March/April: March 30, 2006
Though I have several in my family who’ve had a military background, I was once far removed from these relatives in life as I knew it at the time. Looking back provides me with proof that a warrior spirit is just that. It calls from within. After all, I was thirty-three when I joined the United States Army. I didn’t have a family that sat with me and filled me with stories of military exposure and glamour. I was my family.
Shane, my first son, was born on November 7, 1971 and died on April 2, 1973—the year I should’ve graduated high school. I buried him on April 4, so perhaps the trees that surrounded me then looked much the same as my trees do today, I don’t remember. But I do remember the evergreens at the cemetery. The rest of the landscape appeared forlorn next to their brilliant health. They seemed out of place and artificial. The contrast insisted on attention. Poverty from the red dry land held steady against the winds in the South Plains of Littlefield.
Littlefield, Texas: Home of Waylon Jennings and Jennings’ Conoco. Too, home for a few living Pickrell’s. Also for graves of Grigsby and Pickrell alike. Shane joined three other babies in this particular patch of cemetery. Its care is non-perpetual and filled with chipped granite and stone. Names and dates record solitary events. Life then Death—or Death then Life, depending on how you’re looking at it. Some of the headstones had old photos fixed on their fronts. Faces faded in black and white.
As a youngster, I rummaged around this cemetery while MaMa tidied the graves of the departed. I walked and stared at the pictures. Back then, I imagined the people—not their lives, but their deaths. Morbid fixation occurred later that night. Those were the times I left my bed and slept with MaMa.
I guarded Shane at death’s door for seventeen months before we buried him. My newborn displayed problems from the start. He wouldn’t nurse from my breasts at all. His sucking-reflex was all but absent. He handled a preemie nipple best.
When he was four months old, we carried him to a huge hospital in Albuquerque , New Mexico
The tests were accurate enough. The doctors diagnosed Shane. Profoundly mentally retarded. Cause unknown. I know we call it something different today; mentally challenged, I think. But retardation is not a bad or ugly word, though society has made it sound so. And I don’t use the term “profoundly” in the adverb form, but as a classification. I worked for the Texas Department of Mental Health /Mental Retardation in the eighties, when Aaron was a baby. They had four classifications of retardation: mild, moderate, severe and profound. Shane most certainly fell into the last and most hopeless of all categories. Microcephalic. It means small head. Small brain. Irreversible.
Too, hypoglycemic. Hard to find baby anything without sugar during those days. Polio vaccines propelled my baby into choking, gagging seizures. His tiny body jerked, his spine twisted. Seventeen pounds was his top weight.
As time progressed, he regressed. I developed the habit of label reading at the grocery store. Even Morton’s salt had dextrose in it. A dose of sugar in any form equaled a dose of healthy seizures. Most baby foods had sugar in them. I mashed up bananas, carrots, that kind of thing. He’d choke and vomit. Twice daily doses of Dilantin and Phenobarbital helped to a degree, but three or four seizures a day remained common in the life of Shane—in the life of those of us who watched him, loved him.
We checked him in and out of hospitals. He received nutrition by way of IV’s. Strapped down to a small board by way of ace bandages, he slept, seized. Cries of the weakest form broke our hearts. Cry, sleep, cry. His veins and muscles a mere nothing. Then he’d get enough fluids to live a while longer. He never crawled or walked. Couldn’t hear or see. His spine never fully supported his small head. His life was a sentence of seizures, chokes and short naps.
His final hospital stay lasted about a week. After consulting with the doctor, I had the suction tubes pulled from him. It was a family decision, because as the doctor had warned, “Many parents suffer a tremendous amount of guilt after they remove life support. But no, he’s not ever going to get any better.”
Starvation. His body rejected fluids that last week. Except for the fluid on his lungs. Pneumonia. He weighed ten pounds when he died. He weighed over seven pounds the first day his twenty-one inch body lived outside my womb. Lost, gained. Lost, gained. Lost. Lost.
Suction hoses pulled, the doctor gave him twenty-four to forty-eight hours to live. It took twenty-six. He died at Methodist Hospital in Lubbock , Texas
At Shane’s funeral, I looked around and tried to feel pleased by all the people who’d made the drive for his funeral. Friends I’d gone to school and hung out with were pallbearers that day. I overheard plans for a party, scheduled for later that night.
I looked up and around at my friends. Some couldn’t look me in the face. A few still had braces on their teeth. And others must’ve been lost in thought. Maybe they planned their wardrobe for the party in the works. Some attention-getting outfit. Something to make them stand out.
Such is the mind of a teen attending a funeral. As it should be. You really shouldn’t be the one in black, but then I wore blue and white. Baby blue and white. Strange. It must’ve been the funeral fashion for that time—the absence of black. Mom kept up with those things. She taught them to me. Inappropriate to wear white shoes or carry your white purse after Labor Day.
Before departing for the funeral that morning, I’d been racing to get ready. I really don’t know where my mind was. Well, now I do. Understood now, since I’ve lived through it a second time. But after my bath on April 4, 1973, perhaps at the same time as the ribbon-cutting ceremony in New York City when the World Trade Center
She found me in the bedroom we’d once shared, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. And then I remembered. Shane would never need another bath. He was gone.
It took me a long time to get used to the fact my baby had died.
Aaron was protective of Shane’s memory. He’d never let anyone say the word “retarded” around me. Thinking his protection of me charming, I still tried silencing his unease about his eldest brother’s label. It never worked. Aaron was a bit of a preacher himself.
My cousin, Tonya, I call her Ya Ya now, told me a couple of days before Shane died, “You’re a survivor, De’on. You always have been.”
Makes me sound a little invincible.
I waited ten years to have Aaron and the entire pregnancy was difficult. Sonogram after sonogram, month after frightful month, the interpretation of the technical marvel was always the same. Aaron’s head measured too small. At first, my doctor asked me every question imaginable. She struggled with my fears, with me. Near the end of my pregnancy, she told me, “You have your faith in the Lord.”
She couldn’t tell me my son would be normal. She only reminded me of my faith. Sometimes there’s so little to say.
My faith wavered, but I knew God had promised He’d never give His children more than they could bear. I believed Him. Back and forth. But I had no other choice. I wanted this baby so much.
Aaron was normal. Well, nearly normal. Normal
Someday, upon my arrival in heaven, I fully expect that my elder son, after some form of greeting will look at me and point near him. The first words Shane will ever speak to me might sound something like, “Hi, Mom. Aaron’s over there.”
March/April/Nisan/Iyar
Nisan is the first ecclesiastical and seventh civil month on the Jewish calendar. It corresponds with March and April, has thirty days, though another source cites twenty-nine days for Nisan. The Jews used two kinds of calendars, a civil calendar (official calendar of kings, childbirth, and contracts) and a sacred calendar, from which festivals are computed. Hebrew months were alternately thirty and twenty-nine days long. Their year, shorter than ours, had 354 days. Therefore, about every three years (seven times in nineteen years) an extra twenty-nine day month, Veadar, was added between Adar and Nisan.
April 22, 2004 was the same as Iyar 1, 2004 on the Jewish calendar. Iyar 1, a Thursday that year, was the day Dad was diagnosed with his first cancer. The same day I talked to God and my ceiling fan. The day I told Him that my dad’s cancer must mean Aaron was coming home.
I know so much.
March 29, 2006
Consider April. Consider you’ll even see the morning of April 1, 2006 spring into being. There are only two possibilities. That you will or won’t, but me, I begin to see April during late March. It must be the weather, though the end of April will look and feel far different from the end of March.
The clothes I wore on the day the Marines delivered the news to my door were later thrown away because they were old. I don’t believe there was an underlying cause. I try to stay aware of those kinds of tendencies. Those Freudian ambiguities, the first recordable evidence of anger, controlled or uncontrolled, or perhaps paranoia, proofs of nebulous order that reverse to bite you in the backside later.
Substantiations, later construed from a long mess of things, scraps pieced together. Confirmations, forming a lucid trail, a recordable moment of you laboring out your last piece of gray matter. “We should’ve seen it coming,” the family will say. But alas, the banging bells, heard too late, and yes, at last, girl, you finally tripped the wire. Your living demise, certain.
My closets and drawers are full of old clothes.
“The Leper Lady” caused a certain amount of grief to my mother when she heard my mention of her. “You don’t really see her, do you?” she’d asked yesterday.
“No, Mom,” I answered into the phone.
“She’s like an image then?”
“Yes.”
My family keeps an eye on me. I’m okay.
If I wait long enough.
The Leper Lady will either heal or die.
My husband strains to understand the cadence to which his wife marches and now asks every day, “How are you?”
I really don’t know how to answer this. There just isn’t an answer. Answered if I’ve spent the day in bed, unable to function. I’m not at a loss to answer then. But that’s only happened a few times.
Today my hope is not much more than the hint of growth in my barely tended yard. Bare and without color, hope in the contradictory. In spite of it all, we’ve made it to one more season. Something has now passed, for a time at least.
Jesus was crucified the third hour. When the sixth hour came, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, from noon until 3 p.m. (this was not due to a solar eclipse because at Passover the moon is always full). He cried out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” These were not His last words. No, His last words weren’t a question. No, His last words were, “It is finished.”
I hope my last words aren’t a question. I’m so full of them right now. God questions—not military.
Aaron died close to the beginning of the third hour, the end of the second. No real correlation to Jesus’ death, except that he suffered and bled. Mary was there to weep as Jesus died. She shared in her son’s death. I didn’t even know my son had died right before noon in the Middle East . It was shortly before 2:00 a.m. in New Mexico
The last movie I watched inside a theater was Passion of The Christ. I saw it shortly before Aaron was killed, so it must’ve been in April. The tragic month of April. But I smiled during the scene where Jesus tossed water at Mary. A playful moment between mom and son. And I remember the words Live by the sword, die by the sword. Aaron’s destiny, but with modern weaponry. I don’t balk as I write that. Aaron lived and died fighting. It was in his nature. He was a warrior.
The April 26, 2004 cover story for the New York Magazine, called ‘The Boiling Point’ wrapped itself in the coverage of an NBC reality show, The Restaurant. The article states that Financier Jeffrey Chodrow and Chef DiSpirito are hurling invectives and legal papers at one another.
I’m learning my son was shot to death in a foreign and hostile country while others are unraveling spaghetti strands.
Even now, it doesn’t make sense.
One mother’s son loses his battle to cancer the same day Aaron loses his life in Fallujah. She called me soon after she’d read Aaron’s obituary in the Amarillo
Another mother’s son dies here in Lovington. Losing control of his vehicle and skidding broadside into an oil tanker, dying just before noon on Saturday. This news was reported in our local paper on April 27, the following Tuesday, the same day as Aaron’s was reported. The young man, only sixteen, was traveling eastbound on Avenue R when he lost control. A treacherous curve. Around Lovington, we refer to it as Dead Man’s Curve.
Aaron and I lived in a new apartment near Dead Man’s Curve when he was still crawling. After Aaron became a teenager, he referred to these same apartments as The Projects. Time has a way of deteriorating things.
April flowers, the daisy and sweet pea. Aaron’s favorite flower in his granny’s yard was the snapdragon. Sometimes things mean nothing.
That’s not right. Snapdragons meant something to Granny and Aaron.
It has become a part of me. I can’t let anyone deceive me into thinking that it must go away. I can’t. I don’t want The Leper Lady to hop in and out of the shadows. I don’t want her to heal or die. I just want her to become still. To become satisfied in her suffering until she too can journey to her eternal home. Whole.
I don’t really want to concentrate on now.
March 24, 2008:
Weather permitting, Mom’s out in her backyard. I bet she’s out there today.
She looks at her trees and I know talks to them. To me, she replicates their beauty—full, but with autumn’s gold and silver. She says she doesn’t know how many more summers she has to look at them. She’s in her early seventies and for a decade of those, she’s said that same thing. Each summer is precious to her. She waters a great deal during the spring to ready for the summer. Then she waters during the summer for the summer and the coming fall, then during the fall to ward off shock of the winter. She nurtures. A perpetual garden hose lives at the end of her right hand.
Aaron loved nutrition breaks in high school. His granny’s house is just several hundred feet northwest of Lovington High. When the school bell rang, Aaron was off like a shot to visit her.
It wasn’t a secret Aaron smoked from an early age, so the ten minutes he had, he smoked and walked with Granny around her flowerbeds and through her side-and-one-half of the alley.
Mom waters her alley too. The wildflowers she grows there are thirsty, so, poor Jerry and his water bill and poor government soil and water conservation programs.
Think blue in the face.
But Aaron loved it. “What kind are these, Granny?” he once asked and pointed to the faces of tiny dragons.
“Snapdragons,” she said
“Oh good. I like those best and Mom planted some.”
“Your mom planted some?” My mother is curious. Almost impressed.
“When will ours be as big as yours?”
She just gave him that look.
Their times together, pretty good, so one day he brought a buddy along. The next day, two. Two days later, five. Before long, nutrition breaks for Granny ran a half-block and a half-pack.
As was the short-lived norm, Aaron and the line of famished teens broke for their nutritional needs one day and started their quick journey.
Fed-up, the cigarette lady met them at her front door. “Ok, this is it. Everybody line-up. I’m giving you each two cigarettes and that’s it. No more after this,” she said in her best outside voice.
Aaron, thinking he was surely an exception to the decree, showed up the next day. In his best inside voice he asked her, “Its okay for me, huh, Granny?”
Well, I just imagine.
Once again, my son walked alone with my mother. Together they sifted through smoke rings and greeted the faces of tiny dragons that opened and closed their mouths when properly squeezed.
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