It has been over three months since I dared visit this blog. Since that time I've started to climb out of a deep, black emotional hole. It's depth concerns for a great part my thoughts of promises made and promises unkept, my son Johnny's brief life and premature death, my son Tommy and what the future may bring. In part, it stems from the failure to save both son's from the sick manipulations of their biological mother. In part, from financial limitations that may cause me to lose my house. And, in part because those same fiscal circumstances are keeping me from providing as I should for my family including a truly wonderful woman who is in every way the real mother to my son, Tommy. And in part because of a promise I could not keep to a Roman Catholic Nun.
During those three months I've experienced tremendous moments of tear-welling sadness at the loss of Johnny. Tommy and I were kept from being part of his last few years because his biological mother took him to Ohio and erected barriers both in Maryland and there that barred entry and participation. Her announcement, after the fact, that he died haunts me. "He just quit eating" I was told. At his funeral service his body looked like a cadaver from one of Hitler's death camps. I do not exaggerate. The pads of his fingers were shriveled to the bone. Days later after the fog of loss began to fade I realized that Johnny may well have "given up" but that he could not "just quit eating." He was fed via a tube and pump that put nourishment directly into his stomach.
Before he was moved, quite illegally if the court directives have any credibility, I read in a report from his physician at Children's Hospital that said his biological mother had him in therapy at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. I thought that interesting since early in his tragic disability, she yanked him from that place where he was making tremendous progress and was tended by doctors and nurses who knew him and unceremoniously relocated to Johns Hopkins' juvenile facility in Baltimore. She violated National Rehab protocols on a number of occasions, causing Johnny to contract pneumonia as a consequence of one such incident. The nurses yelled, quite literally telling her to stop what she was doing. She of course put the blame on the nurses. At any rate I went to NRH and asked for records of Johnny's therapy there. Over three years, he had been taken there six times. PT and OT are vital to quadriplegic maintenance: daily, weekly etc. Not one or two days a year.
Unlike the boys' biological mother, I put the blame directly on me for not intervening. I know Johnny blamed me for not being with him daily. He may not have been able to speak but the look in his eyes was articulate and damningly eloquent.
Also during the month's of my written silence, Sister Joyce Volpini, legendary principal of St. Jerome parish school in Hyattsville succumbed to cancer. Sister Joyce was a dear and good friend. She gave Tommy his dog, Gia, in part as a very successful means to deal with Johnny's death.
Sister Joyce was unceremoniously kicked out of the parish by a skunk masquerading as a cleric. She was struggling with cancer when the little man in charge of the parish sent her packing. He lied to the parish saying she was returning to her Order when he knew she was taken from a lifelong religious community that was her home for three or so decades and had no where else to go save a "mother-in-law" apartment at a relative's house. The Order closed its residence years ago with only a small plot of Nuns' graves as all that remained. I promised I would do everything in my power to have the SOB reverse his decision. Dealing with an Archbishop now a Cardinal who has the arrogance and disdain for his "flock" of a medieval monarch and the individual in question once again revealed the incredible hypocrisy of institutional religion...no different than corporate America or pretty much any political or academic ecology. Those in power protect their own...anyone they deem verboten be damned.
This past ten days I was in rural England, Consett to be specific, Durham County or Newcastle in the Northeast. I met some very fine people. Ate some very fine home and pub furnished meals. Had a pint or two and just soaked in the history surrounding the incredibly historic countryside. Everything is made of stone: farm walls, rows of tiny homes that housed miners and their families for a few hundred years. The stones were mined from countless fields and plucked from Hadrian's Roman Legion built wall as well as pasture lands that have changed little since they were crisscrossed by Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen preparing for the June 6, 1944 invasion of the Normandy Coast. I was there for a wedding of two incredibly fine youngsters. The groom's father is a farmer living three hours away near Lincoln on the family farm. He was as quick to reference the circumstances of the preceding generation's experience when General Eisenhower ran the show as anyone alive then or the finest historian.
Most of those training and awaiting the launch signal in 1944 were but kids barely older than 17, Tommy's age. They were away from home, family, and facing an immediate future few could or can now imagine. They were scared. Today, we call the feeling depression. The black hole of World War II makes anything we experience look like the work of a child at the seashore working the sand with a tiny plastic bucket and shovel.
At the wedding was a tike, celebrating his first birthday that same day, named Oliver.
Oliver has huge brown eyes and an even larger smile. Oliver made me think of Johnny and Tommy.
Whatever the future may bring, it's his to deal with and I hope enjoy. Tommy recently told me to listen to a song, I think it's called "The Good Life." He told me to let the words and the music "wash over me." I really couldn't do that from my vantage in the black hole. But thinking of Oliver, of the 17 year olds preparing for war, and my failings and strengths, I did just that this morning.
So to Oliver, his family, to my friends and family and to you I say, that we are alive, whether facing hard times or not, and it is a good life...it's time to launch...so enjoy.
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