E-mail: The Umbilical Cord of the 21st Century

My dear friend Seamus asked me, before Dad passed away, if I'd thought about how I'd feel after...(the sentence continued, as he wrote it "...he gets out of the ICU." Seamus can be SO kind.) I hadn't really thought about it and at the time, wasn't really up for doing so. Looking for work, trying to budget my dwindling savings, keeping in touch with my family, trying to salvage my relationship: those were all on the priority list.

A lot of my friends and family have noticed that I'm not humble by any means; in fact, if I could get some humility injected into me, I'd jump at the chance. I am however, quite self-deprecating and can be downright miserably hard on myself. I tend to take care of other people/things/important events in my life before thinking about taking care of myself, especially in relation to those people, things, and important events in my life. I've pushed grieving my father's death back due to massive amounts of overtime at work and attempting to generate alternate sources of income, acquiring a roommate in my (now cramped) single-bedroom apartment, focusing on the grieving of my family members, trying to help them where I can, etc.

And now it's coming back to haunt me. Specifically, over the Internet. I never realized what an umbilical cord email created until I started to forward something to my dad a few weeks ago and then stopped, realizing. Now that that's happened for about the dozenth time, it seems like the world is beginning to crash around me. I've shut down my feelings so much that they're now sick of waiting for me to be able to cope with them and are rebelling against me, legions of tear-thickened thoughts and menmories and feelings coursing through my mind and heart at all times. Not having had the opportunity to see my father much over the past few years, and the last time I saw him being only slightly before his death, email became our main form of communication. It was how we shared laughs, jokes, badly-written Republican rants and stories of our lives. It was how we knew what was going on with each other. And now I feel like I'm at one end of the modem with only a dial tone at the other end, one that won't impatiently start pulsing if I don't begin to transmit, but rather, will wait...and wait...and wait...

I Am SUCH An Idiot

I don't know if it's because I chose to send the email about the photos I posted of me and my dad during his last days to my flickr page, or if it's because I actually posted them. But I did, and now I feel...ashamed, embarrassed, horrible, and even more excluded from my family than before. Everyone grieves differently...

Though that was not apparently a good enough reason for my little sister, who called me to give me a verbal beating for publishing all of the photos that I did: ["you think that putting pictures of the sores on Dad's feet on the Internet was okay? That's so disrespectful to him and to our family...to the way he lived..."]. Apparently it isn't, in the world of being Twenty-Three And Right About Everything. It's funny, that's the same thing she accused me of when I was 23.

So consider me shamed, my head hung, my attempt to participate in the family grieving process cut short. And thanks so much Em, your subjectivity has been noted and filed for future reference.

Ten Things To Do To Feel Better

1. Put on "Such A Lovely Thing" from DeVotchKa's How It Ends and dance around to it. Or "Just A Ride" by Jem, or "Sing Sing Sing" by the Benny Goodman Orchestra, or "Skokiaan" by Louis Armstrong off of his All-Time Greatest Hits CD. Just be sure to dance.

2. Mass-text all of your friends and tell them that you love them. Then watch the replies roll in.

3. Get out! Go for a walk, a run, a bicycle ride, a hike, whatever, but get out of your little enclosed space.

4. Write a card or a letter (by hand) to someone you haven't heard from in a long time, and mail it to them. Be sure to let them know they're in your thoughts, especially if it's been awhile.

5. Bring flowers to someone. Especially a stranger or someone who could really use a lift in their day.

6. Make an online donation to a conservation trust. A few really good ones:
http://www.lionconservation.org
http://www.wildlifedirect.org
http://www.SaveOurSeas.org
http://www.seashepherd.org

Alternately, offset your carbon footprint by calculating it and donating automatically here:
http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/

7. Make amends...with yourself, with others, with whatever higher power you feel exists, with whatever you need to. Unload some of that guilt you've been hauling around, however you can.

8. Organize a "Free Hugs" campaign with friends (see the original video that spawned the Free Hugs movement on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4) and/or family members, community members, for no reason. Just go do it. Nothing has ever made me feel better than the Free Hugs campaign my friends and I staged last year at the Boulder Fall Festival.

9. When you're at the gas station, offer to fill someone else's car up for them. While it's filling, wash their front and rear windshields. They'll be blown away, and you'll feel uplifted.

10. Smile. Smiling makes everything better, no matter what.














Poppa, Joshua Taggart, Aunt Dondi

Just Another Day In October

It's shaping up to be another beautiful October evening in Boulder, CO. My apartment needs some straightening and vacuuming but otherwise has assumed its usual adjustable-chaos atmosphere. The dishwasher is pounding my pots and pans and plates and such fromt he past few days with quantitative amounts of hot, frothy, soapy water. My cat is out on the balcony, trying again--and as futilely as each time before--to communicate with the birds that crowd the bird feeder. I really think she's just eager for someone to talk to, but they know better, and scold her from their lofty perches. By all accounts, it's just another normal evening in Boulder.

Except my dad died two days ago. My father is dead. My friend, my ally, my hero, my first love, my supporter, my mentor, my coach, my dear old wonderful dad, is gone. The news is so big that it's utterly incomprehensible, although it hit me so hard at work today that I was sent home and spent the rest of the day in bed sleeping, avoiding the world, using "Nature's Prozac", as Jack calls substantial amounts of sleep, to my advantage. Phones rang. People went about their days. Mine stopped. It seems like mine has stopped a lot in the past couple of days, this fact that continually resides in the back of my mind--accept it Dondi your father is dead--is unaaceptable. I just don't fucking get it. I saw him three weeks ago and he was progressing, and now he's just gone. He's just gone. Accept it Dondi your father is dead...

I think for the time being, I'll head back to bed thoughm while I'm capable of thinking semi-rationally about this, hope that my father is in a better place now.

Rest in peace, William Richard Barrowclough, "Bill" to his friends and loved ones, "Dad" to his children, "Poppa" to his grandchildren. August 5, 1940 - October 7, 2007. When I get up the courage, or am maybe able to write on this for longer than a quarter of an hour without tears sliding down my cheeks, obscuring thoughts and vision, I'll write about how he became "Poppa". That's a neat story. For now...thanks for reading.

~Dondi

It's won't be long now, hands can't stop holding...

....it's a line from a song my friend Ramaya wrote and performed with his band A. Ballad Nightly. The "It won't be long now..." part is very true. It won't be long now. From the tone of my sister's very quiet, very subdued voice I knew that. Her telling me that they were taking him off of life support, basically, that they were stopping the feeding tube, the respirator, the fluids, seemed impossible, too far away. But it won't be long now. The doctors aren't giving a time frame but they are giving him morphine to keep him comfortable. A few hours. A few days. Not much longer.

The second part is also true, though, "...hands can't stop holding..." This song in particular has nothing to do with my circumstances, certainly, or my father, or my family, but it is befitting. We are a strong, close, ferociously loving family. Our grasp won't break, our hands won't stop holding, even in the absence of our father, grandfather, brother, friend, mentor, lover, companion, "Daddy", "Poppa", "Dad", "Bill". Our hands can't stop holding...

I love you, Daddy.

Keep on keeping on...

You keep smiling.

When your brother calls you on the first day of work at your new job to tell you your father has acute liver failure and is getting worse, you smile. You try to think about something else. Because if not the wall around your heart will crumble into oblivion and you will become like so many wailing worshipers begging God for anything. Another chance. A turnaround. A better prognosis.

Oh God, what am I going to do?

First impressions...

Three days ago I was planning my day as I laid half-awake in bed on Saturday morning. A last-minute flight, a midnight landing, an emergency trip cross-country and several days later and now i am sitting in one of those hospital chairs that extends to a sort of pesudo-bed. Reflections thus far...

• Foam in, foam out. Pick up your niece (foam), rake your fingers thru your hair (foam), sneeze (lotsa foam), open a door (foam), whatever...foam. There are canisters of foam-version alcohol sanitizer about every four feet. Smart idea, though I'm still getting a hang of them so will end up often with a rather avant-garde sort of white spray over some part of my blouse or pants.
• Hospital food at Carolinas Medical Center ROCKS. No, really, it does.
  
• I'm getting really used to the choked-up feeling that I have all the time now. I hate it as much as I ever have.
• Dad still snores like a pro. I may possibly nod off tonight but actual sleep is not, I believe, in the cards.
• There are so many machines in this room, and only one of me. They can fix him, supposedly, but I can love him. When does quality trump quantity?

Bye for now...Dondi.

Grief finds you...

…when you least want, sometimes even least expect it to. When it’s been awhile since it’s bothered you. When it feels like things have calmed down a little.

In the middle of the bike path today, I was suddenly caught by the thought that my dad was struggling so much harder than I was to breathe. It was like a hot fist reaching into my guts, goring me without aim or care, just tearing in wherever it could. I was wrenched suddenly, mercilessly, it seems; I tripped, I almost fell, I finally sat and, with my head between my knees, felt the tears flooding my face, completely shocked. I was not expecting this. A few minutes ago I was absolutely enraptured, enveloped in love for the place that I lived, the town I was in. I was smiling my usual cheesy-huge runner’s grin, dogging the miles, gearing up for the last big push. A few minutes later and I’ve hit the wall. It’s been years since I’ve hit the wall. I’ve been endurance training long enough to know how to avoid doing it, how to keep it from messing with me, how to avoid its entrapments. This was a different wall.

Emotionally, I’ve always been…sensitive, I suppose, would be the nice way to say it. Melodramatic, overemotional, ridiculous, obnoxious, absurd, rude, and monumentally emotionally challenged, to be a bit more honest or at least, to the point. Hey, I know my challenges (I think!), for the most part, and I try to work with them. Believe it or not, I don’t like being a drama queen all the time. I have never been particularly gentle with news of my father’s condition, when people ask, because it’s very true: he’s not doing well. He’s suffering a lot. He’s…

I can’t commit to paper what I’m afraid to admit to myself, to own up to, to fully understand on my own. I caught my reflection in a nearby window yesterday while I was talking with my brother; my eyes, green like his, had darkened, brow furrowed, eyebrows like swooping wings over my eyes, trying to hide them, it seemed, trying to keep me blind, keep me ignorant, keep me faithful. Keep BJ, my brother, the oldest of all of the siblings in the family, faithful, stubborn, true to himself. And thank God for BJ: true to himself, he admitted fully: they had no idea what was going on, but he needed to be taken to the hospital in Chapel Hill, the specialist center for his cancer. The regular hospital in Pineville wasn’t going to cut it. He needed more specific care. They didn’t know what was wrong with him.

A man is brought into a hospital, he can’t breathe, he can’t eat, he’s lapsing in and out of consciousness, he’s trying to pull the tubes and needles from his skin, pluck the clothing from his body. He’s trying to get out of bed, get up, get out, go home. He’s restless and urgent and doesn’t know reality from surreality from unconscious. His brain is affected, his mind warped by drugs and struggle and fighting, and now, from lack of oxygen. His oxygen levels are too low in his blood, in other words, his blood is too thick. It’s too dense, and it’s not delivering the right things to the right places anymore. His wife, his youngest daughters are up with him through the night, barely sleeping, if at all, trying to reason with him and he probably barely recognizes them. He’s shutting down. His blood is drowning him. Killing him.

I would read this and think, oh, what a sad story. What a terrible thing. What an ordeal. Except it’s not a sad story, or a terrible thing, or an ordeal. It’s my father, dammit, this is my father. That’s my dad; he has four daughters, one son, one daughter-in-law, two sons-in-law. His oldest child isn’t 38 yet. His youngest is barely 23. He has seven grandchildren, and they’re not stopping there. The oldest of them is still in single digits; the youngest is but a few months. They know him as “Poppa”. We know him as “Dad”. This man is a Taoist, a Christian, a writer, a rebel, a Yankee, a liberal, a championer of civil rights and a hero to his children, to his grandchildren. To many others’ children and grandchildren too. He’s my favorite coach, trainer, adviser, confidante, supporter, my first love and one of my best friends. Fucking figure it out already.

I don’t care what you have to do, but stop standing there looking at the scared kid and the shattered wife and do something. Fix him. That’s what hospitals are for, right? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Don’t you understand that this mess in front of you is a man, a father, a patriarch? Someone’s child. Someone’s parent. Someone’s best friend. Someone’s heart and soul and we are all putting everything we’ve got in you, you people, running around this place, these glaring white walls, these charts, these frowns, these red-exhausted eyes. Wake up, get up, get moving, fix him. Fix him. Why are you still standing there? Why haven’t you done something already? Why haven’t I?