Good Hours and Bad Hours.

It has been a week. Things should start returning to normal, right?

I got up this morning and prepared myself for my big day in court. I arrived early and had a brief discussion with my attorney. She informed me that I would be sworn, would answer a few questions and that would be it. That seemed far to simple, I thought to myself. She was right. A few questions about parenting time and that was that. Basic yes and no answers was all that was required of me. The judge granted everything as drawn up and based on the irretrievable breakdown granted dissolution – with one catch. I must complete a class on parenting after a divorce. I wouldn’t mind, but it is Thursday evenings from 1830 to 2030 and costs $50. There are four classes I must attend and then it is all done. My last class will be Feb. 12. Almost 12 years to the day this whole mess started.

I guess I have something to celebrate on Feb. 14 this year.

My attorney said something to me before she left. She stated that she lost her mother a couple of years ago. She said, “At first you will have good minutes and bad minutes. That will soon be followed by good hours and bad hours, followed by good days and bad days. Eventually you will have good weeks and bad weeks. Over time you will heal, like I did.”

Prophetic words.

In an effort to return to normalcy, I have my daughter tonight. I will drop her off at the daycare in the morning and go to work. It will be my first day back at work since mom died. I need to return to a routine.

Every week I took my daughter down to my mom’s house so they could spend time together before the end. She would go into mom’s bedroom, where mom pretended to sleep, and wake her up. They would sit there and watch tv and eat snacks and play.

My brother from Wyoming is still in town. His wife and three kids are with him. My daughter is quite fond of her cousins, so I decided to take her to Spring Valley tonight.

Our first stop was my grandparent’s house. She kept them entertained for nearly and hour before I got her into the car again. I told her we were going to see the cousins and she got very excited. She asked if they were at “Granny’s house.” I told her they were there. She said, “Granny is dead. Her is gone. Her is in Heaven, right, dad?” I told her yes and drove up to mom’s house. (Up never seems right. Mom’s house is south of my grandparent’s house, but it is up a hill, so I will let it be.)

She was quite excited to see her cousins and they had a great time together. There was one thing I noticed though. Every time we went to mom’s house, as I said earlier, she would go straight to mom’s bedroom to wake her up. She went into mom’s bedroom when we got there. I assume it was to make sure she was gone, but she went in there anyway.

A while later, I caught her carrying this little stuffed dog around. My mom kept it on her dresser and she always let my daughter play with it as long as she asked first and put it back when she was done. I don’t know where she found this dog, but it brought back a wave of memories.

I mentioned that to my brother’s wife and we decided to tell her that Granny asked us to give that to her before she died. We made her promise to take care of the stuffed puppy and she promised (like a four-year-old’s promise means a whole lot).

She has held that little dog tight all night. She is sleeping right now and still squeezing it tightly. My mom, daughter and this stuffed dog had some kind of bond, and it is still there. It has been a week, and I thought I was all cried out. Seeing this and hearing my daughter tell me that Granny in Heaven gave her the puppy proved me wrong.

Now I sit hear, quietly crying, watching my daughter share another moment with my mom.

I wish she were here to see it too. I am sure she is watching over this scene and smiling somewhere. Right now I wish she were somewhere much closer…

“Good hours and bad hours.” I guess if nothing else, my retainer paid for the best non-legal advice I have ever been given.

A Funeral, Regrets and Awkward First Meetings.

Not as much to say today.

I started having what I am referring to as “flashbacks” today. I can be sitting here, on my couch, or driving down the road or doing anything and I will have one. They are vivid recollections of those last few precious hours. One of the flashbacks is of my mother sitting in her recliner, comatose, struggling to breathe. The other flashback is the moment when we moved mom from her recliner into the hospital bed about an hour before she died. The hospice nurse slid a sheet under her and five of us lifted her from the chair and into the bed.

I don’t want to compare these flashbacks to those that people with PTSD suffer, but from what I know they sound similar. I hope they don’t last long.

The funeral was nice. So many flowers and plants. TJW sent a plant.

Mom always told me that she wanted to meet Tim and I always said that we would get around to it. I feel guilty for not arranging that meeting now. She was a little nutty and I always felt like he dealt with enough of that, he didn’t need to get stuck in a room with her. I wish I had done that for her now. He would have done it, had I asked. I should have asked...

Heather and my VERY soon to be ex had that first awkward meeting today. They didn’t actually meet, but they knew who each other was. Heather and I had talked about how they would meet and I always figured it would be bumping into each other in a Target/Wal-Mart type setting. I never thought it would be at my mom’s funeral.

Heather had the chance to meet my mom a few times, but their first meeting really sticks out in my head.

Mom travelled to California this past summer and saw a doctor. That doctor prescribed her medicinal marijuana. She was issued a card, which permitted her to go to the “weed store” and buy marijuana products. Mom stocked up on cannabis before she came back to Minnesota. She brought home a few ounces of the biggest, fattest, hairiest buds I have ever seen. The label called it “Grape Ape” and stated it was for medicinal use only. The label also advised against operating heavy machinery while under the influence. It wasn’t just buds she transported home. She brought home weed cookies (laced oatmeal, chocolate chip, etc), marijuana made caramel, and reefer chocolates.

Mom kept asking my brother to pick her up a bong so she could smoke her weed. The only places in and around Rochester to buy bongs are more famous for their sales of sexual toys and videos. My brother was absolutely mortified by the thought of taking his mom into an “adult book store” so he refused to buy her the bong.

Heather and I were sitting at my place and mom called and mentioned his refusal to buy her a pipe. When I was done on the phone, I told Heather about all of this and told her I was half-tempted to go buy her one and take it to her. She supported my decision, so I asked her if she wanted to ride along. She did, so off to the porn store we went. I don’t think the guy behind the counter believed me when I said it was for my mom, but who cares. We bought the pipe and hauled it down to my mom in Spring Valley. Mom had my brother set her pipe up and proceeded to burn a doobie in front of my new girlfriend.

That is how Heather met my mom.

I have to cut this one short tonight. I have to get up early and get ready for my day in court. My mom’s funeral and my divorce hearing all in the same week. My lawyer asked if I would like to change the date when she learned of my mother’s death. It took months to get this date – I told her no way, I am ready to go now. At least I will finally be single again tomorrow – although single in title only. Heather might take exception to my use of the word single, but anyone who has ever been married before will understand what I mean.

 

Sorting Through the Mysteries of Bills and Crap

I always knew that U.S. Rep. Tim Walz was an honorable and caring man. From the first time I met him in March 2006, he amazed me with his ability to remember peoples names and the way he genuinely cared for the people he met. That is why I volunteered my time and resources to help get him elected. That is why I went to work for him. He reminded me of that this morning.

Congressman Walz called me this morning to express his condolences. Unfortunately I missed the call. I slept through the night and didn’t get out of bed until 0830. I was brushing my teeth when the phone rang and didn’t get to it until too late.

I am greatly appreciative of that phone call.

One of my few complaints with the Blackberry Storm is calls seem to go to voicemail much too quickly. Oh well, still love that phone.

Every day seems to bring some new learning experience. There are so many little things that we all do everyday and never think about what the people left behind would do or know if we were suddenly taken from this world.

I pay bills online and I think most everyone does. I have paper copies of the statements sent to me, but not everyone does. This has become a problem with trying to sort out my mom’s bills.

Mom embraced the electronic world and paid almost everything online. She set most of her bills up as automatic bill payments. Mom was scared of identity theft so she did not have paper statements sent to her home. We kind of knew what her bills were and discussed it with her, but now, we have no idea what these things coming out of her account are or who they go to.

In order to figure this out, we have instructed the bank not to honor automatic payments since she is deceased. When the company requesting payment does not receive payment, the thought is that they will send a paper statement informing her that the bank declined a payment. This will allow us to close out her various accounts and inform her creditors that she has died.

As I said, I get paper statements so if I died tomorrow, someone would be able to figure my bills out. Make sure someone knows what your automatic or online bill payments are. Write this information down and keep it somewhere. Someday it will prevent a lot of headaches for someone else.

My mom was a bit of a packrat. Ok, that is a true understatement - she saved a lot of crap. We talked to her repetitively about going through all this crap in her basement and she always said we would get around to it later. Unfortunately, later never came.

We didn’t want to push her too hard and perhaps we were too lenient. I don’t know how I would react with the news that I was going to die and with that in mind, we did not push her to do things. I regret not making her go through this crap with one of us now.

I am quite sure most of this stuff had some special meaning. Why else would she have two hope chests full of shit? The three of us boys can figure some of it out and have figured some of it out. I can figure out that the old report cards with my name on them were saved for a reason. I can figure out what the envelope labeled my first haircut with hair in it is. What I cannot figure out is what a blanket is. It is not labeled; there is nothing to tell us why she had it in the chest. What the hell are we supposed to do with this blanket?

Mom had literally thousands of photos in the chests and packed in 18-inch square boxes. Many of them are not labeled or written on. Some of them are black and white – obviously older than any of us. How are we supposed to figure out what they are or why she had them?

She had crap packed away that belongs with the family of the late asshole she married. We can try to figure it all out, but this would have been so much easier if she would have been willing to do this while she was still alive.

I started to take an inventory of my life and my possessions and it occurred to me – no one could really figure out what all of my crap is either. I need to start figuring out what I have and why I have saved it. I need to make sure that someone else knows why I have it as well.

You never know when it may be your time and there may not be a tomorrow to do it.

I will not make this same mistake twice. I am going to have this talk with my dad and with other family. We need to know what those “valuable” possessions are to prevent ourselves from having to ask, “WTF is this?” in the future.

Random Thoughts on the Reality of Dying

So many things move so fast once someone has died and life really becomes a blur. I am having trouble figuring out what day it is and on what day I did something.

On Friday, we learned why someone shouldn’t die on a holiday weekend.

Before a body can be cremated, the regional coroner in Hastings must sign off on the process. The regional coroner will not sign off on the cremation until he receives a form from the deceased’s doctor.

Tell me – what oncologist was working on the Friday after New Year’s?

Next up is planning the service. Luckily, because this had been a long process, mom had met with the pastor of the local Lutheran church and they had totally planned the service the way she wanted it. That was nice. I wouldn’t have known what scriptures or songs to pick.

We had to pick an urn. I personally thought they were all ugly and don’t think mom would have liked any of them, but I let the majority rule and one was picked.

We had to decide on visitation. We chose none. There will be coffee, cake and those terribly cliché ham sandwiches at the church immediately following the service.

We had to come up with the obituary. The one that will go to press today is very similar to the one I wrote last Friday on this blog.

Of course, we had to fight about that too. My mother had been married twice, once to my father, and once to an abusive asshole that died of cancer in 2007. We all agreed that his name did not belong in the obit. My brothers wanted to list my mother’s name as Cindy Larimer in the obituary. No one would have known who that woman was. Her friends, neighbors and people in town knew her as Cindy Pennington and that is how she should be listed in the obituary. My family caved in to that demand – they had to out of respect form my mother.

I found it hard to function on Friday. The reality hit that my mom was gone. I found simple tasks to be impossible. I tried to open a Dr. Pepper in the car and successfully managed to have it explode upon opening it. I couldn’t enter numbers correctly into a calculator. I had to have the teller at the bank help me put my deposit together.

I have found the physical symptoms of grieving to be a pain in the ass.

The constant back and neck stiffness and aching is growing tiresome. The headache is somewhat controlled with ibuprofen. The inability to concentrate is infuriating. The insomnia has been bad, but I have found that if I fall asleep with someone I sleep much better. Heather has been a sweetheart when it comes to that. I stopped at her place Saturday night, just so I wasn’t alone, and fell asleep on her shoulder in short order. I slept so good that night. Other nights have been restless – up every couple of hours for an hour or so. The bags under my eyes are beginning to make me look like a raccoon.

There are little things too. Every Sunday morning, after the political talk shows, I could count on a call from my mom. She didn’t always understand the politics, but she wanted to talk to me about whatever she heard. She had become a bit of a political junkie while I was working on Congressman Walz’s campaign in 2006. She could babble for an hour about something she heard on Fox News. I spent years trying to convince her that Fox News was right-wing bullshit, but she never listened. With the Minnesota Senate recount concluded, mom would have a lot to talk about on Sunday.

In one of our last lucid conversations on Tuesday, we talked about the recount and whether or not I thought Franken would win, and if he won, did I think I had a shot at a job on his staff.

So I just read the obituary on the Post Bulletin’s website and found three errors. It is obvious that no one writing these obituaries ever had John Vivian as a professor.

Mom lived in Spring Valley, Minn., not Rochester, as the obituary would indicate. They got the names of my uncles wives wrong too. Splendid journalism, PB.

I miss her.

*** EDIT

I emailed Jay Furst, managing editor of the Post Bulletin about the errors in the obituary. Jay had the errors corrected immediately. 

Thank you Jay.

The reality of Cancer

Cindy Pennington, 58, of Spring Valley, Minn., died Jan. 1 in her home after a lengthy illness.

She was born April 7, 1950 in Austin, Minn. She grew up in Spring Valley and graduated from Spring Valley High School in 1968. She married Fred Larimer in 1971 and the couple moved to Long Beach, Calif. They later divorced and she moved back to Spring Valley in 2003.

She is survived by three sons, Chad Larimer of Rochester, Tim (Trisha) Larimer of Thayne, Wyo., and Jonathan Larimer of Spring Valley; four grandchildren; her parents, Virgil and Lillian Arett of Spring Valley; two brothers, Kyle (Debbie) Arett of Las Vegas, Nev., and Kent (Erika) Arett of Oak Park, Ill.; and her sister, Vicky (Jim) O’Connell of Spring Valley.

Something similar to what I just wrote above will be printed in the Post Bulletin on or about Monday, January 5. I am sure it will be fleshed out a little more, but it will be similar. My facts may be a little wrong – dates, addresses, etc.

My mother’s life will be reduced to a few column inches in a newspaper and that will be the end. The problem with an obituary is it really only provides a brief glimpse into what was somebody’s life.

I’m not going to use this as a place to air grievances against my mother. I am going to use this as a place to tell more than what a few inches of newsprint will ever tell you.

The statement, “…after a _____ illness…,” has always bothered me. In my mother’s case, it was a lengthy illness, but it was cancer. Cancer is a lengthy and terrible thing.

My mother was diagnosed with stage 4C ovarian cancer at Christmas in 2003. The doctor’s gave her about six months to live at the time.

A little background – in the 1980’s my mom had a hysterectomy. The doctors did not remove the ovaries at the time to prevent early onset menopause. Mom didn’t see a need to see a gynecologist because her reproductive organs had been removed so she didn’t see one. Had she seen a gynecologist, perhaps this cancer would have been detected earlier, but hindsight is 20/20.

Shortly after Christmas 2003, mom went under the knife. The surgeon discovered that the cancer had spread into the fat lining her abdomen. They removed as much as they could but he explained there was no way to get it all and that it would come back. She started receiving chemo and that became a constant up until this past summer.

Mom was a trooper and she defied the odds. She lived long enough to see my daughter born in 2004. She lived long enough to see another granddaughter born. Mom was indestructible. When things turned bad, we all got to the point that we didn’t believe the doctors when they said anything. Mom always found a way to beat it.

The cancer came back three times. She beat it twice. This past summer it came back again. The doctor told her she had a month to live. We took that with a grain of salt and told her that the doctors have never been right and reminded her that she was given six months nearly five years ago. Like Mayo Clinic oncologists know anything – they can’t even win seats in the House of Representatives.

The cancer had spread now. Stomach, liver, kidneys, lungs – it was everywhere. People ask me what kind of cancer my mom had and I would respond, “Everything cancer.”

The cancer caused my mom’s abdomen to fill with a fluid called ascites. It would make breathing difficult so the doctors frequently drained six liters of fluid from her abdomen. My mom did not waste away to nothing before she died – she swelled like a balloon.

On Christmas Eve, mom was having some trouble breathing, but that was not unusual. She had an appointment to have her abdomen drained that Friday, so we were not all that concerned. On Friday, as usual, they drained six liters.

Sunday, my brother called and informed me that the hospice nurse had stated that mom probably only had a few weeks to live. My response was, “Like we haven’t heard that before.”

Monday the hospice nurse informed him that her abdomen had already filled back up and that two weeks was now the maximum amount of time we could expect. The nurse also stated that by the end of the week mom would likely be severely confused and disoriented so now would be a good time for people to start visiting. I sat down with my boss and informed him of the situation and told him that beginning Friday (Jan. 2) that I would not be coming in to spend time with my mom. He was ok with this, his sister died of cancer as well.

I have been taking my daughter to my mom’s house every Tuesday for a long time. I called my brother to make sure that she was still ok for a visit on Tuesday. He stated she was.

I loaded my daughter up for what I knew would be her last visit with her grandma. I did not want this to drag out for her. We got to my mom’s house and it was hard. Mom was sliding fast. She recognized my daughter and they had a nice visit. Before we left I could see her slipping fast. We called my brother Tim in Wyoming and told him it was time to get in the car and haul ass.

I went to work Wednesday morning. I had an appointment and couldn’t cancel it. My brother called and told me that I should get my ass down there after work, the hospice nurse didn’t think that mom would make it through the evening. I left work early and spent New Year’s Eve holding mom’s hand. My mom was gone when I got to her house. A shell would best describe it. She was in a recliner but couldn’t get up anymore. She could talk, but it was brief (and occasionally funny). Mom was cold to the touch but complained of being hot. She wanted to go outside and shovel the sidewalk. You would have to know my mom, but there is no way in hell she would ever shovel the sidewalk. She would pay a neighbor kid before she ever attempted to lift a shovel.

As the evening wore on, it got worse and worse. I sat holding her hand talking to her all night. Watching her gasp for air is one of the most difficult things I have ever had to watch. Each breath was a full body effort. I commented that it looked like a fish out of water. She got belligerent and combative later in the evening. The last time she spoke was at around 2130 or 2200. I do not remember for sure. She wanted to get up again. She couldn’t but she was fighting to do it. We gave her more morphine at 2330. I gave her some more water. She slipped into a coma shortly after that. I held her hand and talked to her until the hospice nurse came at 0800.

We moved mom from the recliner to a bed. The nurse said it could drag on for a while, but she hoped it would be over that day (Jan. 1). She told me that my mom had told her Wednesday morning about me bringing my daughter to visit the night before and how much that meant to her. That made me feel better.

At about 1045 I left for a little bit. We needed more smokes and some pop. Mom died while I was out.

Heather called me at 0245, while I was holding mom’s hand to see how I was doing. I told her I was angry. That call meant a lot to me. Heather has been a rock for me the last few days. I don’t know how I will ever repay her. Last night was tough. Everything in my home is reminding me of my mom. Heather took me from my home and kept me overnight. She is an angel right now. The difference between me and insanity.

I said I was angry and was very angry. Watching someone suffer like that knowing that there is nothing you can do is a crushing thing. I got mad at the medical and pharmaceutical communities.

Cancer has been around a long time, but we haven’t done much to advance treatments or drugs. I understand it is complex but this is what pisses me off:

Most doctors and pharmaceutical executives are middle-aged men. Has anyone else noticed how the treatment of erectile dysfunction has advanced so quickly in the last few years?

We spend billions of dollars every year to make sure the middle aged guys can get their cocks hard so they can screw their twenty-something year old wives/girlfriends/mistresses but we cant get new cancer treatments?

I guess having a hard dick is more important than having living relatives.

Maybe the hardest part of all of this has been me trying to figure out how to explain to my daughter that her grandma is gone and that she will never see her again. It is bad enough to wake up and realize that you don’t have a mom anymore. I am an adult and understand that that is how life works. How do I explain that to a little kid who isn’t quite yet five years old?

I have a funeral to plan so need to cut this short.

More in the next few days.

Ladies – go to your OB/GYN. If not for yourselves, do it for me. All of this could have been preventable. Don’t let this happen to you or your loved ones.