Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Wherein I beg for money.

I don't normally beg for money.

Well, okay, there's the whole "standing at the Rosa Parks offramp with the "I need whisky" sign" thing, but, hey...sometimes there must be whisky regardless of the household budget.

But. This September I'm taking part in an Alzheimers fundraiser. I'm part of a group that's walking for Jimmy Conway, a player from the old NASL Timbers. But I'm also taking part for my own father, the Master Chief, who died of - I suspect as much as the stroke that carried him off - mortification that he was losing his mind to senility.

IT's no big thing. I walk around Portland International Raceway with a group of friends from the Timbers Army. LAst year I made it barely past the start house before my bad hip forced me to stop. This year I'm gonna make it all the way around, dammit. The Master Chief would expect nothing less.

So. I'm putting this here in hopes that you might toss a few dollars into my tin for Jimmy, and Jack Lawes and I promise - promise! - that this time I won't spend it on whisky.

If you follow the link above, I'm down there on the bottom right; John Lawes. Click "donate".

Thanks.

No whisky this time. Really. Swear ta God.

Life is Life: A Master Chief story

When my father was dying last spring several of you asked me to tell you something more about him. I don't know...yes, I do know why that occurred to me this morning; a friend of mine just lost her mother and I thought back to losing my father.

So. You recall that I told you that my father the Master Chief was a proudly intellectual man, an engineer, with an engineer's dislike of obfuscation and insistence on precision in both word and deed. That made him something of an uncomfortable man to be around; he was perfectly capable of the sorts of small evasions and elisions that we use to lubricate our interactions with others, but one could never be sure if, or when, he might simply state an unpalatable truth. Not rudely, perhaps, or as a weapon of social combat, but simply as he saw it.

I'm not sure when this was - probably some time in the early Seventies when I was between puberty and young adulthood and full of the sort of rudely anxious certainty that seems to come with our early teens - but I was holding forth at dinner on the unfair requirement that I perform certain chores during the long summer vacation, in that that vacation time was itself limited and the requirement to put my own entertainment on hold even further seemed grossly burdensome, a needless reduction of my already-painfully-short free time. The Master Chief listened to this gravely, and nodded, and replied:

"Well, yes, but you still have more free time than you will ever have again in your life. After your school days are over you will never have this much freedom again. Not just less but much less. You'll probably never have more than two weeks vacation the rest of your life. You'll work at your job that means five days a week or more, no spring breaks, no summer vacation, no half-days, no two weeks a Christmas. Just work and two weeks a year."

This seemed appallingly, punitively unfair, and I said so. Was that it? School and work, work and school, endlessly and forever with only the thinnest of hopes of a rest? What was the point, then? What was the end? When did it stop?

"Once you're older, perhaps, if you've planned and worked carefully, there might be a "retirement" when you will have all the free time you could hope for." he noted. I wailed that this seemed even worse; the only hope for freedom was to hope to be to ancient to enjoy it. What hope then?

"Well, then you die." was his conclusion. Dinner done, he retired to his chair to smoke a pipe and mark up the paperwork he'd brought home with him.

My mother was horrified; "Jack!" she exclaimed, and hurried to reassure me that life wasn't that bleak. But I think that my father was well satisfied to remind me, hedonistic youth of the hothouse hedonism of the Seventies and the relative wealth that his work had brought us, that at bottom what mattered was living up to your promises, taking satisfaction from work and life well-done, and dying without regrets, without leaving your works unfinished.

And that was my father, or at least a part of him.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

I lathered him with me shillelagh

...for he trod on the tails o' me coat.

Normally it's just the walking stick I use to take the weight off my bad leg. But last Sunday it was me shillelagh as I went walkin' in honor of two men I hold (or held) dear; my own father, and the former Timbers great Jimmy Conway of Dublin.

Conway is dying of the disease that killed my father, robbed of his life by the death inside his own head. He lives on in the hearts of his friends Mick Hoban and "Timber" Jim Serrill and through them to those of us who know them. When Mick sent out a call for the Timbers soccer community to join in the Alzheimer's Walk the past Sunday I was proud to join. I hobbled alongside my Bride as far down the track - the event was held out at North Portland's motor racetrack - as I could before we headed back home. I wish I could do more, but I'm not a physician or a neurologist. All I can do is walk and damn little of that. But walk I can, and did.

To the immortal memory, pop. I hope you and Jimmy raise a glass to yourselves wherever it is that the souls of the living dead are gone.

Filius est pars patris

Well, my father died in...well, it'd be wrong to call it "his sleep"; it was the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead. He was alive only in the sense that his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath.

Early on the morning of Sunday May 3, 2015, however, that ended.

He died hard, my father, his body refusing to cease its function days after his mind had ceased to direct it. It was...painful...to watch. As a living man he was inordinately proud of his intellect. He was an engineer, a Cornell Chem-E from the postwar crop, and if there ever was a term that described him "engineer" was a good one. He was convinced that there was no problem that he couldn't out-think or solution that he couldn't design, whether to physical or personal matters.

He was in several ways a difficult man, but for all his cussedness he was also a decent, honorable man in a fashion that made his stubborn irreconcilability as much a quirk as a curse.

So to see his husk a mindless, twitching thing lying helpless in a bed was very hard. My mother and sister both told him that they were content with him, that he had finished his time here and they were willing to release him. I sat with him, talked to him, told him that he had done his job, raised his family and cared for his wife, and now that great work was ended.

But in his contrary fashion he refused to die until he was ready. And then, in the half-light of predawn, he was gone.

I don't want to be maudlin about his death. In many, many ways it was a great mercy. His mind was failing, the intellectual acuity that defined him in life leaving him apace. I believe that the part of him that was still lucid hated and raged against that decerebration, that loss of self, and both hated and feared what he was becoming, the gormless vacancy of mindless existence, the parody of his life that would have been not life but un-death. The death of his body spared him that, at least.

But that mercy is only for the dead. As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone.

I am in several senses my father's son. One of those is that I, too, am vain of my intelligence. As such I understand that it is the nature of life and death that sons are born to bury their fathers, that a man who dies before his children is in that way a blessed man and that the child who buries his father will find nepenthe for the grief and loss of that parting.

But that does not make me feel particularly blessed or peaceful today.

The son is a part of the father, and now that part of me is dust and ashes.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

The Master Chief says good-night

My father - the "Master Chief" for those of you longtime readers - is in his late eighties and has been slowly fading into the sort of twilight lands that we often wander into late in our lives. Forgetful, querulous, diffused...all the early signs of a mind that is dwindling towards that last goodnight.

But he was, as he has always been, physically sound. So it was a bit of a shock to get a phone call from my sister - who of the two of us is the geographically close one - last week informing me that my father was in the local hospital have suffered some sort of brain trauma, and the medical tests had revealed that the insult was bleeding inside his head, a sort of stroke, if you will.

He had lost much of his coherence and almost all of his intellectual function. Over the past weekend into Monday he appeared weak but physically healthier than mentally; the medical opinion was that whatever had happened inside his head had suddenly moved him into the "late stage" of Alzheimer's Syndrome. Monday he was moved into the Alzheimer/hospice care wing of the place where he and my mother now live out the ends of their lives. I and my sister were preparing for a part of our lives that now included the body but not the mind or soul of the man who was our father.

But Nature or my father, who was ever a masterful man, intended otherwise. My sister called again last evening to tell me that my father had fallen yet further into the wilderlands of brain death. He was lingering now like a cat in a doorway, motionless, at the very furthest borderlands of death. My sister called this morning to inform me that our father is still sleeping if you consider the consciousless twilight at the edge of life "sleep".

But the blades of the scissors are very near his thread. The hospice nurse told her "Hours. Days. But not weeks."

So I'm taking the wretched day-long cross country flight this afternoon not knowing whether I will arrive before he departs.

But in a very real sense he has already gone on ahead of me. The shell that breathes in the bed in the anonymous room in the industrial warehouse for the old is not my father, not the man who raised me or stood beside me through my childhood and young adulthood and manhood, who helped me become who I am and what I am.

That man is already gone. What remains for me is to honor the bargain that we all make, parent and child, father and son, mother and daughter, from the moment we begin our lives together; that we as parents will bring our children into the world and we as children will see our parents out of it.

Catullus said it better than I ever can, and so I will depart and leave him speak for me:

"Traveling through many lands and over many seas I have come, brother, for these wretched funeral rites, to give you the last dues of the dead and to speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes."

Out of the gloaming

When I was twelve my father and I used to go out back behind the big house in Chicago and throw the baseball back and forth, me with my "Ernie Banks" model first-baseman's glove and my pop with his 1940's style "giant puffy Mickey Mouse hand" mitt.

We would throw the ball until the light began to fade, in those long summer evenings, enjoying the small conversations, and good stretch of arm muscles, and the pop of the ball into the glove.

But the light would fade, and I would begin to lose track of the ball in the gloaming, until one evening the inevitable happened and the grimy gray ball sailed over my mitt and popped me square in the face.

My father came over to see why I was lying around not throwing the ball, checked me out to ensure I wasn't really hurt, and then picked up the ball and his son with the other hand and remarked, as we headed indoors to find my mother and a baggie of ice:

"Next time just make sure you keep your glove up."

That was good advice and I've kept my glove up ever since, Pop, thanks. Happy Father's Day.

Street Football

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the late Sixties my pop, the Master Chief, used to toss the football around in the quiet suburban street - Hillside Avenue in Glen Ellyn, Illinois - out side our big old house.

Those times; the crisp acrid smell of the fallen leaves, the cool snap of the autumn air, the perfect heft and flight of the prolate sphere...they are still lovely memories of my father.

Now he and I are far apart, and at 86 he is no longer able to toss the ball with the same authority as he once did.

So it has fallen to me and my son to maintain the family tradition. So we took advantage of the break in the rain we're enjoying Thanksgiving Day and tossed the little football about for a while. He's a good tosser, the Peep. Catching? We're working on that.

Mind you, my father is famous in our household for his observation (during a late summer baseball-toss in which a hard throw coming out of the falling darkness popped me right in the face) that "You should have gotten your glove up."

The Master Chief knew even then that life is harder than a baseball and just as likely to hit you in the face when you least expect it.

Unless you get your glove up.