Tips for TBIs and various Hypothesises (?)

12.15.12

Intro: written live

I believe I should/will be writing a yearly a summation of what I've learned about brain and spinal  injuries/sprains or at least about mine.  Within these summaries will be both strategies I have, am and did implement which may be of use to others both with a TBI and those with other diagnosises wherein the symptoms overlap.

For example I recently heard, haven't confirmed but I trust the source, that in his readings he came across some information on autism that correlates to what was, is and remains an at times truly horrible after effect which I now refer to as: "I lost my mute button".

That translates to an inability to mute sound, to focus on one sound or block out others. I first noticed when an old high school friend (Hi Al) took me to a Hawley-Cooke's bookstore cafe in Louisville. Everyone and everything was at the same decimal level, or so it seemed.  I just started crying. I couldn't express or understand what was happening, what had happened.

Over the years as I tried to express to medical personal they'd say things like "Oh that's just sensory overload" or "weren't you always like that?" (No I was one of those people who would put in a music tape low, essentially block out the sound, and study- quirkily background noise I knew and my brain had memorized, actually helped me focus.)

In the ten plus years since the TBI + spinal sprain (major assault on my central nervous system) one of the many horrors (and no I'm not overstating it)  has been dealing with those who literally can not conceive or have any baseline understanding of what I am talking about.  Who act as if their experience and my experience couldn't be at all different, who pressume there's really nothing that changed and it must be "just lke when you've been in a room with loud for a few hours". No.

No.

What it's "like" is that some mornings I can barely stand being in the shower because the sound of the water hitting tile is so loud I could scream.

Other mornings the sound has no effect and there is no high level noise sensitivity.

If you know the vocabulary word this let me know because in ten years of medical personelle no one has yet to attach a vocabulary word to it except for innocuous phrases like "noise sensivity" or the ever insulting, and both functionally and experientially innacurate term: "sensory overload". Nobody wakes in th emorning to sensory overload, sensory overload as I understand the term is a reation to conditions. "It" is not a reaction to a prolonged exposure to sensory input.

And no
it's not
"just like" anything
you've ever experienced- unless
perhaps
you're autistic?

Anyway that's the skinny I've heard recently. That researchers finally know why, or hypothesize why, autistics bang their heads up against walls "frustration" and perhaps wanting to to make themselves unconscious because they are experiencing sound is like a constant assault. The same way touch can feel like they're being burned- so it is with sound.

Anyway- ear plugs= constantly have them on you. Plus white noise is immensely helpful to me though I understand that others with the same unknown condition can literally be driven close to nuts with white noise. Outdoor environments are of course better than indoor environments because of sound's particle and wave quality. Plus (hopefully) I'm looking forward to getting some Bose noise canceling head phone which of course I must pay for despite being on government assitance- just like I''m the one paying ear plugs.

One doctor told me the noise eliminating headphones wouldn't help, he had a smirk on face at the time like maybe to him this and being like this is simply funny, but another doctor advised I have them on my person at all times and NOT to just use them when sound is to the point I want to running screaming out of where-ever I am but to start using them pre-emptively.

What a difference! Doc- you may never read this- I may never get a chance to tell you but you have no idea the difference you made in my life.

What I wonder about per Bose noise eliminating headphones, as opposed to earplugs, is the pressure and balance differential in the inner ear.

My ears have been popping for a decade now, and no this preceeded the use of earplugs by nearly ten years. Periods of time where my ears are popping constantly which is always accompanied by dizziness (though I dizzy plenty without that particular quirk) muscle clenches and spasms - plus a few extra weird symptoms.

I heard a doctor at Duke University speaking about a year or so ago on the radio and he had mentioned research they were doing based on the hypothesis that TBI may, in a addition to cellular death within the brain, be related to damage/re-arrangement to crytalline structures within the inner ear. I'v etried contacting the program I heard him speak on and a doctor at Duke - but so far no reply.

If all the aforementioned is true then one could surmise that perhaps  the earpopping is and are those small crystal like structures being slightly re-arranged and the body trying to heal itself.  When I was in school we were told these structures "didn't do anything" which of course is absurd.

What I wonder per the ear plugs is if the pressure redistribution, as well as the moisture level because I sometimes have (what I perceive as) enormous amounts of liquid that has accumulated creates an alteration that is beneficial and part of the relief OR could the relief be more so without the pressure and moisture change?

Hopefully I'll get to find out.

Anyway so that's what I have per this entry:

Tip: If you are a TBI, or other neurologically challenged individual, who is experiencing something beyond "noise sensitivity" or "just sensory overload" and therefore NOT sensory overload but something as of yet not given a term, and therefore legitimacy, by the AMA try the following:

1) ear plugs on your person at all times
2) check out Bose noise elliminating headphones
3) As much experience with outdoor/ nature noise as possible?

What's true for me is that sound reverberating/bouncing off walls and indoor spaces differs hugely from how I experience noise, even music outside/open air. One can utterly incapasitate (totally spelled that wrong) encapasitate (?) while the other is nearly innocuos (suspect I mispelled that).  See what the difference(s) in environment make.

4) If you can develope the physical balance, or have access to an amigo or a chair: when the sound thing is bad try instituting what I have come to coin: voluntary blindness.

Maybe only for five to ten seconds maybe for a few hours but I have found that if I can shut down one sense then its like the other one that's overwhelmed has enough neural energy(?) avaliable if the brain system only has one sense taken temporarily 'off-line'.

?

5) I had a five but unfortunately I don't remember what it was:(

6) Though it relates to the visual system (dizzines, depth perception and eyes drifting and darting): The Hansel and Gretel appraoch (previously mentioned) is extremely helpful:

In your visual field, the path you'll be taking, find focus points (non moving objects) close to you and then farther and essentially visually focus and then leap frog to the next visual focus point. I have found this incredibly helpful and when a sudden wave of dizziness hits, at least for me, this technique helps. I don't know why but possibly it helps orient the body in space?




Lastly:

TBW/( to/2 b(e) written): A yearly summation of what I have learned and am still learning about something that occured 11 years ago. 

An Affair To Remember

search: string theor(ies/y), ws merwin, dante, purgatory, poetry, tragedyz-easy-comedyz-hard-poetryz-excrutiating and you just might find my new blog.

Plus it'll be an interesting experiment fo rme myself and I: bigheartsungirl
as
I
have
written
prev
ious
ly
things
r
n't
always
as
they
seem


just because

u can't see it

doesn't mean it
isn't there/ (t/here)

http:http://www.inckqblot.wordpress.com



Nope- - you know- ya' know having short term memory problems really does suck try this instead



























try clickin' this doo-ah-mah-hickey
at least I hope thats's right/correct
:)

Red Alert: Superhero Advisory Notes

I xpereince cycling petit-mal seizures which flirt around with becoming big bad grands. While I’m getting physically pounded an old familiar hallucination/sensation visits.


Originally I’d lost the sense of smell. The only times I could smell was when smelling a non-smell: an ol factory hallucination and therefore not a smell at all.

Recently I had a bad long attack and in the midst of a lot of physical discomfort a separate feeling, so distinct- familiar, it is almost as if. But this comforting reminder generated by my mind is simply a hallucination- like smelling something that isn’t. Just the brain remembering but so very vividly.

Finally the attack ends, I physically begin improving BUT I so prefer the lie of that hallucination to reality that part of me battles to bring that lie back to life. At such times I don’t do particularly well at reminding myself, and really believing, that this comforting sensation of someone IS an hallucination my brain has modeled after a real and actual person- a friend of yours.

Eventually I make myself remember how things actually and really are. I’m working on a better behavioral modification strategy for that and those half light times.

Anything that arrives- just mark it: return to sender like the Elvis Presley song.

-4unately and maybe unforrtunately as well they'll be arriving at PO Box 1947.

The numbers

according to the numbers my page is viewed. I may even be read. But no one has anything to say.

OK then niether do I...as if.

Thank You: Barnegut Bay New Jersey Yachts-people

Dear Lafayette Club:

I've tried finding the yacht club online; thus far can not find it anywhere and therefore will post this here and hope the message finds its home:

To Lafayette Yacht Club, Specifically those three or four old salts waiting on the porch as our boat came into shore in 1979. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the forms and file the paperwork. Thanks too to all those who approved the paperwork.




Dear Sirs and Madams,



Thank you for taking away my father’s captains license.

For seeing to it that he’d “never captain a boat on the eastern seaboard again”.



Thank you.



With More Gratitude Than I Could Ever Express To You,



Maren Alford





PS. The above is really all that’s necessary- the rest is for me but anyone who stumbles across this who has the time, inclination and abilities - I really would like to thank anyone and everyone who made sure the above happened.



On th enight Sandy hit the Jersey coast I briefly searched another storm.I searched hurricane David just to know, just to see because I didn’t know and like “Martha Recipes of Munchausen’s by Proxy” - David and that Snipe was much worse than I ever knew but I had just wanted to know how old I was.



I won’t be able to write this, not tonight. Tonight at just about this hour Hurricane Sandy, the name of our dog in New Jersey…-I digress.



Tonight October 29th, 2012 a hurricane named Sandy and possibly its wall of water are where I grew up, my childhood home, the geographical portion of my life with which I have the most fondness because of people like the ones who ran the Lafayette Yacht Club in 1979 when what was apparently a very large and well publicized storm approached the Jersey coast and therefore our parents put us in a small boat and sailed into it.



We never cried. I never cried.



I was 9. My sister was 7.



I never saw the paperwork so I don’t know for certain that what my mother said was true but it would explain why she continued carrying around her Lafayette Yacht Club Membership card. A card from a yacht club she hadn’t been a member of in nearly twenty years was in her personal effects, her wallet. Allegedly the jib or the main was the rope she used but I never saw any paperwork regarding his license being stripped only that we were never taken back to Lafayette Yacht Club after hurricane David. I only know that during my mother’s dual confession as accusations truth period she boasted this great secret she’d been keeping. In an one-ups-man-ship tone my mother said:



“Your father”, that was her husband’s official name.



“Your father had his captain’s license taken away,” she said giving this news update eleven years after the fact while apparently having forgotten that during the years following his captain’s license being stripped she had encouraged my sister and I to give him nautically themed gifts and we did. Which we did at encouragement continue the nautical theme not knowing we were delivering weapons at her spouse for her. She most certainly never considered how and what that boat had been to and for anyone but her. She and I never spoke of it. She my mother spoke it though but what it was for me or my sister, we weren’t allowed to talk like that, like we could and did feel.



The above sounds good - I believe it is well written (as most writers are delusional on that point) but the thing is its dishonest because the truth is I collapsed into tears tonight on the kitchen floor and the thought in my head : ‘We didn’t cry‘ and “he kept yelling at me, us“.



We never cried. Not in the boat. Not as we drove home. Never, never about this- only now as Hurricane Sandy hit’s the northeast United States do I cry about another storm altogether.



The thought that preceded the collapse and audible sobbing: He yelled at us the entire time, the whole time he was yelling at us.



Two little girls, nine and seven-years-old and he is/was screaming at us because HE put everyone in a boat, in a fifteen foot Snipe for a hurricane, for fun, for kicks -and we were the ones getting yelled at.



On that note, I would also like to thank the Freehold Girls Soccer League who too said: “No“. In their case it was “no- more ‘coaching’ from you as screaming like a complete lunatic at little girls is completely unacceptable”. Thanks too to all the parents who complained about the way he treated your kids because that meant I didn’t have to deal with him screaming at me nearly as much on the soccer field.



But back to the unabridged thank you to those from the Lafayette Yacht Club who made sure he never got to do anything like this again.



In my mind I had always classified “Hurricane David”, see I didn’t know until tonight, until that same him-ness that lives in me wanted to confirm “its not that bad” or it couldn’t have been. So for me I’d always told myself, figured it was the tail-end of a hurricane (which I’m sure it was). I always figured David had been a small hurricane like a category two or three that had been puttering out and was probably not so much a hurricane but a tropical storm by the time it hit New Jersey’s Barnegut Bay. That’s still probably true.



I didn’t know until tonight that 1979’s hurricane David had been a big storm. The kind of storm that would have had plenty of media attention. I didn’t know until now that both my parents would have known and heard about David because they were partakers of nightly and morning news - so its not something that they would have missed or been unaware of. I guess part of me still believed the lie, wanted to believe the lie but believing in truth I ran a quick search on my pay as you go phone? Mostly I had just wanted to know what age I was on that day.



I saw 1979 which would have meant I was nine or ten depending on the month.



I saw “Category 5” “many deaths” and switched my phone off as that was and is enough to know.



I remember that day so clearly, but in snippets and pieces. I don’t recall how I felt maybe because not feeling, being as numb as possible was the primary survival strategy? I felt dead inside most of the time and had and did learn to “act” as my parents did: act happy, act as if this all isn’t really happening.



But I do remember I was afraid before we ever got in the boat. There was no one at the yacht club. Not one boat was in the water. Not one. There had not been any cars, anywhere- hardly any car on the road as we drove there and now everything was deserted and he expected us to “get in that boat”.



Not a single person was anywhere, not one person and he expected us to get in that boat. The yacht club was entirely abandoned, the club house closed. There was this particular clinking sound of the wind against something metal, a particular sound and its in my head right now. That clink came off of the mast and usually there was the background noises of other people getting their boats in the water but there were no boats in the water. The water was nothing but white caps. The sky was grey, a weird grey.



The Earl/the captain was angry before he barked us in to the boat. Our mother had not wanted to go in the boat and I believe told us not to get in but he snarled and growled “get in the boat”, said it more than once and kept getting scarier and scarier looking and was going into his terrifying face when really, really bad things happened. So my sister and I got in the boat before this got worse. We were raised to do whatever he told us to do. You can’t edict like that to kids and then expect them to pick choose like our mother did at that moment. Fact is he’d hurt us, he’d hurt us later when she wasn’t looking or really hurt us in private, hurt us more. So we got in the boat.



I remember our mother looked betrayed, as if we’d betrayed her and let her down and I felt ashamed and badly about having just hurt her feelings. Her feelings on display and were that when we’d gotten in the boat, you could see on her face that to her it meant we’d chosen him over her, that we‘d betrayed her trust somehow. She ever acted as if we didn’t look afraid and I know we did, especially that day.



See she told us not to get in the boat but we were too afraid of him to not do what he said.



The mud, the surface around the yacht club was white, a strange chalky clay.



When I heard about this storm, Sandy, and heard people talk about media hype I just made a silent wish that they’d all look at it like fire drills in school: there may never be a fire but if there ever were one you’d want to be prepared? I hope they did.



As for me I could write it all and have before except for details like the submarine sandwiches in the cooler, the island we stopped at for lunch, the Christenson’s not being there and later having been shocked we were, had been- that anyone would put a boat in the water in such weather.



Apparently we were in the water for the worst of it -one of the gales, a huge burst of wind and water and the captain kept angrily screaming at my sister and I to bail, which we were - we were already bailing and he kept screaming at us to bail harder and faster as if we weren‘t as if it were our fault that the waves were too big and there was too much rain and as if if we would just do a better job at bailing we might not all die. We’d been bailing ever since we got back in the boat. “There’s too much water in the boat!” he bellowed at us as if this were something within our powers, or anyone’s, to correct- as if that were our job and this, this sinking boat was our responsibility as if my seven year-old sister and I had driven the car, un hooked the boat, lowered the boat into the churning water and he, the captain, just happened to be there.



I remember the water rising inside the boat as the waves kept breaking on and increasingly in the boat. The waves + the rain = the boat was sinking. Too much water in the boat and only then did the captain look at all worried. Up until that point he had been completely elated and quite obviously enjoying himself, that no none else was- up until that point that‘s what he’d been enjoying most about the day. That’s what he got off on.



Other than the water, there too of course was the wind and the clamps failing.



I remember thinking that we might die, drown. I remember feeling great sadness at that and noting the unfairness of dying at nine. Worse for my little sister because she was really little. I looked at my mother and felt badly for her; I was very reliable at feeling badly for her. Not until a little over thirty years later when Sandy came to the Jersey coast did I cry about that day on Barnegut Bay.



Martha, during her personal commission of truth period had said the angry faces, who at the time when I was nine years old just seemed like more people who were angry in my direction, standing on a porch waiting. Martha said of those that had left their homes gone out in the storm, stood and waited on the yacht club’s porch - waited stonily for who? To say what to who?



Nearly fifteen years later my mother announced triumphantly, of her ex-husband and those old salts waiting on the porch “they said ‘take your family out in a storm like this!”. In the world of my mother the accusation only pointed at “your father”/her husband because Martha was human Teflon. She was just following orders, being an obedient wife and the man making all these insane decisions was “their father”. Ever it was as if we gave birth to him and our mother was just dropped into the situation as if by a stork.



My father/ her husband/ the former captain never took his family into hurricane David on Barnegut Bay in a Snipe because he never had a family; he had hostages. Then of course there’s what he came up with following hurricane Hugo, came down specially for that but that was a full decade later.





The thank you I give may have started with residents of Barnegut Bay I may have never met and never will. Those storm watchers who from their homes saw a little boat on the water and started making calls, watching us from shore, noting we were still afloat but struggling.



So thank you to all of you and you are in my thoughts and prayers these days-those living along Barnegut Bay, those of The Lafayette Yacht Club, the state of New Jersey and the Coast Guard for surely being there “if“. But most especially my love to and for you who made sure my father could never put us in that boat or take us into a hurricane for his personal amusement ever again. Thank you.

An Apology: Give Ground Zero Back

"In 1492 Columbus, "  this is a song we were taught in school and if you are from the UNited mayb eyou were too.

If you were not born in the United States of America here are the lyrics:

"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue," except that given the history that would have come and that we' ve all seen it would more properly be:

"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean red". Red with the blood of native people. Red with the blood of the slave trade. Red with the blood of every living creature that could be trapped. hacked, eatten, worn, experimented, torture and killed.

"In 1492-" - who?

Demons sailed that ocean blue and turned it red.

"America's a free country," - no it was free a country and peolpe were free until european "nobility' decided to spread their own personal brand of slavery to two more continents.

America was a free country- maybe it can be again?

To the tribes my family 'displaced' (that's a nice poilte word for it) - my sincere apologies and may ancestors know peace. May those us who come from those who robbed you of the peace in which you and your people lived - some of us hope we can build back to the superiority of your race.

O(r)bit:In Memory of: David John Morgenson

Dear David,


I recently read of your death.
Read someone else’s online ‘tribute’/obituary and wanted to write a bit more, the pieces of you I remember. Admittedly they’re few, they’re hardly any with the “family” spread across the continent. Marshall, as Marshall would, makes it spread across the world.

The picture in your obituary was sad to me. Perhaps you were happy but it looked forced which I’m sure someone or everyone will resent me saying but that is what I saw, what I see and thus was not only sad to read of your death because I recognize that smile, the I-am-trying-so-hard-to-smile smile. Your face in photographs so often seemed to be saying I’m trying so hard to smile and be what you or someone or anyone or everyone wants and it is breaking me. I recall seeing a lot of those on your face in the family album, pictures from weddings or school shared and sent between the Olson sisters.


At least that’s what I read on your face in that photograph and perhaps because of the angle and Martha , there was a picture of Martha with a very similar, eerily similar trying-very-hard-to--smile smile with those same family angles in her and your check bones, jaw lines and something in the eyes.

But too,

I have tales of you,

in my head,

lovely bits of you

just small threads that do not make a yarn but

moments and nuances of your person, always emotionally so very gentle.


You/David, were the gentlest in and of your band of giants.


Martha’s favorite story about you/David, one she told over and over again and every so often I see a bug, especially a particularly interesting looking one and I think of: ”He’d never seen bugs before”. According to Martha you were blind- okay not blind but apparently couldn’t see hardly anything from a very young age and needed glasses terribly and once you got them could barely keep your eyes off the ground and loved watching the bugs. Martha loved remembering you seeing what you had never seen, fascinated.


Of course I can not speak to the validity of that statement because it came to me second hand but I can speak from my own memory: who you are/were in my memory.



Ridgefield, Connecticut- early fall, Greenwich and those stone walls leading to your house, the smell of skunk weed. The screened in porch, the lazy-Susan on the kitchen table, the pool table in the basement and my very cool cousins with whom we always felt so safe and comfortable we never wanted to leave. Once when Martha locked the keys in the trunk I and my sister yelled “Horray” because we got to stay with you guys/all an extra day.



Was it that day? That visit or another the you told us a perhaps tall tale from Field and Stream magazine?



Was that the day we three went fishing? You, our big man of the world in high school cousin took us fishing. Where was the rest of the tribe? In and out -Monica with Barbazon (sp?) Eric and Erica somewhere or another and most certainly in a state of play, for the Morgensons could play, were encouraged to and do things whereas, well that was one of the wonderful things about coming to Connecticut and then of course there were the geese and the dog named Popcorn.



I’ve had quite a few geese around me these last few years but of course these geese can fly unlike the pair in Ridgefield, the pair metaphorically tied to the pond. A good sized pond with fish and frogs, two surly geese and right across the street from your house. That was a special day because you took us fishing?



Yes and no.



It was special because you were so kind, sensitive and not at all mean.



I don’t remember what kind of fish lived in the pond but that there was a tackle box and fishing poles and my sister or I caught one!?



“It’s tugging at the line - reel it in nice and steady, nice and steady-” you/David readied the net and then the bend in the fishing pole was gone at the sound of a snap.



“Line snapped,” you said and soon began untangling the mess of fishing line while shaking your head, clearly bothered as you/he explained how hooks pierce and catch fish “That fish’ll have that hook stuck in his mouth for the rest of his life.” You may have even said it twice explaining how important it is to reel a fish in correctly or else -and then you David were completely alarmed, panicked.



Your little girl cousin/s had started crying. Crying hard at the thought of having hurt the fish.



Flustered at this turn of events the gentlest giant said “But it’ll fall out,” you/David said which made us cry harder because



“You said -you just said an article in Field and Stream -and it’ll never come out and hurt the fish, it might starve - that might be killing the fish right now, and now it’ll longer for it to die.”



You/David paused, stumped and there was silence as your little girl cousin/s cried until we heard you say “Oh now I remember,” you/David said and apologized because you‘d forgotten something “they disintegrate”.



“The article said“, our cousin would almost entirely convincingly allege “I forgot, the hooks disintegrate,” which was a new vocabulary word David defined for us and described how gradually the metal breaks down, the hook breaks apart and the wound heals.



We stopped crying, we could stop crying and not feel as badly for the fish as when all I could see in my minds eye was all the long suffering because the line snapped. And David assured one or both of us that it was no one’s fault: the line broke because they just do sometimes.



My sister and I talked about it later because we kinda’ figured you/David might have made up the hook disintegration thing so we’d stop crying and wouldn‘t feel bad. That was strange to us, and really nice- nice to know someone like that.



And really strange because you were big and a grown up comparatively AND a big male person and instead of trying to make us cry or liking to see us cry or getting angry because we were crying you tried to make us feel better. In the world of my sister and I this was and would be very strange, very unusual behavior, very special behavior. A big kind hearted giant.





That and you defended us from the geese. The two geese who lived at the pond who did and would attack. Who could blame them? their wings having been clipped and now trapped only able to watch as other geese whose wings weren’t clipped could still fly and fly off without them.



Was it you who pointed that out?



Wouldn’t surprise me if it had been- would be in keeping with you, the little of you I got to know.



Those weekends were like escaping to a dream and then your tribe moved, you guys/all packed up and moved and we wouldn’t see you again until I was nearly or in in high school myself.



I still have pictures of when you and your tribe rolled into Albert Lea, Minn. all those years later - exiting a van on your collective way to another reunion too, stopping at R & N’s for basketball, a chow down and then roll out. None of you would talk to my sister and I, seemed to avoid us even- every one in your family really except for you/David.



Why? It had been odd to my sister and I, we’d been so excited to see the Morgensons and then they were so very cool, distant, uncomfortable to be around us. That was the word you used to describe your lot at seeing us: “uncomfortable”.



And I’ll never know if it was like at the pond in Greenwich: entirely true, possibly true or not at all true but said to make us feel better, to take away some of the sting? I know I was disappointed, hurt.





All I know, all I saw and how I see it in hind sight: No one ever asked to speak to my sister or I on the phone, never. Everyone called to talk with Martha “my family” she used to say with the same tone of things we weren’t allowed to touch. Were we the untouchables? Or because we were half him, that thing she was married to? Or was it simply because we were like puppies cute when little but after that who cares really?



Either way we’d been so excited to see the Morgensons who had disappeared to Texas for marriages we couldn’t attend, only details passed second hand and then a reunion of a few hours. Mattie’s picture taken with every person who in her having children had children and so on and so on and the Morgensons would barely look at us and then you/David came over and said something to us before you all left (for the Hedstroms?).



I wish I could remember exactly and precisely what you/David said but just like at the pond it did made us feel better .



“I’m sorry,” you/David said ‘none of us have really(?)…we’ve been avoiding you?’ What was it exactly that you/David said?



That you- a grown up person- were apologizing to us?! Would even use the words “I’m sorry” that was stunning in and of itself. You used a feeling word and that was nice to hear again because those used in our house. “Uncomfortable” and I hate to tell you/David but used the words “young ladies” during what you were the only one kind enough to do.



“I’m sorry…we were expecting two little kids?- we still think of you as little kids” and it was “uncomfortable” seeing I think you used the term “young ladies” right about then. The tribe couldn’t wrap their mind around it: one a high school hottie and one in braces- they’ve actually grown up.



On the other hand Martha I doubt ever had much good to say about us. I have some of her letters from that period and I remember what was occurring so-. Maybe you just took the sting out of our being on the outs and even if that was the case entirely, though I don’t believe that. You never struck me as a particularly good liar- but then again as no one ever did: what do I know?



I know there were always laughs and laughter and that your tribe could and did. The next time I’d see you was during a split in pieces Thanksgiving in St. Louis.



Martha’s pies.



The competition as to whose elbow skin was the most elongated? Whose was hanging the lowest naturally and who could stretch their elbow skin the silly puddy farthest?



“A Wonderful Life” was on, a holiday classic, a holiday survival tool for some. None of you had ever seen it, none of you had ever had to.



The story of your youngest brother who had been so involved in making out with a girl the car had begun to move and he had just felt like the earth was moving- except it was the car that was moving was recounted and everyone - even Jack could laugh about it. Snow, ice and perhaps some crashing involved?



The next time I would see you was at Martha’s funeral, after and actually while I was being interrogated, questioned about one of the very things I had asked be prevented from happening but no had listened.



You came though. Thank you.



I’d always intended to send a thank you note to New Hampshire but I never got around to it. Heard only snippets of your life- many children and they lost you so early.



“Brain cancer” I read.



I suspect I’ve seen over the last decade some of the places that might have taken you. Me- the brain injury and you -the brain cancer-ed. I hope you went fast. But from the little I read it doesn’t sound as if you did, sounds more like you were that fish having to drag a hook around the pond.



I could write more. I could almost always write more. There’s so much I don’t know like what you were doing in Texas? Last I knew New Hampshire.



I hope you found peace? More, I hope you are somewhere wherein the kindness - and going out of your way to make sure feelings weren’t hurt and if hurt soothed- I hope that is where you are. Where all the hooks that pierce one here disintegrate or fall away.



And should any of those who lost him ever come to find this - I hope the portrait does him justice and that’s its good to read him remembered in such a way and that you too knew these shades of him, that gentle giant. I hope he was that for you too.






-Martha's Daughter          


 PS: AND you and Karen(?), your girlfriend DROVE my sister and I and took us to an ice cream parlor or nady shop? We we convinced you two would get married and someday and then we'd come live with you:)   That was about the neatest and greatest thing that had ever happened ever and made us both feel really specially- all I can hopr know is that you knew that OR that they have google and blogger in the sweeter hereafter.