. I’ve been in so many different situations that have tested my nerves beyond the normal.

It was a three-year old that almost took me out. In the grocery store. Not my kid or anyone I knew. I was just looking for a pound of coffee and this shopping cart bumped into my backside.

I take a look back and see in the cart, a little girl who looked exactly like Candace at that age. I hurry and look away, feel a tsunami of ache. All I can think is to look at this kid again, maybe pretend for a second that she is really still alive. For just a moment. It might keep me from breaking down in the store.

So I did, I looked again. It wasn’t pleasant. It felt like a ninja star was slicing up the inside of my chest. I walked away, stopped by the hot sauce and tried to intellectualize the situation. I had grieved the loss of my 19-year old niece, the adult. I had never grieved the loss of the child she she had been for most of her short life.

That was something that even on my most creative day I could not have imagined would happen.

Memorial Day…

It was a little scary driving my mom home this Memorial Day weekend. I’m wondering if there is some sort of curse on us with all that is going on, you know. While there I drove out to the cemetery to clean my father’s grave. I don’t know if it is tradition to clean graves for Memorial Day, for me, it was just coincidence. Just time for Mom to go back and since I was in town and knew it needed to be cleaned, I had to get that done.

While driving out there, on the highway shoulder was a man dragging this huge wooden cross and about 30 people following him. I don’t know who these people are or why they do it, but they are really begging to have an accident.

I wondered if these people are suffering. Or recruiting. It seemed a bit blasphemous. Strange. Especially on that day.

Anyway. The cemetery is in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. It is behind St. Charles Catholic Church which was built in the late 1800’s.

It is not the town where we grew up, just a nearby town. In my town the graveyard was full and there was no more room for any new graves, so we had to find another place. My husband’s family being in the funeral business suggested this place, it is where their family members are, so they must know something, right?

It is a gated community. No worries about grave vandalism as with the cemetery my dad was in (we moved him recently).

There are moss covered treed pathways. A peaceful place.

And see, they do bury people above ground in Louisiana. Some of them. They do this because the water table is high in South Louisiana. Dig a hole, you hit water quickly.

That is the older part of the cemetery.

My family is in the new section. It looks pretty empty, but most of these plots are sold. The owners just haven’t died yet. It is too soon.

Way way too soon. Candace and Shane are on the right with the taller headstone (two in one vault), my dad in the middle, and Lorne (Pumpkin) in the yet unmarked grave. All four of them should still be alive. Should.

I don’t write this stuff for sympathy, in case you are wondering. I don’t like that, sympathy. Or pity. I pack light, remember?

I do pity those who abuse alcohol or drugs. And those who live with them. It is a miserable existence. I am blessed I do not have this disease.

The reason I am writing this is because three of these deaths were related to alcohol or substance abuse. (Some would count Candace, too, although she did not have drugs or alcohol in her blood, she was partying most of the night before her accident).

You use, you lose. All of it. And the people who love you also lose. Because once you check into this place, you are not coming back.

A Million Kinds of Crazy

Yes it is true, there has been another accidental death in the family. That makes three in seven months. My brother Lorne died on Friday and although we don’t have the results of his bloodwork, word on the street is he took too many muscle relaxers. This is the exact same thing that happened to Shane, my other brother who died last October. That was the word on the street for him too.

Louisiana is broke and is not doing autopsies as they should. They did not autopsy either of my brothers and I hear Soma (muscle relaxer) does not show up on drug screens. What comes back on these death certificates is “probable heart attack.”

So we have to rely on “word on the street.” I don’t like having to interview and interrogate friends and family, a good chunk of them addicts for information to figure out how my brother died.

I have another brother (still living) who is strung out on drugs. At the funeral home, there were stories circulating that he had gone to my mother’s house and ransacked it looking for money to buy drugs. First, the story was he had torn my mother’s room apart. As the day and evening progressed, people were saying he had turned the entire house upside down. It kept getting worse and worse, this story. We didn’t tell my mother any of this, got a hotel room for the night and kept her there.

After the burial services I brought my mom home but told her to stay in the car while I checked the house. Now, I didn’t really believe those stories, and I’m not afraid of much. But. When I opened the front door, I smelled a horrible odor, like something dead was in that house. It was dark and very still. I got this feeling that maybe my strung brother or one of his friends had gone in there and died, and I tell you my knees were knocking. My heart raced as I turned every doorknob and flicked on each light.

Much of my adult life has been like this regarding my brothers. If you’ve had alcoholic or substance abusers in your family, you know that feeling, that late night phone call or knock at the door, the shit that races through your mind. You never fucking get used to it. And when you do get that dreaded call, the nightmare come to life thing, it’s a sorry ass feeling. A fucked-up one. On the one hand you are devastated about the loss, on the other, you don’t have to worry about getting that call again. Unless you have other substance abusers in the family.

About my mom’s house and that rotten smell, I didn’t find a damn thing. No dead body, no ransacking, no nothing. Unless Snow White came by and cleaned that house. Turns out my mom had left some food out and since she was in a hotel for two days, it went bad. So much for word on the street.

About my brother Lorne, he didn’t use drugs all the time, wasn’t strung out on them. I never really thought I’d get a call like that about him. I thought for sure it would be my other brother who is out walking the streets right now doing his thing. Trying to get him into rehab is like trying to keep water cupped in my hands.

This May Save Your Life

Candace is my niece who drowned in her car on New Years Eve. We still don’t have all the details, all we know is she wrecked off of a bridge, her car landed in the water and she did not get out of it. The ditch she landed in normally has two feet of water, but since it had been raining so much the night before, it was seven feet deep that day.

I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get out of the car. It seems simple. It is not.

Less than a month after the accident, Mythbusters premiered their episode of a car underwater. They showed how difficult it was to get out, how the doors and windows are impossible to open at certain points while the car is sinking. It is best to open the door when the car first hits the water, or open the windows before the water rises that high. But once the water gets past the window, you need to break it with a hammer or one of those gadgets they sell just for that. Or conserve your energy and just hold your breath until the pressure equalizes in the cabin. Then the door will open easily. It is a long time, about a minute and a half of holding your breath.

I used to think, oh I’d just breath near the ceiling in that pocket of air. Wrong. The front end sinks first because the engine is so heavy. So, nose down. Cars usually rotate upside down, too. (very disorienting) I’d have to chase that pocket of air to the back dash. It’s not likely I’d be in clear water, either.

Oh. Make damn sure the very first thing you do is unlock the door and unbuckle your seatbelt.

This video shows how they got out using two different methods. It’s just a few minutes, but it may save your life. After you watch that, come back and hit this link, it shows their first attempt, uncut. Had they not had an oxygen tank in the car, one Mythbuster would have drowned.

Edited Note: Mythbuster segments are no longer available on YouTube, so I had to find a replacement.

Here is a 20/20 segment of them doing pretty much the same thing.

Or you could click on this link, a video from the experts, Survival Systems USA, “How To Get Out of A Sinking Car”.

I bought the LifeHammer and Res-Q me punches for every car we own. Just in case the door or windows are damaged and won’t open. The Res-Q me punch fits on the keychain and is easy to pull from the keyring. The LifeHammer also has a razor on it to cut the seatbelt.

You can order window punches from Amazon.

Things That Hurt

A friend of mine described the feeling of losing his child six years after the fact. He said, “It feels like I’m walking around with a sword in my chest.” He also said he recently went on a religious retreat and experienced something, like the sword was being pulled out, all at once.

I’m not religious, but spiritial. I don’t know how I’d deal or if I could deal with that sort of loss.

When my niece Candace was born, my brother got a tattoo with her name and birthdate. Not a lot of people were getting tattoos back then, but I thought it was cool. After Candace had her son, she got a tattoo with her son’s name and birthdate. I didn’t know that until yesterday.

Yesterday her mom (Paula) sent me a photo of a tattoo she just got:

What a beautiful tribute. Baby blue was Candace’s favorite color. She liked it so much, it was part of her email address.

Oops

I’d always wanted to move my dad to another cemetary because the one he is in is in a bad part of town and is frequently vandalized. When Shane died, there was no room near his grave to put Shane, and this is a bad place anyway. So we put Shane in a new cemetary and bought a plot next to it for Dad to be moved there.

One of my brother’s (Punkin) had a fit when he found out we were moving Dad. We told him about the vandalism. Then we tried to tell him we didn’t want Shane all alone in his new place and since he was not married when he died, it was likely he’d always be buried alone.

Still, Punkin wouldn’t have it. He threw a fit. Made threats. All this time it kept raining, so the ground was too wet to move the grave. In the meantime, Candace dies and there is no longer the problem of Shane being buried alone. We cancel the move for my dad. Problem solved.

Well, someone called yesterday and said they finally moved Dad’s grave.

Oops.

So I kept trying to call my Mom all day to make sure she didn’t go out to dad’s old cemetary and find him missing. I finally reached her and told her Dad took a ride today.

So now the three of them are together and this is on a piece of land my dad always loved, out in the country. I like it that they are all buried together. And I like it that my dad took a ride today. Wish I could have been there.

Sorry Punkin.

Train Wreck

I was talking on the phone to my nephew Capone just after his sister died, and in the background I could hear a train passing, really loud. I cracked up laughing and asked, “Boy, you live by a train, you too?”
He laughed and said, “Yeah.”

I’d never heard a train over the phone like that except when calling my mom’s house. The tracks are right in her back yard. So damn close that when it approached she’d say, “Hold on, the train is coming.”

I remember doing that when I lived there. Listening real good for that distant rumble, that warning sign that I was about to be embarrassed, to do something quick. I’d tell my friends, “I’m going to put you on hold” and then unplug the phone line until it passed.

Still, I loved those trains. The whole world passed through my backyard on that thing. Mostly freight. My favorites were the ones carrying the brand new cars. Only once did I see a passenger train. I’d always hoped to see one of those, and when it did finally pass, it mesmerized me. It even stopped for a few minutes behind our house. The passengers’ faces were pressed against the window staring at me stare at them.

Watching trains, I saw that the world was not stagnant. I was the first to know what the latest model cars looked like, what colors they came in, and that people somewhere were buying lots of them. I used to stand on those tracks and watch the caboose until it faded away in the distance. I wanted to go there, where the tracks formed a pinnacle, to that “as far as the eye can see” place.

Besides seeing and hearing that train, we could feel it too. Our house was wooden and stood on these brick columns. The dishes would rattle, the things on the wall would tremble. It was like these little earthquake aftershocks. Not a violent or frightful feeling, no, it was a predictable, rhythmic thing, like a gentle rocking. To me. Friends and visiting relatives were not used to this and were afraid. Especially when it passed during the night. They couldn’t stop talking about it the next day. It made me feel brave that I could put up with such a thing. And all that noise and shaking was constant reminder of opportunities out there, places to go.

I even missed that damn train when I got married and moved just a few blocks away. I did get to experience that shaking and that sound in the new place. A tornado passed right over us and it sounded and felt exactly the same as the freight train. But that was a really scary thing for me. Hearing that train noise and not living by the tracks.

So back in October just after burying my brother Shane, we are all at my mom’s house. Capone and his sister Candace, these are Shane’s two kids. Capone is in the Navy, lives in Florida. And Candace, she’s the only one in their immediate family still living in town now that their dad is gone. I have this overwhelming feeling, a warning, a rumbling in the distance, like the freight train is coming. Or a tornado. One or the other. Capone feels it too. The two of us talk for an hour or two about the risky situation Candace is in. About how to keep this situation from swallowing this kid. Capone goes to Candace’s that night or the next day and tries to convince her to go home with him or to go to New Orleans where her mother lives.

She choses to stay. She is an adult and it is her choice. Us trying to do anything to save her is like putting a rock or a coin on the tracks. We can’t derail it.

The coroner mortician thinks Candace fell asleep at the wheel. She was driving over a bridge, hit a guardrail which deployed the airbag and knocked her out cold. The car plowed into the water and there were no signs that she tried to get out of the seatbelt. She drowned. Her only other injury was a tiny bruise on her cheek from the airbag.

Edited Note: This was written for Capone, who lives by the trains, him too.

This is my favorite photo of her taken last year for her high school graduation. I have no idea who took it.

The Show Must Go On

I came up with the name for my blog right there on the spot when creating the account. It was something my mother used to say all the time. She was the manager for a movie theatre for many years and whether rain or shine, sleet, snow, hurricanes, tornadoes, she had to open up the show.

I didn’t realize that Pink Floyd had a song called “The Show Must Go On” until I wrote that post about my brother, “Comfortably Numb.” I listened to that song while writing that post and that was when I saw that the “Show” song immediately followed it (on “The Wall” CD). Strange.

So, as promised, I have the special story on that built in DVD case we just had built.

First, here is the media room:

I’d like to say we watch a million movies in there, but honestly, this is where my husband plays his XBox 360 while I am banging out script pages (I call the game thing a husband sitter.)

Recently, he got a carpenter to make this built in DVD shelf in there. It’s still a little rough, needs touch up paint and all that, but a promise is a promise… the show must go on.

My husband is an engineer, he is creative and inventive and thinks up some pretty fun stuff. This is no ordinary built in DVD case:

It is a secret door that goes into a secret room built out of extra attic space. It opens all the way, I just don’t have a good shot of that.
Oh, did I tell you the carpenter skipped town with the money and didn’t finish the job? My husband was in there last night on a ladder hanging sheetrock.

So he is in this room without windows and this brown butterfly keeps flying around his face. He thought of Shane right away. A lot of people think spirits come in the form of a butterfly. He does. I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible. That was last night.

This morning at about 9AM, Shane’s daughter Candace, 19, my Godchild, was killed in a car accident. She was alone, no other car was involved that we know of.

The secret room, I wish it were a padded cell right now. I don’t understand, I will never understand how in just two months my brother and his daughter, both young, died so fucking tragically.

Candace was smart, she just finished a semester of college despite losing her dad and the fact that she had an infant and was a single mother very much on her own. It was rough, but she didn’t give up, was determined to keep going.
Here is a photo of her from a couple of months ago.

Candace used to read this blog, especially the things about her dad. She was too shy to leave comments and would email some to me instead.

Please drive carefully during the New Year’s holiday.

Edited Note: Parts of this original post have been edited for security reasons.

Hurricane Tracking Chart

There were five of us kids. I can use real names here because in our family real names are just for birth certificates. Except for me, Kitty is my real name. My mom almost named me Katrina. I used to wish she had named me that. I wanted a proper name to put on important papers. Damn good thing she didn’t.

Saying “I have four brothers” was always good to make conversation. “I have three brothers” just doesn’t sound like it’s going to start anything. I’m not ready to say, “But I used to have four.” I know where that conversation will drag me.

I’d like to say I’m a lone griever, but, well, look, you’re reading this on the world wide web. I could be writing from a storm cellar, though.

James, the oldest found Shane that day. James is underwater, in the storm surge. He’s got a life preserver on but hasn’t figured out which button to press to inflate the thing. He’ll come up.

Lorne is a tropical storm, spinning out there. Doesn’t seem dangerous, but you never know. He never gets the attention he deserves.

Robert is a tornado. Came into town unexpectedly, left Mommie a bunch of mean sticky notes because he was locked out of her house. A trail of uprooted trees, that boy.

Mommie is my mom. She’s unusually calm and normal right now which is abnormal. Her whole life is a cat 5 storm and always full of overdramatics. Which I miss.

Me, I’m watching for the birds and small animals to leave town. High tides. Just watching.

This is an old photo I got from the house, and yes, I got it before that big fire. It always looked like this. Except for a few years back, I sketched in the missing lower corner. I should have sketched James in there while I was at it (he spent that summer at my grandparents).
Mommie made these old fashioned bathing suits for a costume contest. We won. This is the photo they put in the newspaper.

Robert is the baby, I am the only girl, Lorne is holding the balloon, and Shane is to my left with Mommie’s hand on his ear.

Here’s another photo and has my dad in it. But Lorne is looking away.

And I could swear that blonde headed boy to my left is the guy I married because he looked just like that back then and came from the same town. He says it’s not him.

Funeral Crasher

So there’s this lady in the lobby at the funeral home last week and she’s crying her eyes out, mascara down her cheeks, lipstick smeared all over. She tells me she’s sorry about Shane. I tell her thanks for coming and ask how she knew him. She said she didn’t. Later, I see my mom and ask her who is that lady and she says she doesn’t know. Nobody knew who she was. I wasn’t bothered by her at all.

Then, there’s people I haven’t seen since high school. It’s a game to guess who’s who. There’s a crowd of Shane’s old friends around me in a circle. I point and say a name. They seem relieved they haven’t changed that much. One woman wearing dark glasses, I skip over her. She doesn’t like it.
Woman in dark glasses: You don’t recognize me?
Me: Uhhhh. Take your glasses off.
Woman: How ’bout now?
Me: Your eyes look familiar, what’s your name?
Woman says her name.
Me: Where do I know you from?
Woman: You don’t.

I bust out laughing. Another thing that cracks me up is my nephew calling my blonde teenage daughters “Nicky and Paris Hilton.” The girls like it, too.

“Comfortably Numb”

I went out to the tracks yesterday in a spot where my brother and I used to throw rocks as children. I asked myself what everyone has been asking this week, “How are you feeling?”
I felt comfortably numb.

“Hello?
Is there anybody in there?”

My brother was lying on the floor with his eyes wide open. He wasn’t breathing. His lips were black they say, but I think they were probably the darkest blue. He had been listening to music on his computer when he fell to the floor. I wonder what it was, that last song he heard? What was he looking at as he lay dying?

“Well I can ease your pain,”

The coroner took a bag of his prescriptions when they came get his body. My mom found these later and asked me to scratch his name off and throw them out.

I stacked them by month starting with April of ’06 (far left). The tallest stack is what he took in August. Over a thousand Lortabs prescribed by the same doctor. He took Soma and Valium too. Hundreds of them. September would be the tallest stack, but as I said, the coroner took a bag of medicines.

I wondered why my brother kept all these empty bottles of the pills he took over the last six months. I see it and it tells me a story of a man who suffered greatly with substance abuse. Maybe he kept these to remind himself of his problem? Or maybe he knew they’d kill him and he wanted us to know how bad it had gotten? We decided not to throw the bottles away, to keep them to show people and scare them off drugs.

“There is no pain, you are receding.”

Seeing him in the coffin all I can think is that his pain is gone. I see his children in the parlor. They are suffering.

“Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.”

I kiss his cold face goodbye. I tell him thanks for cooking for me when Mamma was at work, for letting me listen to his records. His Pink Floyd I remember the most. That “Animals” one he scared me with. But I don’t feel anything by the casket. I don’t feel his spirit; I don’t understand that he is really really gone.

People say stuff to me and I have to ask them again what it is they said. I hear a real voice exactly like my dead brother’s and for a flash my brain says, “see, he’s not dead,” but I look and see it is one of my other brothers talking. They all sound alike.

At the burial the sun is blazing hot for October. No breeze. Everyone is sweating. At the very end of the service, someone hands me a rose from his casket and at that very moment a chilly breeze passes over me, it lifts my hair and I close my eyes. I thank him for the cool air as I feel my brother leaving.

Edited Note: We still don’t know the exact cause of death for Shane.

Dogs In Life And Death

When I was little, our dog had ten puppies. One of every color and according to our math, two for each of us. This was Pluto’s first set of pups and she was too young. Two of them died within the first few hours.

I had an idea. Steal some holy water from the church. The stuff works like magic dust I told the others. My brother, the meanest bully in the world even drove me there. On his bicycle. It was sleeting and dark, and on any other occasion, he would have just made me do it. Maybe he wanted to make sure it was the real thing.

It was. We got it. We blessed the dogs. I wish I could tell you that they all lived, or that just one of them did. But as I said, Pluto was pretty much a pup herself. My brother never said I jinxed them because the holy water was, after all, stolen. But I thought it anyway. Don’t even think it had anything to do with us touching them. We didn’t, we sprinkled the magic from afar, just like the priest does it.

Dogs bring out the best in people. In life and in death.