Chapter Twelve: The Fourth of the Last Four Days
Visitation, Memories of Frank Cooper and Great Friends
One thinks that the end of the Caregiver’s Journey might be the funeral. I guess I thought it was too. It boiled down to a statement very simple for friends and family to attend.
Was it Over?
Saying - Visitation will be held at Memphis Funeral Home on Tuesday, October 7, from 12–2 p.m., followed by a short graveside service at 3:30 p.m. in Forest Hill South Cemetery. Richard wishes to thank all of those who were supportive of our needs during these recent times. Thank you to Father Frank Cooper for reminding us through this quote that, “Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those that travel with us. So be quick to love and make haste to be kind.” - does not end the journey.
This was not the end as I thought it would be. Susan showed up, and that is my most vivid memory of this day. A wonderful surprise from our days at Coastal Dunes, she and Herb having been along for the journey from more or less its beginning to its final ending.
As I write this today, updating from a much older writing, I have no vivid memory of my mother having attended. Let me be clear here: they did not get along, and there were reasons why. More importantly, as I have stated in previous writings, I am certain the relationship of husband and wife supersedes that of mother and son.
How Did I get To Her?
You see, when I divorced my son’s wife in 1994, my mother had issues with that. Having never really moved along from her own divorce, she seemed to place blame on me for that failing. I will spare you all the backstory on that. Brenda, then, when I met her later, was cast into some odd role by my mother.
Diversion and Misdirection
You see my first wife and I had come to an impasse for sure. We divorced. My friend Joe one day afterwards called me at was my most miserable work life ever with people that I really did not like at all and said “hey man let’s go to Owen Brennan’s after work and hang out”. It was a Wednesday. I can tell you to this day it was December 7, 1994.
We walked in and hung out. I was terribly shy at the time and I suppose I ordered a glass of wine or something. There were so many people. I suppose I was either totally aware of completely unaware but I noticed her as she walked in. I can remember much about it but two things I really remember. She had this kind of a houndstooth jacket on with a big elephant pin. I think she noticed me as well. Or at least I tell myself this to this day.
Joe, ever the bungling wind man had no chance at all and truth is neither did I to meet her that night but he looked at me and said, “listen I will go over and say hello and start talking and you come in and say ‘Hey Joe” and then introduce yourself and I will step back”. What a plan. I was not even sure why I felt so compelled to listen to his musing. I thank him to this day. I stepped in after a few minutes and said hello.
The teeth pulling began but the connection felt sincere and meant to be. Indeed looking back on it, it was meant to be. And you know once you give yourself permission to be in the “meant to be” moments you might have more than one. I am not really sure where we left it that happy hour evening but I had her phone number to give her a call. It was her work number at Baptist Memorial Hospital. The rest they say is history. Oh it took a fair bit of repeated attempts but one day later in December but before Christmas that year she relented and allowed me to meet her at her work and have lunch. Hey, its a start. Our first dinner came much later in 1995 and I can remember the place we went as a location but cannot at all remember its name. So be it. I was apparently dating again and indeed an older woman.
Oh Yeah This
But back to the issue. More importantly, I think with me still in my early 30s and with only one child, she may have wanted more grandbabies. By the time Brenda and I had met, and certainly by the time we married in 1998, she was 47 years old. Still I am not sure my mother had the chronology correct at all.
There were many other undercurrents that I need not describe, but that day of the funeral, as I try to remember the exact guest list, except for Susan, everyone else is not a vivid memory. Oh, I know Johnna was there, and Mark for sure... Corey and the kids. But that memory is no longer vivid. And a word to the wise for you all: memories do indeed fade. Cherish every moment, no matter the moment. It pains me now to be forgetting my life then and those people and friends and family. But that is life. It happens. It fades, just as it finally faded this day for Brenda.
The importance of being a friend I learned that day, because of her 200-mile drive unannounced, was profound.
And for me, after it was all over, I wanted to get out of town so fast.
We had kept an apartment in Memphis.
I returned to our home in Florida the next day without anything in tow, really, except the dogs. There was a person whose name now escapes me who had become a friend. She had agreed to take care of Rudy and Missy while Brenda was dying and while I was taking care of things afterward. I picked them up that day and the next headed for Florida. I was done, and I wanted to go. Mind you, the apartment lease was going to run until October 31, 2014, but I left that day knowing I would come back and get my things. On my way, I headed back.
But Find the Moss
And then, the moss. Yes, even as Brenda lay dying and even as the drug effects were profound by now, she managed, with just me and Johnna in the room, to offer either an apology or a setup. I only became sure later which it was.
“Moss,” it started, with Johnna and I close at hand. We tried in so many ways to get the meaning. A bit more here and there came along as best she could, eventually landing on “moss drawer” and a sheepish look on Johnna’s face.
Busted. What Brenda was trying to say, and we did get the nod, was that Johnna had given her some weed to ease the trauma and fear and maybe some pain a couple of months earlier. Right on cue, for some reason, Johnna explained that she did not smoke any... and Brenda gave a bit of a nod in concurrence, as if that mattered to me at all.
I suppose she wanted me to find it. I guess she wanted to come clean at the end, that maybe she was going to give herself the space to be free to find some relief. More likely she wanted me to find it. Not sure why at that point, but let me tell you what happened, as if you cannot already guess.
When I returned to the house, I did indeed find that little bit of “moss” in a drawer in our bedroom dresser. I suppose she wanted me to maybe take my time and get my own pain relief... or maybe not. Who knows?
We will know soon enough. So yes, needless to say, not a prude and of course not a college student that “didn’t inhale,” I did indeed fashion a bit of a pipe out of some aluminum foil and had my fair share for the next several days.
Perhaps that is what she wanted. I also found, or should I say just straightened up, probably a few hundred thousand dollars in street value of various pain-relieving drugs.
Most people probably do not even begin to know the dosages available and the purpose of drugs like fentanyl sublingual or Lortab or other forms of opiates, and indeed most people would equate morphine as a hard to get pain reliever in any dose much less what she had. And methadone with drug addiction treatment connotation rather than a drug to treat substantial pain?. She had dosages of these things you had never known existed in milligrams and literally bags of “relief.”
What to do?
I had come home to the house we built on Wood Beach Drive in Sugarwood in Seagrove Beach Florida to find every temptation that I could. A little weed and now a treasure trove of high street-value drugs. Crazy as it seems, my Brooks and Red moment had arrived.