Hello - Anyone Still There?

Well, that's it. The end of the book.

If anyone is still out there reading this please let me know,

and what do you think? Be honest:

Publish or Perish?

I am off to Mexico in a few days and hope to ponder the epilog that ties everything together for the book.... stay tuned.

Here is an especially funny little video www.devilducky.com/media/57946/ thank-you Susan.

Love,
D

Chapter 10 - The Land of the Living

Chapter 10

When you have a dead child one of the toughest questions to answer is, “How many children do you have?” At first it never occurred to me to not answer honestly, that I had three, one was gone and two are left. Answering that way left me way too vulnerable. Of course they wanted to know what happened, in fact most people wanted all the gory details - was I obligated to tell them? No, I finally realized. If I didn’t want to share the most personal and gut wrenching experience I had ever had with them, I didn’t have to. I answered two after that, I have two children. I got really good and automatic with that answer. If I was telling someone I completely trusted and I wanted them to know then I told them. At first it felt like a lie and a denial of Thomas but then I realized I had to protect myself, I was fragile for many years after he died. For many years after Thomas died I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic – how many children did I have? Two boys? A boy and a girl? Who's alive? Whose's not.

When I finally opened up to other people about Thomas’s death I was shocked to find that almost everyone has lost someone close to them. Intellectually this makes sense but not many people had shared their story with me until I started sharing mine. Sort of like people often smile back, if you smile first. In fact the amount of tragic stories I have heard since then is staggering. It is not the stories that have become remarkable, it is the people who tell them, who live with them, who suffered them. Each time I hear another horror story I think, I could not survive that. I have two really special friends and they each have had a child murdered. Murdered. I can’t think of anything more horrific. No matter how bad my story was there was always someone's whose was worse.

Lana, one of my oldest and best friends in Port Townsend was telling me about some new people she had met. They were friends of friends and had just moved up from San Francisco and her name was Deborah too. I meet Deborah at one of Lana’s fabulous dinner parties and liked her and her partner George. Sometime later Lana tells me that Deborah had a daughter that had been murdered. Whoa. That was beyond what I could comprehend. A sickness, an accidental death, but a death on purpose, oh how unthinkable, how really tragic.

I saw Deborah again and I knew Lana had told her about Thomas and our car accident, just like Lana had told me about her, but she and I never talked about it. The next time we were at Lana’s for dinner, we ended up in the kitchen alone and she starting telling me what happened. It just poured out of her. I don’t want to recount for you this tragic story, I wish I had never heard it myself but someone must help her carry the great weight of her grief. Her daughter was 8 when she died, and she had no more children. She said that for the first few years she was a mess. She said she could not function and had no life. Somewhere about 5 years later she said that her daughter came to her. She is not a woo woo kind of person. She said that her daughter was standing before her as big as life, full color, she was still 8 years old and she said, “Get it together mom! You are embarrassing me!” Wow. I can so totally hear one of the kids saying that. She said that after that day she began to heal, to walk the long road back to the living.

Cameron my son and Thomas’s little brother has had his own devils since he was in the accident with us. He was only two years old when the car he was in went off the cliff and he never saw his brother again and his mother started acting weird. A child physiologist at the time explained to me that Cameron was so young that he did not have the inner psychological structures to deal with an event of this kind. He did not have inner dialog that could begin to incorporate this. I didn’t realize the depth of what he was saying, I was in deep shock and grief myself. Poor Cam, when I finally came out of myself a little it was to take care of Beth, instead of a cool older brother he had a useless, pretty much, baby sister. He was a sweetheart though. The photos of him during that time show a beaming smile, always full of love.

Cameron was a cool kid. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Legos was his favorite medium for a while. He made the most amazing things with legos, even when he was little. Cars, planes, space ships were among the first creations. Once when he was about 8 the toaster oven didn’t work one morning. The next thing I know he had it taken apart, he saw what was wrong and he fixed it. Cameron was fun, we rode bikes, took hikes went on vacations where his adventurous spirit was contagious.

I tried to shelter and protect him but he told me in no uncertain terms when he was 5 that he would rather be dead like Thomas then to not really live. His idea of really living then was fast bikes and skateboards. I use to comfort myself with the idea that I had lost one son, what were the odds of losing another. The other day I was up at the pioneer cemetery and I saw a gravestone surrounded by a fancy old fashioned iron fence. I was drawn to read, Julius Weaver, 7, Scott Weaver 5, sue weaver 9 month all with the same death date and one word: drowning. What were the odds.

When Cam was 17 he headed down to California to spend some time with his dad. I knew he wasn’t coming back to finish high school or live with us again. I wanted to do something supportive and healing for him before he left. A woman I knew introduced me to a physic friend of hers who used a technique she called “Rapid Eye Technique”. This was something that was developed for autistic children. A pin pong ball was suspended on a string and swung back and forth in front of the child who was asked to follow the ball with their eyes. As with hypnotism, the conscious mind follows the ball and leaves the unconscious mind unattended and able to come forward. Evelyn did not use a ball, she waved a rod rapidly back and forth in front of the subject. I had a free session and found it very helpful so I made an appointment for Cameron. He was very interested, as he is very intelligent and curious. I went and observed his session. Evelyn talked with Cam for a while, small talk, then she explain the process and that he was to watch the wand. It was quiet for awhile. She asked Cam to go back to the accident, what had happened? I was so shocked at what he described. He said he and Thomas were going down a long tunnel together. At the end was white light and lots of friends and then Thomas got to go on and he didn’t, he had to go back and he was mad. He is still mad. There were other things he said but nothing sticks in my mind as to how close I was to losing both of them. Evelyn gave Cam a tape of music that was special for him and we said good-bye. I don’t know if it was my imagination but Cameron seemed happier, lighter and sat a little straighter after that.

My daughter who it seems I would not have had if Thomas had not died, has also been impacted by the brother she never knew. It was obvious to her from the beginning that I was terribly saddened by the loss of her brother. She was fascinated about him. That was really good for me. She celebrated his birthday and his death day, not in a sad way but a profound simple kid way. She has always been very respectful of my grief.

It is odd how events have conspired to happen in a way that has promoted my healing. The most unusual was an independent film I was in. I got a call from Rick Schmidt the winter of 1991, he had heard that I had been in a small local independent film and he wondered if I would be willing to look at his script and consider acting in his next film, “American Orpheus”. I was delighted, the small film I had been in earlier was very fun and I was excited to be asked to be in another one. Rick was the real deal, he had been making low budget feature films for the past 17 years. He was a director of national and international fame and he had just moved to Port Townsend from San Francisco.

“American Orpheus”, started with the idea of exploring love and death in a modern version of the Orpheus legend. In the legend, Orpheus was a musician who descended into the netherworld to reclaim his wife. The legend is famous for the line “don’t look back”, for the Gods allowed Orpheus to walk out of the underworld and his wife would follow if he “didn’t look back”. The story goes that just as Orpheus walked into the outer world, he looked back to make sure that his beloved wife was still with him and because she was not totally in the outer world yet, she vanished forever. Rick’s turn on the story was to make Orpheus a single mom. He focused on the bond between the mother, Fay and her young daughter. At the beginning of the film the mother and her daughter move to a small coastal town to flee from the child’s father. "Fay"the mother is afraid that she will lose the child to the father. She is betrayed by her sister’s boyfriend, the husband tracks her down and the inattention of a babysitter leads to the death of the child. In this version there is a happy ending as the mother goes to the underworld and brings her daughter back.

How I fit in is that I was doing silk-screening in my garage at the time and Rick wanted me to be the mother’s employer in the film and shoot a few scenes in my shop while I was printing and teaching “Fay” about the business. He thought it would make an interesting scene with my six color wheel going around. Rick’s technique of using non-actors to play characters similar to themselves gives his work an element of realism and improvisation.

Before filming began Rick learned, I am not sure how, that I had a child that had died young. He asked if I would be willing to talk about that in the film. He would add a scene where “Fay” comes into the shop to talk with me after her daughter has died. I was very nervous about this but felt there were a few things I could say, things I had said to my friends over the years. The most poignant part for me was that the day we shot the new scene was on the 8th anniversary of Thomas’s death. Anyone who has worked on a film knows that by time you see the schedule, it is already wrong. Rick had scheduled several days to come over but he was behind. The day we shot way July 11, 1991. During the take I said to “Fay” that this was the anniversary of my son’s death. Later Rick asked me what had prompted me to say that. I told him that today really was the anniversary of the day he died. Rick was shocked and asked if I was ok, we can stop he said. I was ok. That line is not in the film but the power of that day is. I was very happy with the scene. After “Fay” and I talk, the camera follows me out to my yard where I am hanging out clothes in the sun. Beth my daughter was then seven years old, she is standing beside me holding her kitten. There is something so positive and uplifting about that last shot.

The film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands. I wanted to go of course but there was no way I could. The United States premier was at the Seattle International Film Festival in the Neptune, a nice old theatre by the University. We were going; Beth and I each got a new dress for the opening. We took the ferry to Seattle and had a fancy dinner out. When we got to the theatre we were ushered to the front of the line and sat with the cast and crew, middle center. Wow seeing myself of the big screen was something, but seeing my little Beth holding her kitten in the sunshine in that theatre brought tears to my eyes and a quiet peace to my heart. The film went on to win a Gold award for best low budget feature at the Houston International Film Festival 1992. I got good reviews and if you Google me, I show up under “Film Actress”. Most important is the shared moment with my daughter we will both always remember. Remember the film honey? Ya ma, you asked me last year. She's 22 now and has more important things to do. That film was my story, it has taken me many years to see that. I lost my son to the under world but I have a son and daughter that followed me into the land of the living.

Chapter 9 - A Good Death

"Lamenting the Spirts of Extinction"

M. J. Peak 1992

Chapter 9

Honey, I think we should take Thomas’s ashes back to California, William said that winter. How about we take all the kids down on spring break? I hadn’t been back since Thomas died, six years coming up that summer. He was willing to drive and to take me; he knew it would be good for me and that it would help me along the grief trail. Cameron and Noah, William’s son sat in the way back of the Nissan. Cam was 8 and Noah 11. Beth and Sadie sat in the backseat; Beth was 5 and Sadie 8. That was a lot of kids in a little car. When we got to Garberville, we meet my kid’s dad, they were spending 3 days with him and then we would be back and pick them up. I gave him the box with T’s ashes and said he could do what he wanted. It was really strange to be back in Garberville, the roads terrified me and we weren’t even going up the mountain. We drove on south to Inverness, in Marin County where William’s sister lived. I so enjoyed seeing where they lived. His brother in law is an architect and built them a very special house. Old California style, lots of wood, lots of redwood. He doesn’t build like that now, today he is designing alternative energy systems for homes. His house in Inverness was one of the first passive solar homes of the sixties.

On the way back we decided that we would pick the kids up at Geoff’s in Alderpoint, forcing me to go up at least part of that mountain again. It was awful, I made William drive really slowly and I cried. I knew I had to do it. He was very patient with me. It was good to see C and E again, I’d missed them even though it was only a few days and it was good to reconnect with my good friend Geoff. After the accident, Geoff was the one who held our place there together. Took care of things in Zenia and watched over the house on and off while the kid’s dad was who knows where. We had written and been in touch but it was good to see him. I had been in contact with some of my friends from there over the years, but without contact most of those relationships died too. Geoff was one friend who made sure we stayed in touch and we are friends to this day, I really appreciated that about Geoff.

I tried teaching school the next year; I had to support my kids somehow. I had been subbing in the Port Townsend schools for years and finally there was an opening for a teaching position in my field. I don’t think I was emotionally ready. I had a really hard year. I had majorly withdrawn from life the years after Thomas’s death. We spent a lot of time home together, the kids and I. I suppose not driving contributed some to that but also since the accident I had a real low tolerance for social interactions. I was okay with the few people I knew and trusted, but basically, I didn’t get out a lot. I think that year of teaching was overload. I didn’t sign up again for the next fall and I didn’t know how I was going to support myself.

Seiza was a friend of mine who had kid’s the same age as Cam and Beth and the kid’s were friends too. She was married to Howard, one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers; “juggling and cheap tricks” was how they described themselves. They were jugglers extraordinaire and have played in many venues over the years. In those days they still lived in Port Townsend, in a huge old Victorian uptown. Seiza was an awesome friend, she brought a lot of joy into my life and still does. She was fun and exciting. If you want to be my friend you have to learn how to juggle,” she said, “I’ll teach you.” I remember lots of happy times with her on the downtown on the street in Port Townsend, while she actually did teach me to juggle. I can still see Seiza with her red leather high top tennis shoes, black and white striped tights, her short (she has great legs) short polka dot skirt. Her hair had been totally grey since she was in her 20’s and she always kept it dyed. Seiza was dying her hair long before kids were dying their hair weird colors. I remember once when she dyed her hair bright pink. She had thick bangs and her hair was straight cut about at her shoulders. Everyone always commented on her hair, I think that was the point. Well she also had a wig, cut in the same style and dyed the same color for those bad real hair days. I was with her once when someone, obviously shocked said, that can’t be your real hair. Your right Seiza said, and pulled off the wig. I wish I had a picture of that woman’s face when she saw that the hair underneath was exactly the same, blunt cut and bright pink.

They had a very busy life, lots of people coming in and out and Seiza was an artist not a housewife, so she hired me to clean and organize her house once a week, more when needed. Carol, a friend of hers asked if I would clean her house when she saw me at Seiza’s. This snowballed and I was able to support my kids while they were growing up on house cleaning. It worked really well for me, I could set my own schedule and take a kid with me if I had to. I worked alone so if I was having a bad day it was manageable. It was physical work so my energy did not stay bound up.

It was a weird thing. I had gone to school and had a degree in science, but I really got into house cleaning. I loved it. I guess it showed because I had really good jobs, I cleaned some of the most beautiful homes in Port Townsend. I made several really good friends and people were really good to me, they paid me really well, handed down clothes, towels, sheets, and books. They gave me food, they invited me to their parties and most of all, they appreciated me. I remember being surprised at how thankful people were with my work. I didn’t get that many strokes when I was a teacher. My mom kept an impeccable house. She didn’t make me do much to help her, she didn’t work then and said that she wanted to have children and to take care of the house. I didn’t realize how much work it was to keep it that way until later, but I knew I liked to live in a clean, organized and uncluttered place. I took pride in my work and wanted the bed made just right and the pillows fluffed just so. I made sure all the chrome in the bathroom shined and the mirrors sparkled. I never had to advertise and had enough jobs so that I could pick and choose which ones I stayed with.

Carol had a wonderful family who had beautiful house out of town on the water. Carol had been a professional comedian on a tv show, before she met Sedge, the doctor. She was very interesting, into alternative healing and physic energy and she was really funny. Their house was a joy to clean. It was new and architecturally unique. We all became friends, she was very sensitive to my having lost Thomas and she helped me very much through some really rough times.

One of my favorite memories of these generous people was the time I came down with strep throat. I knew what it was right away because I had gotten it several times the year I taught school. The stress of teaching coupled with the fact that every student at on time or another seems to cough right in your face, kept me sick a lot of that year. It was of course a Friday night and the kid’s and I were supposed to fly to Michigan to see my parents on Sunday. I called Carol and Sedge. He said, go to the pharmacy at Safeway and I will call in an order for antibiotics and then come on out here. I get the stuff and head out, feeling like crap. He is in the kitchen with some syringes out. He says, I am going to give you a shot in your butt and you’ll start feeling better in a few hours, oh and I am giving you a shot of Vitamin C too. I use to get Vitamin C shots at the pharmacy in Mexico if I felt like I was getting sick and I know it works wonders. Oh Damn, he says, I don’t have a -, oh I can use this. I turn around and he is using the end of pencil to push on the plastic syringe end and push the shot down. I did feel way better by morning and had no trouble leaving for Michigan. What would I have done without Sedge? I had no health care, I couldn’t afford to go to the emergency room and I would have been really, really sick by Monday.

While this working was good for me, I still had not rejoined my community. I shied away from doing or meeting anyone outside my small circle. I remember it was hard for me to follow through with commitments, plans with people, I could have a bad day (that’s what I called it) and not want to go. In fact I really hadn’t been out in the world much at all. I taught for 2 years straight out of college then moved to California. I spent the next five years isolated in the Coast Range Mountains; after Thomas died I really I turned away from the outer world and isolated myself, five more years.

Still interested in the environment, I cared enough to go to Port Angles, a town about an hour drive farther out the Olympic Peninsula from Port Townsend, to a meeting between the local fishermen and the Washington State Department of Fisheries. There was a huge controversy on the peninsula and I want to hear about it first hand. When I got there the room was packed. There were many men there my grandfather’s age and I listened as one by one they stood up and gave testimonial to the fact that when they were young they had literally “walked across creeks and rivers here on the backs of salmon”. In their voices and in their faces, I knew this was true. Hard to imagine the numbers of fish they were talking about. Picture every stream and river on the Olympic Peninsula full to capacity with spawning salmon. Now these men were angry, these men were afraid, they felt cheated, and they blamed the government. I wondered if I was witnessing the end of an era. I wanted to see salmon, wild salmon, mythical salmon. I had a quest then, to catch a glimpse of the disappearing salmon of the great northwest.

There was a small local non-profit organization called Wild Olympic Salmon that was operating out of the old post office building in Chimacum. William had worked with them at their last Salmon Festival. He had on a t-shirt from the group that had the organizations goal on it,” Wild Olympic Salmon”, it said, “Dedicated to the Health of Wild Salmon and Their Chums, to the Hydrologic Cycle, and to a Good Death”. I liked the joke about salmon and their chums, so this not one of those too serious groups, I liked to see the phrase “hydrologic cycle” on a t-shirt, I was trained as a biologist and like hard science, and then, a good death. They publicly mentioned death, I really was struck by that, you normally don’t see that on a t-shirt, and not just death, but a good death. What a beautiful idea, death, a normal healthy sustaining part of the natural cycle. I sensed a spirituality, a thread through salmon, to my own spirit. As I connected with this community, the grief began to lift.

I began by volunteering in small education and restoration projects. One such project that was just starting was to set up a weir in Chimacum Creek. Chimacum Creek was the creek that drains the whole watershed that is Port Townsend, Port Hadlock and the Chimacum valley. The plan was to set up a weir and count the indigenous wild Chum salmon of Chimacum Creek as they made their way upstream when the water came up in the fall. We had a lovely time, we worked on week-ends, in small groups, by the creek, and in the creek. The weather was mild, the leaves were changing color and we were helping the earth. William did most of the design and directed the building of the weir. It was a wonderful time of togetherness for the group. When the weir was finished we took turns watching it. It was designed so that a fish going up stream got caught going through and couldn’t go past until we counted it and lifted the gate. For days we rotated the watch, this was the time of normal migration, we wrote poetry on the weir itself, and a journal of data and poetry was kept. It had become a scared space. You could see it wasn’t just me who was connecting on some deeper level.

The first year we counted no chums. We were undaunted though. We must have done something wrong, we said, they must have gotten through the beavers tunnels, we must have missed them, they have eluded us. We took it out and put it in the next year. This was no small task, to coax the heavy wooden weir pieces and metal posts up a steep trail a ways from a road. By the third year we had only seen one chum salmon, and we had to face the fact that this run of chum salmon no longer existed. This same run of chum salmon had been in Chimacum Creek since the last ice age 12 thousand years ago, and now they were gone.

Members of the group could just not let this rest. No wild chum in Chimacum Creek, this was not acceptable. A dedicated cadre of volunteers created a vision and a plan to bring back the chum to our creek. Each run of salmon on each creek or river is specific to that creek or river. Salmon travel thousands of miles in the ocean and return home to their natal streams. The best we could do was to take salmon eggs from the next creek to the west of Chimacum Creek which was Salmon Creek, raise them and put them in Chimacum Creek, assuring the fish would recognize this as their natal stream and return. First we had to enhance the chum run on Salmon Creek as it was a depleted run and when the Department of Fisheries gave us the go ahead, we were able to take eggs from the wild spawners of Salmon Creek and raise the eggs in Chimacum. When it was time to release these fry into the Chimacum Bay in the spring, it was an grand event and they were always sent off by many well wishers. There was a great sense of community in the group on the dock, satisfaction and hope. We sipped champagne and toasted our chum. We read poetry we had written for the occasion and we stayed out on the dock long after the last fry had been seen swimming away.

On of the best parts of this project was that it was to be for ten years only. It was always clear that we wanted to boost the run but not artificially keep it going. There were several restoration projects on Chimacum Creek done in those years to facilitate the spawning of the chum salmon when they returned. We have been gone from the project for a few years now. We got an invitation just last year to the last fry release in Chimacum Creek, the humans have stepped out and the fish will take over. That was indeed good news. Go Fish.