All Used Up

A few weeks back, some folks asked if I’d be ‘blogging NaNoWriMo’ again this year.

I said yes. Of course I said yes; I have a strong need for a feedback loop in the creative cycle, so knowing there’d be one built into a certain string of blog posts is an automatic draw for me.

But there was a seed of doubt.

Yes, I wrote a lot of advicey posts last year, and they were generally received very well — more importantly, folks found them useful. But the non-secret secret of those posts is that I was really just writing notes to myself, figuring (correctly) that if the writing process followed a fairly clear pattern from beginning to end (it does, at least for me), I’d end up writing something worthwhile for lots of people.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I can do it again.

I mean, the process is the same, right? The stages are the same, right? What if I said everything useful last year? What if I don’t have anything good left to say?

Then again…

Every single time I’ve ever written a story (obviously not just in November), it’s been different. The challenges have come in different places, and with different parts of the story. The stories themselves have been different, and certainly I’m learning different things (and the same old things, again) every time.

And I’m different. In editing together that ebook of the advice I wrote last year, I found some things I didn’t entirely agree with. I left them in, because it’s still good advice, but it’s not quite me anymore.

The question basically boiled down to whether or not I thought I still had any words left at all.

And there’s really only one way to find that out. You go looking for them.

Story Time
I grew up in South Dakota, on a farm. On that farm, we raised cattle. Cattle are pretty simple creatures; they generally require only two things:

  • Grass. (The ‘corn-fed beef’ ideal is a dangerous, illness-creating myth.)
  • Water.

Now, out on the Great Plains, grass isn’t much of a problem, but water sometimes is, and if your pastureland doesn’t have a convenient lake handy or an artesian well set up, your livestock has to rely on a dugout.

A dugout’s basically a man-made watering hole — it looks like a rectangular pond about the half the size of a football field, with a suspiciously uniform hill lying directly along one side of it. The reason it looks like this is because of how it was made; basically, someone just hopped in a backhoe and dug a big hole in the ground about where someone decided there must be an underground spring, then piled the dirt up alongside the hole for no other reason than it was the easiest thing to do.

As a kid, all the dugouts around my home where preexisting affairs — old enough for the piles of dirt next to them to have settled down, grown grass, and become practically indistinguishable from burial mounds. I had no concept of them as a Thing That Was Made.

Then, sometime during my teen years, a well in one of our more distant pastures dried up, and my dad decided to get a guy out there with his backhoe and make a dugout.

It was a pretty epic undertaking. Via methods I’m still not entirely clear on (and on which my dad and granddad disagree), the optimal location for a dugout was determined, the heavy equipment was rolled in, and the digging commenced.

Problem was, it was two days in, and they weren’t hitting a spring. The hole was getting DEEP; both it and the pile of dirt next to it were bigger than the backhoe that had made them, and still no water.

I and my granddad had driven out to check on the digging (partly, I’m sure, so my granddad could rib Dad about the big dry hole), and after a bit of ‘conversation’ on the topic, Grandpa had walked over to talk with the foreman. I was left standing next to my dad. We stared into this enormous hole for awhile — it was pretty damned impressive.

“So,” I asked, “what do you do when you don’t find water?”

Dad didn’t respond at first; he was still looking down into the hole, and I wasn’t sure he’d heard me over the roar of the backhoe. Then: “If you know the water’s there,” he said, “you just keep digging.”

“No matter what?”

“Yep,” he said. “You’ll hit it eventually.” He put his right hand on my left shoulder, leaned in, and pointed so I could sight down along his left arm like the barrel of a .22. There, along the walls of the dugout, where the backhoe had just pulled another scoop of dirt away, there was a thin, silvery snake of water, running down toward the bottom of what would become, over the next four days, the biggest and deepest and most consistently full dugout we’d ever had.

“Now,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “Walk around t’ other side there, and make sure your granddad sees that.”

He sounded more than a little smug.


This is a cold hard fact about writing. Sometimes, you won’t feel like there’s any words there. You’ll sit at your keyboard and think “Everyone’s got a novel in them, sure… but what if I only had one? What if I don’t have anything left to say?”

The water’s there. You know it is.

Keep digging til you hit it.

Missed.

russel.jpg

My granddad died today, at about 5 in the morning. I’ll write more about this later, but for now, I think I’ll just let the previous post (about our recent visit home) stand as testimonial.

Summary

I’m going to tell you about my trip home to see my Granddad. I’m doing this so I remember. Apologies now for shifts in verb tense and the like — it’s not the most edited of posts, and that’s all right.


We left Thursday night, in Kate’s car, because it’s a little roomier. The plan was to drive to North Platte that night (four hours), stay at a hotel there, then finish the rest of the trip (another six hours) on Friday morning, and that’s basically what we did.

Kate had her iPod wired into the car’s stereo. The soundtrack for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog made an appearance during each leg of the trip, as did songs from our wedding reception and an extensive exploration of Johnny Cash hits that fit right into the grass-over-sand of Nebraska. Kaylee turns out to be an excellent highway traveler; almost perpetually self-entertaining and quite able to get a laugh out of her friends in the front seat.

I drove most of the way on Friday (for some reason I was in the mood to drive). We got into Miller about three in the afternoon, and drove straight to the nursing home. My folks spotted us as we pulled up and walked out to greet us while we were still unfolding from the car.

We talked a bit outside and I got the current updates on Grandpa’s health and Grandma’s state of mind. (She has Alzheimer’s, and it has progressed quite a bit since I’ve last seen her.)

I’m one of the first of the grandkids to make it into town (one of the reasons I set out so early), but I’m told nearly everyone will be here this weekend. Friday may be the first and best chance to talk to him on my own before interruptions and before he gets too tired.

He’s in pain, you see, and he hasn’t quite acclimated to the pain medication, so he dozes often and his speech is sluggish when he’s awake.

Dad also tells me to be ready for what he’ll say.


The facility is nice, and the staff is friendly and helpful and personable.

The commemorative plaques for those who have donated to the facility are permanently affixed to each door; the names of the room’s occupants are printed on sheets of paper, attached with scotch tape.


“What’s all this nonsense about you being sick?” I call out as I walk into the room.

He gestures at himself in his recliner. He’s thinner — mostly in his face and neck — and paler. “I’m done,” he says. He grips my hand as I sit down next to him. “I’m tired of this. I just want to be done.”

I don’t know what to say to that. He is tired, and he doesn’t want to go out in a recliner, unable to walk where he will and go where he likes. He is stoic and unapologetic for his desire to see an end to things, and if nothing else, I respect his courage and honesty about it. Right now, he’s not going to have a conversation with me — he’s trying to tell one more person in his family that he’s ready to go; that he’d speed things up if he could.

Not that there’s much more that could be done in that regard — he’s not on a respirator or any kind of machinery; the medicine given to him is for comfort, not longevity — the cancer is beyond any available treatment even if he were strong enough for it, which he is not. We are playing a waiting game; a balance of comfort and control – quality of life over quantity. This is not when he and I can talk; he is speaking, and everyone else in the room is trying to convince him that they hear what he’s saying.

I hold his hand, and introduce Kate and his great-granddaughter to him; Kaylee is shy on my lap, but says hello to him and holds his hand. Over a dozen great-grandchildren will see him this weekend (his great-great-grandson will play at his feet that evening), but he is charmed by this blue-eyed redhead, and tugs at her finger and gasps at her in mock surprise — a game I remember from thirty years ago — that I have played with her since she was old enough to giggle, not realizing who I’d learned it from.

I have trouble understanding him through the slur that the pain medication puts in his words, and we don’t talk much, but I spend time with him until some of the rest of the family arrives, then make room for another cousin to take my seat.

I walk down the hall to my grandmother’s room and visit her. She doesn’t remember me, but admits that I look quite a bit like my dad, which is ‘interesting’.


We go back to the farm with my folks, and spend the evening going through some of the boxes of photos my grandparents have accumulated in the last six decades or more. Photos of my grandfather as the third oldest in a family of nine(!). Another of my great-great-grandfather, as a child. Photos of a young man in an army uniform. Dad tells me about things he’s learned since my last visit about Grandpa’s service in World War Two; it’s a shared piece of detective work for him and I, as Grandpa will tell other visitors about his time in Europe, but rarely speaks of the time to his family; it seems he had command of 20 other men, and was a forward observer during the Allied offensive into eastern Czechoslovakia toward the end of the war. He used to tell us he never even saw the front lines; apparently that was because they were behind him.

I can’t sleep when the house gets quiet. Dad and I stay up til midnight; I ask questions about my grandfather’s more recent past. Dad answers anything he can and corrects incorrect assumptions I’d made here and there. I know him, perhaps, best of all the grandkids — I’ve spent the most time with him, at least — but it seems at times that I barely know a fraction.


By the time we’re back into town in the morning, most of the rest of the family is there. Grandpa refused the pain medication ‘patch’ when it was brought in by the staff in the night, and it isn’t until my dad talks to him and reassures him that it is not prolonging anything and just for his comfort that he lets them apply it. His schedule is now askew, and the first wave of medicine washes over him mid-morning instead of midnight; he’s very drowsy. Few real conversations take place between him and anyone, let alone me.

In fact, he barely seems to know who, specifically, is there.

Grandma doesn’t know me, or even if I look like family, but opines that I look strong enough to help her walk around the building a bit.

My sister arrives just after lunch, and the room’s visitors magically clear when she arrives — it’s either consideration for her first visit, or a welcome excuse for those in the room to take a break.

I follow her into the room after a minute and find her bent halfway over his chair, within inches of his ear — trust her to know exactly what she needed to do to get her words to him. She is just finishing when I walk in.

“– we spent all our childhood with you,” I hear. “We wouldn’t be the people we are, without you. I love you.”

She steps away, and another cousin walks in, and I walk with her out of the room. We hug.

“I’m so glad you could tell him that,” I say, thinking of everything I want to say to him and somehow can’t find the time or the words.

“No regrets,” she replies, repeating a conversation we had not more than a week ago, before we knew any of this was about to happen.

We take a break from the visits, and go to the bed and breakfast that the family has taken over a few blocks away. I spend several hours catching up with cousins I haven’t seen in years; over a decade in some cases — since I moved to Denver. I and one of the oldest of ‘my’ generation — beautiful and funny and (unbelievably) already a grandmother — spend a half-hour in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for a salad and talking about some of my stories and why I always seem to write about someone losing a loved one.

I decide to walk back over to the nursing home. My dad comes with me and we talk about time lines and what’s most likely with Grandpa’s prognosis. We are not pessimists, he and I, but I think it’s fair to say that we are realists.

I hope to talk to grandpa when I get there, but he’s asleep when I arrive and needs help from the nurses when he wakes up — I do my best to stay out of the way and let the professionals do their work (despite my aunt telling them from the doorway that I’ve had “Training” (a CNA for a year during college) and can help them).

Two hours go by, but having to move around the room with the nurses help has wiped him out and he is never fully awake in that time. I sit with him while the rest of the family stays down in the building’s day-room and catches up with one another — I’m not the only one who rarely makes it home. My sister walks in to find me sitting next to him, holding his hand and staring at the ceiling, tears tracking quietly down my cheeks. She tells me we’re getting out of the building, informs the family, and off we go.

Bonnie takes me to the city park, where Kate and Mom have brought a couple of the younger kids, including Kaylee.

(I am not writing enough about Kate and her part in this trip, during which she somehow kept me facing the right direction at all times and kept me from misplacing everything from my wallet to my keys to my daughter. She is a rock throughout this whole recounting.)

As Bonnie expected, I spend the better part of an hour clambering over the the ladders and slides and rings and fireman poles and slides with my daughter and get things back into perspective. She and Kate visit at the side of the park, watching me and the rest of the kids playing.


We are a mid-western family, and that means when someone is sick, the rest of us eat. It’s a logistical impossibility that we could have missed supper no matter how long we’d have stayed at the park. I visit a bit, and make the rounds of each cluster of relatives, then make my excuses and walk back to the nursing home to see Grandpa before it’s time for bed.

I wait while he dozes (the mis-timed medication in the morning has thrown the whole day off), and when he wakes up he’s agitated and needs the nurse. I step out while they work and visit my grandmother, who has also just woken from a nap.

She doesn’t know who I am – the boy she babysat for well over a decade – and doesn’t recognize my name when my aunt reminds her, but says “he looks pretty smart”.

Grandpa is in bed when I go back to his room, and the talk in the hallway is that he probably won’t be gotten back out of bed in the morning – moving him around is getting to be too much for him. He is fast asleep when I go in to see him, and only stirs a bit when I take his hand.

I try to tell him something – anything – while he’s still awake; one of the dozen things spinning around in my head.
I tell him we have to go back to Denver in the morning.

I leave the room defeated, and nod agreement when my aunt asks if I will stop in for one more visit in the morning before we go.


We are doing the whole trip back to Denver in one day, rather than the two it took to come out, so we try for an early start. Someone calls from town while we’re having breakfast and tells us that Grandpa was awake and alert in the morning and wanted out of bed; his slight fever from the day before is down and he’s feeling better. Good news.


We get into town by eight-thirty.

The room is mostly mine when I get there; everyone knows we’re heading back and they want to give me time to say goodbyes.

Grandma is there as well, sitting next to him, and he is dozing.

She looks over when I sit down, and pats his hand and says “Russel, it’s Doyce.” By her expression, it is the most natural thing in the world for her to recognize me; hardly worthy of comment.

He stirs and looks me over. I take his hand, and once again, there’s too much to say.

“We have to go back to Denver today.” Banal trivia. It makes me angry with myself.

He nods and squeezes my hand. “I know,” he murmurs.

I’m already breaking up a bit. I lean in, emulating my sister, who understands loss much better than I do. “I Wish I Could Stay.” I manage, and sag back into my chair.

We don’t say anything for a bit. I stopped to think of everything I need to say and it overwhelms me – mutes me.

But my granddad is the First Storyteller among a family of storytellers. I write, but he knows words. One more time – one last time – he helps me.

“It’s a good life,” he says, and squeezes my hand. I look up. “A good life,” he repeats. He inclines his head toward mine, as though he’s sharing a secret. “No bad parts.”

There is no way you can encapsulate what this man has done for you. It is a hundred million moments that spill over you at once — things he said, things he did, and things you only knew years later.

I stand up, and I lean in, and I tell him exactly what I’m feeling, and it is foolish and exactly right.

“I am so proud of you,” I tell him, and I kiss his forehead, and hug him as best as I can. “So very proud of you.”

And he chuckles, because it’s silly, isn’t it? But it’s true, and in the end it is the most important thing I have to say.

No regrets.


We have a long drive home, and we started later than I’d hoped. We take a longer route home, also, because Kate has yet to see the Black Hills during the day, and after years of summer vacations, I feel I know it better than most. We drive by Wall Drug, and take a picture of Crazy Horse, and watch some mountain sheep climb a rock wall along a winding road, and drive from Wyoming into Colorado as the sun sets.

Kaylee is a trooper even during this much longer drive, and the last hour of trip she decides she will sing for us — not Itsy Bitsy Spider or Twinkle Twinkle — but new songs that she makes up as she goes, integrating everything she knows in the world into brand new tunes that are, I say with only a hint of bias or irony, genius.

“A duck on a bike is very tough,” she sings, “and everyone’s a hero in their own way…” Who are we to argue?

It’s a good life.

No bad parts.

One shoe, dropping

illus0114.jpgI’ve spent a lot of time in my stories poking at certain ideas. Themes, I guess. None of this is really conscious on my part — I tend to realize it after the fact or, at best, midway through the story.
“Oh, look at that, I’m writing about X again. Hmm.”
For one reason or another, one of those “X” topics is the idea of loss; someone dealing with a death (either recent or not-so) and how they cope with it. In Strange Weapons, there’s Michael’s wife as well as Lora’s former partner (whose memory lingers in a very palpable way — he drives her car). In Hidden Things… well, the whole story is really about death and coping with it; after finishing the story I realized I’d broken up the book into sections that directly correlated to the five stages of grief. (Then I noticed I’d done the same thing with Strange Weapons.)
My feelings about this are mixed.
I think it’s a tiny bit fascinating that the structure of grieving naturally (and unconsciously, I swear) integrates into the structure of the story — I think it means that I’m exploring Calliope’s grief in a real way, that her actions are following a pretty natural progression. That’s a comfort; I think any writer wants to write true things, even if they aren’t writing real things.
On the other hand, it’s troublesome to me that I keep going back to that particular instigator. It’s like I keep scratching a bug bite; I can’t leave it alone. Obviously, the idea of personal loss is something that looms large in my subconscious, probably because it’s such an unknown to me — no one close to me has ever died in my adult life — if I’ve never been in a storm, but I can see a number of them massed on the horizon and closing in, of course I’m going to write about storms.
Both my parents are healthy (and only 20 years older than me). I lost one grandparent when I was 10, but the other three (in their eighties) are all fine.
Until now.
During a routine checkup last week, doctors discovered a pretty major tumor in my grandpa’s lung. Since then, tests have revealed the strong possibility that it’s also spread to his liver. The major test results aren’t back yet, but it could be very bad news about a very short time frame.
Now, the fact that the man’s made it to 85 is a bit of a marvel in itself — he smoked several cartons of Salem Menthols a week for 41 years, he had triple bypass surgery in his mid-sixties, and has generally been rode hard and put away wet his whole life. That’s reality. The fact that I’ve had him around to pull my leg for coming up on 38 years is a gift.
And yet… and yet.
My world is tilted, these last few days. My wife and daughter are here, and loving, and healthy. My parents are strong, my sister is brilliant and funny. My work is going well, and my mental playground has all the best toys. Things are good; the platform of my life is solid.
But one pillar is trembling.
I’ve had a look at it a number of times; I’ve known it was eventually, inevitably going to give out, and I could see that time was coming — I’ve done my best to shore up the remaining struts, and I know that things will be fine; the platform will survive.
But this pillar, man… this is one of the old ones. One of the first ones. One of the strongest ones.
It doesn’t matter if I’m strong enough to withstand his absence. It’s the idea – the undeniable, inescapable fact that he could fall. That he will.
That is what shakes the foundations, today.