jim is dead

Jim is dead and the brief mention of it in our local paper drew 35 comments, 31 of which were expressions of shock and dismay that the iconic Tulsa hamburger joint where Jim's body was found had closed its doors.

There was much angst and discussion of what it means for the local economy that the famous Ron's Hamburger Heaven was no more. The wailing and rending of garments over the loss of the hamburger restaurant was sincere, I'm sure, and on another day, if it were not my friend found dead in that building, I might have joined in, at least in spirit.

Happily for Tulsa burger eaters, it was discovered in the ensuing discussion that Ron took his big grill elsewhere, leaving the tiny little storefront on 15th Street because it was too small and too old. Ron's thrives and Tulsans breathe easier.

My friend, though, he's still dead. He was a lawyer for the Indian tribes in Arizona 25 years ago. He fought hard on environmental issues. He was a big hearted man, smart and quirky and funny. I met him only later, after he arrived in Tulsa and was living at the YMCA, a comedown fueled by the stress of his work and the alcohol that helped take the edge off of life. He was proud, though, of the work he did and of the nickname he was given by the Indians: Little Prairie Dog. He was never certain about the origin of the nickname, whether it was because of his wild eyebrows and thick golden hair, or if it was just a term of endearment, for he was dear to them, I don't doubt him on that.

He was dear to many of us, even with all of his eccentricities, the breaking waves of a profound mental illness that he tried to strongarm into remission. We were gardening on the day his disease first stood up and looked me in the eye. Sitting in the back drive, transplanting seedlings and moving them to the hoophouse, we were lazily planning the dinners we'd have midsummer when the eggplant and squash, onions, tomatoes, and basil were in their full and fragrant glory. Jim was, as I am, a fan of ratatouille put together from vegetables minutes from the garden. We worked and laughed and talked of gardening and AA and wilderness lands, politics and God, food and how it feels to find a love that's true.

In the midst of it all, Jim stopped, looked up and said "Yes, I understand and I will." What? A mourning dove sitting on the roof of the house had directly spoken to Jim. I missed the avian communique and dismissed it as a new agey spiritual kind of thing. We were all spiritual seekers in the mid-'90s, and anything was possible, maybe even a verbal dove.

A few months later, Jim got a message that he was to clean up downtown Tulsa. He would arrive at meetings 10 minutes before closing hauling the bags of trash he'd picked up on the way, railing at the slovenly habits of Tulsans. Eventually, dark forces began to oppose the cleanup and Jim felt and looked hunted, and yet he persisted, perhaps finding in that action some semblance of the environmental work he did before his brain betrayed him.

He came out of it enough to recognize that he needed to get out of the YMCA, get some kind of steady work beyond mall food court duties. I helped him get a job where I worked. He was eminently qualified ~ overqualified ~ to do child support enforcement, but he loved it. He felt useful and he was profoundly moved by the plight of the children in need. He worked for them, ever the advocate of the underdog, always with an open heart and the wish to help.

Some days at noon, he'd head out to converse with the trees ringing the parking area. Occasionally, he'd prune them, speaking in reassuring tones. His coworkers withdrew. He appeared one day with hands dyed blue to the wrists. No explanation, none asked for, but blue hands when meeting with the public as a representative of the State? Not acceptable. Write-ups ensued and his deterioration continued. The little house he'd purchased on the west side became his haven. I'd see him on his bicycle riding to and from work, shaking his head in response to the conversations he was having with himself.

When he lost the job, he lost his insurance, of course, and he lost his house and the last time I heard from him, he was laid up in one of the 11th Street motels, a flophouse the last line of defense between wounded human being and living on the street. He called to ask if I could spare any "fresh organic vegetables from your beautiful garden." It was February, and I had barely put in onion sets. I had nothing. The calls came in for a couple of days, "if no vegetables, perhaps some plant starts in case I can get established somewhere in time for a garden."

I guess he did get established in that abandoned building half a mile from my "beautiful garden." It hurts my heart to think of him alone there, so close to our home, where he spent many happy times. I don't know yet what killed him. I am not sure a lot of official attention will be paid to a homeless man found dead in an abandoned building. I called the police department's chaplain to help them find Jim's next of kin. I left one message about Jim's family. And then I called back, just to say that Jim mattered, he did.

I wanted someone official to know that Jim mattered to a lot of people. That he was loved. That he had a community. I am too familiar with the indifference of some police officers and I wanted them to know that Jim contributed to this world, that he was everything I'm telling you, and that the loss of Jim really is a loss. It is.

People die every day and homeless people, the invisible souls who exist in abandoned buildings and alleyways, who pass out on sidewalks and roll their carts into neighborhoods where messy lives are not met with approval, they die all the time. In this country, it seems we have to be attached to something before we're of any value. We need to be planted in a home, connected to a job, a school, something that assures others that we are of some account, that we are not dangerously untethered to normal society.

It's easy to get annoyed with them, those men and women with their signs on the corners, the ones we just know are only looking for enough cash to drink, the ones we imagine go home to their tidy houses in the suburbs, having put one over on us by playing on our sympathies and raking in more money than we do. It is easy to dismiss them, to look at them with hard eyes and the certainty that they created whatever led to their downfall.

Maybe. Sometimes. And many, many times not. I am of the belief that it could happen to me, that I could be sitting in the garden only to find myself being addressed by a lily or a robin. I know too many people, perhaps because of my AA affiliation, who were living normal lives until they weren't. In an instant, the line is crossed and then it vanishes and life is forever altered. I can see myself in ragged clothes, pushing a cart filled with all that I own, collaring anyone who will listen to tell them what the lily said, of the robin's warning.

My friend is dead and he mattered. There are Jims everywhere in Tulsa and I expect each one of them matters to someone, somewhere. Maybe to you. I hope to you.

barry and audrey

In 1964, my mother, Audrey, turned rabid on the subject of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was launching his doomed run for the presidency on the basis of what was considered at the time a far right wing agenda. Being 7 years old, I don't remember why Audrey was so adamant that Barry was the savior of this country, but I remember how deeply his failure to win the presidency affected her.

It was shortly thereafter that my mother began experiencing depression, the first hint of bipolar disorder which led to mood swings of astonishing intensity. I have to wonder if the loss of the campaign played into the many other losses in her life: her mother died when she was two years old; she lived in a foster home with distant relatives; was victimized by a child molester of the worst kind; between my oldest sister and me, she had six stillborn baby boys, each of which she carried to the 7th or 8th month before they died.

But Barry enchanted her that year, 1964. For Barry, she campaigned tirelessly, attended conventions, fundraisers, walked the streets. She was relentless in her advocacy. When he lost, she lost something too: the sparkle in her eyes, the note of excitement and anticipation that had sounded in her voice that year.

I am, of course, horrified by this because Goldwater was one of the most virulently conservative men to have ever seriously run for president to that point. I can't reconcile what I think of far right wing zealots with what I think of my mother. They are callous, indifferent to the plight of regular folks, religious crackpots, greedy, corrupt, conscienceless. My mother was kind, loving, accepting, open of heart and mind, religious in the best way, smart and capable.

How could Audrey be seduced by Barry? What did he say, stand for, believe in that enchanted her, that won her heart and her mind? Here in the south, even in the upper left hand corner of it, we generally plant our crazy people right on the front porch for all to see, but this, honestly, embarrasses me, my mother as this kind of conservative.

I am comforted somewhat in reading the Wikipedia entry on Goldwater. It seems there was a huge push in his campaign to vanquish communism, to protect from potential nuclear war. This was surely a response to the widespread fear in the '60s that the hateful commies were going to blow us to mist and the world would end in a horror of radiation poisoning and suffering. Audrey always urged me to take seriously the bomb drills we had weekly at First Lutheran. Those drills found us grade schoolers tucked up against each other like biscuits in a pan, hands clenched tightly over our necks, ready as we could ever be for the bombs to fall.

To say that it was a culture of fear is almost laughable; it was so much more than that. In that time, in that school, that religious community, the fear of communism was alive. We were constantly reminded by our teachers in morning devotions that they were coming and we must be strong in our faith.

The worst fearmonger, Stanton Hoffmeier, the cadaverous and frightening music teacher, assured us that the communists were well on the way, lurking even now, perhaps, in the cloakroom. Upon arrival, they would quiz every child as to their religious leanings and then all Christians would be killed. His sadism was evident in his gleeful assurance that we would have to face the bayonet and admit to our Lutheranism, else we'd burn in hell for eternity. Immediate gutting, death and glory, or life lived as a slave to the Russians, with the absolute promise of hell for denying our faith.

That decade was frightening in so many ways: Vietnam, riots, cities burning, the Cold War, assassinations, more assassinations, pollution out of control, the fear of nuclear war. There was death and mayhem at every turn and it was overwhelming, but 1964 was just the beginning. If I felt this, in my relative innocence, perhaps my mother, even in 1964 and standing at the threshold of mental illness, also felt overwhelmed and afraid. Maybe the strong voice of Barry Goldwater, assured and confident, as right wing zealots so often are, gave her comfort.

I wonder how she would have felt, had she stuck around, to know of my growing radicalism, my political activism in the '70s and '80s, of my Marxist leanings and the feminism that transformed me. Would she shudder in horror that I've become a socialist in response to the right wing madness that began with Goldwater? On some level, I think ~ I hope ~ she would have applauded, would have cheered me on, this brilliant, educated woman whose life was so tightly circumscribed by the expectations of women of her time, by her children, her traditional man, her place in society.

I wish I could have known her as an adult. I wish I could have given her what Barry gave her for those brief months, and that it would have been enough. I wish she were here so I could ask her these questions. I wish for so much, for my mother, even now.

tantrum

I have been a screaming hotheaded psycho of late. Between episodes of dramatic and intense weeping have come searing explosions of near nuclear rage.

One could make the case for this being a natural reaction to what is happening in this country, in the world, and I'll make that case. I wonder sometimes how folks can just go about their daily lives, seemingly oblivious to what is happening politically.

I have come within millimeters of kicking my doctor in the face, have gone so off on the Asplundh tree men butchering my pecan tree that reinforcements were called out to attempt to calm me. I've written about being well armed, with plenty of ammunition, and it's a little frightening, really.

My friend Paula was sitting in her college classroom at about 20 years of age. In the midst of the lecture, she realized that she could reach up and lift off the top of her skull, exposing a vast array of beautiful jewel-like crystals in her head. After removing the gorgeous crystals for further examination, she realized she could not fit them back in and at that point started the first of many, many bad experiences associated with schizophrenia.

That one can simply be okay one moment and not the next is something I have been aware of since my mother vanished in 1969. One of my lifelong fears has been that I will lapse into mental illness. I refused antidepressants when my husband was desperately sick, despite the doctor's insistence.

In my world crying is a good thing, laughter even better. I am not depressed, not really. It's the mix that's out of whack for me right now and so I go searching for explanations. World events, yes. Political climate in this country, check. Economy, certainly. Ailing parent, absolutely. Uncertainty, yes. And in this examination of causal factors I've finally nailed it: steroids.

The shot I got in the joint of my second toe has run me purely off the rails. I should have recognized it, having had steroid rages before after treatment for poison ivy. The lack of sleep, the jazzed-up energy, the ease of crying which so easily transitions into screaming rage. I am healed just by knowing what it is. Isn't it funny how that works? The unknown is so dreadful and intolerable and nothing changes by knowing except that with knowing comes understanding. I think there's a life lesson in there. Hope you are all well and steroid-free.

stakeout

Thirty seven years after my mother vanished from the face of the earth, my sisters and I will be staking out the cemetary in Blackwell, Oklahoma. It's the place where my grandparents are buried, May and Curtis, and flowers have mysteriously appeared on their graves as long as anyone can remember.

My niece, who is mildly obsessed with my mother's disappearance, the only grandchild born before she vanished, is convinced it is her, Miss Audrey, making her way to the cemetary to remember her parents every year.

According to a cousin, the flowers are always there well before Memorial Day and no one has any idea who puts them there. May has been dead since the influenza epidemic of 1918; her death is the reason why my mother and her siblings were sent to live with the beast who abused them. Curtis had to continue his work as a trainman, which kept him away from home for days at a time. He couldn't know that May's sister's husband was a pedophile of the worst kind, a violent, twisted man. These things weren't news in 1920 and if they were known, they weren't discussed.

So is it my mother appearing at the cemetary, flowers in hand, to honor her parents? Is it even possible that she could still be alive and able at 89? Given her state of mind before she left ~ unmedicated bipolar with almost catatonic depressive episodes ~ it is really inconceivable.

Still, there's that hope forever tugging at my heart, a wish to finally find out what happened, what truly prompted her disappearance beyond our belief that her despair was ultimately too much to bear. Where has she been? How has she been? Did she ever find relief from her tortured past? Ever any comfort for her wounded spirit? I just wish I could tell her that it's okay, that I understand, that I love her still. I would like to let her know that it broke my heart, her disappearance, and that it was hard, of course, but that I survived and thrived and that I love my life.

I'm doing my part for the stakeout on Friday and Saturday. I might possibly drop dead in my tracks if I looked up to see my mother walking among the headstones after a 37 year absence. The news from the crew on stakeout this morning is that the flowers aren't there yet. They're in good spirits and filled with a kind of hope that is precious, no matter the outcome.

Pat is dead

Six years ago I answered the phone at work to hear a frantic voice shouting "he's dead, he did it, can you come, they need you." The voice was a neighbor of my in-laws and the dead one was Pat, their son.

Pat was the baby in this family of five. He was the good son, in contrast to Glenda's in-your-face hostility and Mike's hippie wanderings. Pat moved from Wyoming to attend Oklahoma Baptist University. He wanted to be a minister, studied theology, psychology.

One of his classes took a trip to the adult mental institution in Craig County. Pat's world shifted when he saw the inmates claiming to be Jesus, God, Moses, screaming their fear of satan. The scrawlings on the walls, the artwork, so much of it depicting the agonies and fires of hell, somehow convinced him there was no God and his beliefs were foolish.

He dropped the theology, became a committed atheist. In every way but that, he was my kind of man: activist, vegetarian (I'm not, alas, but I want to be), environmentalist, angry about social injustice. He cared. He cared and it hurt him. He agonized over conditions in third world countries. He raged against whaling, against destruction of the rain forests, the absurdity of cutting the last old growth redwoods.

Pat's first suicide attempt came in early December after we returned from a trip to the wilds of New Mexico. There are few states I love more, and the mountains around Taos are a spiritual touchstone for me. Mike and I were spiritually inspired by the evidence of ancient cultures, by the glory of the wildness and Pat seemed so too. We got back on Sunday. On Tuesday, Pat's coworker called to say he had not come to work.

My husband and his sister, Mike and Glenda, struggled with what to do. They debated whether he had the right to follow his own path. While this telephone debate was going on I was screaming GET OFF THE FUCKING PHONE I'M CALLING THE POLICE GET OFF GET OFF GET OFF!! Calling the police had not entered into their minds. They would never rat on their brother, never call "the man" to deal with this thing. Never.

Sometimes I think that nothing I do is authentic to the moment, everything is influenced by past events, by old feelings. My mother attempted suicide when I was a child, passing out at the table while my sister and I ate our bean soup, and I remember being absolutely frozen in that moment. My eight year old self did not know what to do and my racing heart and screaming brain were trapped in an immobile shell of a body. I couldn't act, I didn't, and someone else effected the rescue.

So with Pat the act was clear. I loved him very much, but some of the detachment that comes with not my kin, not really let me act while Mike and Glenda debated. I don't blame them for their inaction and I'm not criticizing, but get out of my fucking way I'm not just going to dick around while he dies. That was my thought. I called the cops.

Very long story short, the cops came, an ambulance, he pulled a gun on me, Glenda assaulted a reporter, Pat was wild-eyed and incoherent with the overdose he'd taken to do himself in. Locked up briefly, raging against us; Mike and I got nervous enough to get the pistols off the shelves and out of the cabinets where they're tucked around the house (a Wyoming love turned me into a gun moll) and keep them handy. Pat was not himself in any way.

But he got over it and meds were adjusted and on and on. Two years later, night before Thanksgiving and a frantic call from the mother-in-law: "Pat left a note on the table while we were gone, he's going to kill himself and the SWAT team's here can you come??" The SWAT team was indeed there, made up of my coworkers among the detectives at the Justice Center and a few others I did not know.

I made an effort to keep my self out of it and to rebuke the feelings of humiliation at having my family become the Client and God bless those cops, they were so kind. Same routine, short hospitalization, release, changing meds, blah blah blah nothing changed.

Twice we interrupted Pat's plans; I suspect there were others we never knew about. He wanted to die, he said so, he told us we could not, ultimately, stop him. The night of our Christmas open house while we were laughing and enjoying life with 150 of our friends and family, Pat swallowed two bottles full of his meds and a pint of vodka. While we were having a lovely evening full of joy and friendship and warmth he was dying alone.

It was Tuesday before Jack became suspicious and, using his key, went to check on Pat, finding him curled up on his bed, a puddle of fluid beneath his head, absolutely cold and finally dead. Jack never got over it. I believe it was this horror, of finding his beloved child in this way, that started the events that led to Jack's death three months later. Another long and sad story and this one is long and sad enough.

I'm not even sure why I'm telling it except to say that Pat and my mother were very much alike. Both intelligent, strong, educated, willful beings who were convinced there was nothing wrong with them. My mother was convinced she did not need lithium; Pat was convinced that medication alone would fix him when the evidence so clearly indicated it would not. I begged him to get counseling and he briefly met with a therapist and actually improved. That's a slow process, though, and painful. Something in him rebelled against the idea of confronting his feelings with another and he quit shortly before his death.

This is a blue time of year for so many and I see it in the eyes of folks everywhere. This day is the anniversary of Pat's death and another couple of days will be 37 years since my mother vanished. I am not blue, though I'd be just as happy if it were January and we could skip all this.

But if this is a blue time of year for you, please take care of yourself. Life can get better. This will be the longest night of the year and from this day forward the days will be growing longer with the return of the sun. The light is returning to our world and if you're missing a light in your soul, know that it, too, can come back. Just don't give up. This is a hard time of year but it will pass. Don't quit on your life the day before it starts to get better. If you've tried everything, ask for the strength to try again, but please don't quit.

And so my holiday wish for everyone is joy, peace and love for all and if you just can't get there, adequate help to make it so and the fortitude to stick with it and keep trying. Love to all of you.