Life Cut Short...

I am weary of death. I saw far too many people die while I was working hospice, and comforted so many loved ones.  I still think about them all. On occasion, something requires that we return to New Bern and, as we drive past various streets, I remember those whose deaths I attended. Some had lived to a ripe old age and some were still young. Each death was a loss, but a few had become special to me and I felt those losses the most.

In the last year I have lost three friends of varying degrees of friendship. All in their early sixties...far too young...far too soon.

The one year anniversary of Kathy's death is nearing. I blogged about losing Kathy some months ago. She was only 61 and left behind two children in grad school...just entering adulthood. She will never see them walk across a stage and receive their degrees.  She will never have the pleasure of watching them marry, mature and enjoy some of life's successes. She will never know the pure joy of holding a grandchild and all that follows.  We will never have the opportunity to hug one another. She will be missing so much and we will be missing her.

Ann was one of my closest friends when I lived in Miami. We lived two doors away from each other and had boys the same age who became fast friends. Rarely did a day pass that we didn't spend time together. I moved 800 miles away when our boys were 9, by then she'd had a daughter about two years younger than mine. We stayed in touch, but the friendship slowly receded into the past. In recent years  Facebook helped us reconnect. Then, in June of this year, she messaged me.  The breast cancer she'd beaten over twenty-five years ago had come back and, while it responded to treatment for a couple of years, she was not winning the battle. She said she wished I was there, that she would be needing hospice soon. She was tired of fighting and wanted to die on her own terms. She said she was almost ready to stop treatment and that she was scared. We talked for a while and I gave her my cell number. She never called. Six weeks later she passed quietly. She was 66 and had three small grandchildren on two coasts who will grow up without their grandma.

Lynn was one of the beautiful girls in high school. We were not close friends but our school was all-girls and our class small enough that everyone was friendly. I learned that she was a beloved kindergarten teacher for many years. Our graduating class began reconnecting on Facebook about five years ago. It was surprising how we felt a kinship, we are TMLA sisters (TMLA being an acronym for our high school). I saw Lynn three years ago at a reunion luncheon she helped plan. She was still one of the beautiful girls. This year was our 45th reunion. Although she still lived in the area, Lynn RSVP'd that she could not attend, that she had been diagnosed with ALS and had lost her ability to speak and to eat. It was a blow to all of us. Lou Gehrig's Disease is vicious...making you a prisoner in your own body before it kills you. Lynn bravely carried on as the disease robbed her of more and more function until she was a prisoner. A week ago her daughter-in-law announced that Lynn's quality of life had deteriorated to near non-existent and that Lynn had made the decision to discontinue her tube feedings. She died Friday, leaving behind her mother, her husband, her son and daughter-in-law and a slew of former students, friends and TMLA sisters. She was 63.

Kathy's death was unexpected, with no opportunity for anyone to say goodbye. Ann and Lynn had the opportunity to say goodbye to their families as they made courageous decisions to let go. I don't know if I could be that brave...and I hope I never have to find out.  

Kathy

Wrote a few posts catching up 2012 but did not touch on the worst happening of the year.  Probably because I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

All through my trials and tribulations early on with Jack's fear of commitment and my brother's heart surgery and various other events, both happy and sad, there was one person who was always there to support me, cry with me, rant with me, and cheer me on.  Kathy.



We went to high school together, but barely knew each other then...reconnecting later in life through the miracle of facebook.  I often lamented that I wished we had known more about each other and found our connection back then...that we lost out on so many years of friendship.  She agreed, but reminded me that we had lots of years left.

She lived a full life...had many joys and endured many hardships...and came out stronger.  She was funny, irreverent, passionate and a supporter of the downtrodden.  She could put up sheetrock, lay floors, paint, move furniture.  She didn't drink, but hung out at a bar owned by a friend.  She always had room for another cat in need of a home, some of whom filled the rafters of her basement until they felt safe enough to emerge...much like Kathy who often said she was like her cats when it came to romance...hiding in the rafters, peeking out and disappearing again.  She loved the water and loved the sun, roasting to a golden brown every summer.  She dressed up as Cher on Halloween and went into the streets.  She had a way of making all her friends feel special...especially me.



 

I lost Kathy last September...the world lost Kathy last September.  She died suddenly after a short illness...leaving behind two young adult children and a legion of friends.  We won't have lots of years of friendship after all.  What we had will have to do...and I treasure every moment we had. 

I miss you, Kathy.

Love you, Sis!

Exhausting August...

Wow!  Seems August has kept me busy since this is only my second post for the month and the last day of August.  For a little while there, it almost felt I was running a Bed and Breakfast...sans breakfast as everyone helped themselves.

Lin, a girl I went to high school with visited Wilmington with her husband Dale and we had dinner together.  We went downtown for dinner at Elijah's...one of my favorites...then walked along the riverfront in Historic downtown Wilmington.  We hadn't seen each other in forty-three years and didn't know each other very well in high school - so it could have been an awkward evening, but it wasn't.  Jack and I enjoyed the evening with them and conversation flowed easily.  A nice reunion.

The next morning Glen came for a visit and brought Tasha Dog with him.  We ate out a lot, spent time visiting with Becca, Davis, Katie and Jackson and...Glen and Jack finally met.  Tasha enjoyed her time lounging on the porch!   As usual, Glen put in time cleaning up my computers - he's a computer whiz - and he started work upgrading Jack's computer.   He pronounced Jack a nice guy and said I can keep him!  I always enjoy time with Glen.

Next came Roy and Cynthia.  Roy's a former boyfriend and Cynthia is his best friend turned girlfriend.  They were in town so Cynthia could gather more information for her upcoming book on Gullah culture (due to be published by Christmas) and spent two nights with me.  It was a nice visit.

As Roy and Cynthia left, Ken and Ciera arrived.  They wanted one last weekend at the beach before Ciera went back to school.  Got some beach time in and some good food.  Sadly, Becca and family were out of town so the cousins missed each other.  It was good to see them again...a little  odd, but good.

A few days later I experienced a first in my life.  There was a 5.8 earthquake in Northern Virginia that was felt down here!  It created much excitement and frenzy for East Coasters unfamiliar with earthquakes.  I was sitting on Jack's couch watching something I'd DVR'd (he was at work) and the couch started to shimmy sideways.  My first thought was that the dog was scratching while leaning against the couch...until I saw her sitting on a chair!  I didn't know what it was until I later went online, but I'm proud to say I didn't freak!  Jack, being from California, knew exactly what it was immediately.

Gail, Jack and Mardell

Jack's sister Mardell came to town next.  She was in New Jersey visiting a friend and they traveled to Carolina Beach for a few days, so we made plans to meet in Wilmington.  We spent most of the day wandering downtown and visiting - with a stop for lunch at Elijah's, of course, and ice cream at Kilwins.  I really enjoyed meeting her and her friend Ellen.  We got along well; I liked them and they seemed to like me.  Jack later told me I received his sister's stamp of approval.

A few days later, Irene came to town - a rather unwelcome visitor as Irene was a Category 2 hurricane.  We battened down the hatches at my house, left the cats lots of food and water and retreated to Jack's to ride her out.  She was expected to bypass Wilmington and make landfall at Morehead City so we knew the cats would be safe.  We fared well - only losing power for about eight hours.  It got a little warm without A/C and have to admit we missed cable which stayed out about twenty-four hours...but really no great hardship.

Wonder what September has in store...

August Already?

My gosh...we're nearly half way through August!  Still no real job, but signed up with an agency to work flu-shot clinics this fall - so maybe an opportunity for some money.  The routine job hunting continues as always.

Jack and I have dinner plans tomorrow with a girl from my high school - and her husband.  After forty-three years I suppose I shouldn't be referring to her as a girl, though that's what she was the last time I saw her!  Funny how time changes perspective...though we were not close in high school, we are both excited and looking forward to seeing each other tomorrow.  We reconnected via Facebook.  Her husband is a car racing enthusiast as is Jack, so I am hoping the men will find common ground for conversation.

Saturday, Glen arrives for a visit - his first in a year.  I am looking forward to introducing him to Jack and just having time to visit!

Down the August road - more house guests and meeting Jack's sister...

San Francisco, Returning Home and Clogged Pipes...

Back from my San Francisco trip for two days...and the bathroom pipes clogged again.  Steve - my good-looking plumber - came by, unclogged the pipes and once again refused payment.  He's going to come back next week with a camera and see if he can find the root of the problem.  There's got to be a reason the pipes keep clogging.  I hope we can get this taken care of...I can't keep calling him every few days and he can't keep unclogging my pipes gratis.

San Francisco was nice.  Visited the Castro District and enjoyed the Different Lights Bookstore; went to Chinatown to eat Dim Sum and to North Beach to eat Italian.   Traipsed through the rain to the Japanese Tea Garden, had some tea and met a delightful young man from the Netherlands.

Johan was in the states on business and enjoying the sights.  He is 32, single and fluent in Dutch, English and German with a smattering of French.  He recently met a very nice young lady online named Eva and was hoping the separation would not thwart a budding romance as the eight hour time difference made communication difficult.  As we sat and shared stories of hopeful romance found online, I found myself wondering if an American that age would be as comfortable chatting with a sixty year old woman as he was.

Also visited the famed City Lights Bookstore, prowled the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, walked Fisherman's Wharf and Ghiradelli Square, rode the trolleys and the cable cars, and toured Alcatraz as described in my previous post.  It rained a lot and the temps stayed between forty-five and sixty.

It was a nice trip, but I was ready to come home.  Rather unusual for me.  I'm usually gypsy-like and never quite ready to go home.  This time was different.  I learned that, while I love to travel, who I am with matters more than where I go and the person I really wanted to be with was back home.

More Childhood Memories...

We moved from the house on 85th Ave to the house on Superior Road when I was seven.  The LIRR ran right behind the house and no one could sleep the first night we moved in.  Dad packed us up and we went somewhere for the weekend.  I don't remember what happened after that weekend, but eventually we hardly noticed the trains and were always surprised when someone else did.  Hardly noticed them, that is, except when Glen and I were competing.  We worked out a system that awarded points.  If a freight train ended with a red caboose, I got a point; if it ended with an orange caboose, Glen got a point.  If a passenger train ended with a double-decker car, point to Gail.  Standard single-decker passenger car at the end went to Glen.  Most of the trains ended with either an orange caboose or a single level passenger car...so Glen "won" most of the time.  It seems my habit of rooting for the underdog started early.

Life changed in the new neighbothood.  It was quieter and more affluent - only we weren't...affluent that it.  Mom and Dad kept me in the Catholic Elementary School in the old neighborhood - so I went to school with one group of kids, lived near another and didn't fit in either place.  There were no kids running around in the streets or jumping rope on the sidewalk...they played quietly in each other's back yards...and ignored me, the Italian Catholic girl who didn't go to their school.  It hurt being snubbed regularly, but I learned to keep quiet and pretend to ignore it.   At some point I made friends with three or four boys who attended the same Catholic school I did...Johnny Rebhann, Jimmy Grennen, Tommy McMahon and sometimes Kevin Heath  Kevin was orphaned after a few years and went to live with relatives in Michigan.  It felt so strange to have a friend with no parents.  It was hard during the times when the boys would go through a "girls are yucky" stage - but they ultimately became the source of some limited experimentation (I hated being the "victim" of the "TV game" as the boys called it), my first kiss (Jimmy...I was 14 and devastated to later learn that the only reason he kissed me was to win a bet among them as to who could get kissed first; I tried to get him to "like" me for years after that) and my first boyfriend (Johnny...I was 14 and had had a crush on him since the second grade).

When I was eleven, Mom had a surprise pregnancy and I got a baby brother just before my twelfth birthday.  It was exciting at first - brought out my nurturing qualities.  I learned to change diapers, feed and burp and rarely went anywhere without the baby carriage.  After a while it got old, but the bond was established...really more mother-child than big sister-little brother.  It remains that way to this day.

Day to day life was not particularly memorable.  Glen and I tended to stay out of Dad's way as his moods were volatile...though I was better at that than Glen was.  For the few years that Amy was with us, I was enamoured of her life and crazy about her boyfriend, Richie.  She introduced me to rock 'n' roll and taught me how to dance, but she left home when I was about ten.

As time went on, I made a few girlfriends...Nettie Roos, the Dutch only child whose Mom was six feet tall, rode every where on a bicycle and taught us how to do Eeeny, Meeny, Miney Moe in Dutch;  Alene Zully, the oldest of five sisters was my friend in the sixth grade but then moved away to Oyster Bay; Carol Lee Pallin, my friend in the seventh and eighth grades, hung out with me and the boys and became Tommy's girlfriend for a little while. 

High school days rolled around and things changed again.  I found a Best Friend.  Mary Anne Rotolo was a year behind me in school, but she lived in my neighborhood and went to the same Catholic HS I did.  We became inseperable and were often taken for sisters with our dark Italian good looks and long black hair - only I am 5'3" and she is 5'10" - we were a female Mutt and Jeff!  She was from a large family that welcomed me with open arms.  I spent a lot of time there during my HS years and had a mad crush on her brother, Joey.



74 Superior Road
Bellerose, New York

 I lived in the house on Superior Road for fourteen years - from the time I was seven until the day of my wedding at age 21 - in the front upstairs bedroom with the ugly green and pink wallpaper and two windows overlooking the rooftop.  I remember the pantry with the freezer big enough to hold a body, the red breakfast nook, the knotty pine all over the kitchen and basement, the brick fireplace that never saw a fire, the window seat in the foyer that held Dad's old books and the great big walk up attic that I loved to retreat to.

My parents sold the house and moved south decades ago, but I can still see the interior like it was yesterday.  I have good memories and bad memories of those fourteen years...and more as I returned often with my babies to visit.  Thanksgivings around the dining room table...and the trees on the dining room wallpaper.  My grandparents all sitting out in lawn chairs in the backyard...conversation suspended every time a train went by.  Glen and I in the yard waving at the engineers...cheering if they waved back.  A slap in the face from Dad when I was fourteen - I didn't speak to him for a week and he never did it again.  Mom bathing my new son in the kitchen sink.  Dead birds in the chimmney and bugs in the carpet - I was glad to see the ugly green carpet go.  So much green in that house, I did not use green in my own house for almost forty years!  Grandmommy fallng in the basement and breaking her hip.  My first baby shower held in the living room.  A quickie with my fiance` in the basement when everyone else was asleep.  The mailman shouting through the screen door when an airmail letter arrived for me from my Marine boyfriend.  Guys subjected to the third degree when they came to take me on dates.  Denting the rear corner of the house with Mom's car when I came up the driveway too fast - Mom thought it was an earthquake - I thought life as I knew it was over - but Dad was surpisingly calm about it.  Hiding at the top of the stairs as a kid listening to Mom and Dad fight.  The conversation in the kitchen when I told Mom and Dad I was getting married.  And another conversation a few years later in the same kitchen, when they told me they were thinking about getting a divorce (the divorce never came to be).  So many things helped shape the woman I am today...

...always hoping for a red caboose.

A New York Reunion...

Went to New York last weekend for the TMLA Class of ‘68’s Second Annual Luncheon, a long title of my invention for a small gathering of women. I’ve never made it to previous high school reunions before, distance, money or family obligations usually being the obstacles. Money was an obstacle this year, but with the help of my old friend, Jayne, who put me up and chauffeured me around – thus saving me the cost of both a hotel and a rental car – I finally made it!

Most of us looked pretty good for our sixtieth year - a few would have been recognizable anywhere – as for the rest of us, thank goodness for name tags with our H.S. pics on them!  It was fun seeing old faces and catching up with old friends' news.  We're widowed, divorced, remarried, long-time married and single....we have grown children, teens still at home, grandchildren and no children...we're retired, still working and involuntarily unemployed.  We laughed, hugged, talked, reminisced and made plans to do it again!

I hadn't seen Jayne in twenty-five or thirty years but it didn't take long at all to fall into comfortable conversation and catch up on years of happenings.  The friends you can pick up with after years, as though you'd last visited only days or weeks ago, are the best kind!  I'm resolving to keep our friendship current this time around...can't afford to wait another twenty-five or thirty years to see each other again!

Thanks in part to Facebook, I am also forging a new friendship.  Randy and I knew each other in high school, but not well.  Reconnecting on FB before the reunion, we found we had much in common, so we made a point to spend some time together.  Jayne, and I had a leisurely lunch with Randy on Sunday and had such fun.  I wish Randy and I had taken time to get to know each other better forty-two years ago...but it's never too late!

The reunion lunch took me back to Long Island for the first time in over twenty years and it was a real trip down memory lane.  I don't know what was more fun...seeing what's changed or seeing what hasn't.  My old elementary school has taken on the look of a reform school...run down, bars on the windows and neglected lawns.  The house where I grew up looked great, but the house we lived in when I was born had a decidedly unkempt feel to it.  The old drugstore on the corner where I met my first husband is now a nail salon and his favorite bowling alley is a mini-mall with a Staples.  Nancy's Fireside lounge, scene of many of our dates is still there, only it is just called Nancy's.  Our luncheon was held at Stella's, also scene of many dates, but I wouldn't have recognized it - it had been completely renovated from pizza place to lovely Italian Ristorante - but the food hadn't changed a bit...it was delicious!

It was truly a fun weekend.  I'm glad I went...and hope to go again!

Old Friends, New Friends and The Blue Virgin...

My brother Glen is here again.  A friend of his from high school just published her first novel and was in town this weekend for a book signing.  He has the coolest friends.

Marni's a retired nurse and has always loved writing - poetry as a young girl, articles for nursing journals during her nursing career and fiction...mysteries to be precise.

The Blue Virgin

Her new novel is a mystery, set in Oxford, England, and Marni's first hand experience in Oxford is evident in her book, as is her grasp of the intricacies of the mystery genre.

I read The Blue Virgin several months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it...but have to confess...I was just a teeny bit jealous.   I too am a nurse (currently being forced to contemplate retirement), an avid reader (partial to mysteries) and a wishful writer...I have some skills but lack the creativity and imagination required for success.  Needless to say, I was excited at the prospect of meeting someone who succeeded in bringing this particular dream to reality.  Our plan was to attend the book signing and then all have dinner together.

Marni felt like a friend the first minute we met...warm and outgoing with a contagious smile...and just too nice to be the least bit jealous of!  Turns out we went to the same nursing school and trained in the same hospitals...at almost the same time...and likely crossed paths at some point!  Her husband, Arthur - a retired plastic surgeon - although on the quieter side, was just as down-to-earth as Marni.  They are people I would enjoy getting to know better.

The book signing, which resulted in the sale of ten books, was a success.  Dinner at The Pilot House was an even bigger success.  Another HS friend of Glen's and Marni's...Simone and her husband, Tom...joined us.  The good food, the camraderie and the peaceful atmosphere that accompanies dining on the riverfront added up to a really great time and by the end of the evening I felt like I had new friends.

P.S. ~ If you'd like to read The Blue Virgin, you can either request that your Barnes and Noble store order it for you or you can order directly from this website:  The Blue Virgin.  Meanwhile, Marni is hard at work on the next novel in this series.