Member of the Club

Today I watched It's a Wonderful Life. I remember watching it for the first time in high school with my friend Heather. I loved James Stewart in Rear Window, so when I saw another one of his movies for sale at Kmart on VHS for $3, I had to get it.

The next morning, my mom came downstairs all excited and asked how I liked the movie.

"It sucked," I said. "It was the most depressing thing I had even seen. The guy gives up all of his dreams to take care of other people? We got to the part where he was going to jump off the bridge and we stopped. We couldn't finish it."

My mom looked at me dumbfounded. 

"You need to watch the end," she said. "You need to watch the end."

That was probably the best advice my mother ever gave me, strange as it sounds, telling me to watch the end of It's a Wonderful Life, but it is true. The ending makes all of the difference, the difference between hope and despair.

My mom died two days ago as a result of Alzheimer's, which she battled for ten years. My dad called me a week ago Saturday to tell me she lost her ability to swallow, which meant her body was shutting down. For the following week, it was wait and see, wait and see. Friday morning, she passed.

About twenty percent of my friends have lost a parent, and now I am a member of that club.

When I first heard the news that my mother had died, I was relieved her suffering had ended, that both her soul and her body were both at peace. Now, relief is slowly being replaced with quiet grief. 

Build a Fire

My mother is dying.

For real this time. 

We think.

She's had a decade with Alzheimer's. Her conscious mind left her body years ago, but her heart still beats.

Now she can no longer swallow, eat or drink. She is effectively in a coma, sleeping all day, not responsive. In this state, she can feel no pain. I spoke with Rhonda today, the nurse who has been caring for my mother--and my father--for years.

"She could have a week," she said. I was surprised that anyone could live that long without water, but I guess it takes a while for the body to shut down. Plus, she is expending almost no energy. It doesn't make much fuel to keep what is left working.

I have a hard time believing my mother is going to die this time because we've had close calls before and she rallied and pulled through. My mother is a tough cookie. She survived Covid in June of 2020, early in the pandemic when it was slaughtering its way through nursing homes. In my mother's memory care unit that season, more than eighty percent of the residents died of covid. It was brutal.

And my mother lived. I think one of my Chicago aunts has a vicious prayer circle going for my mom 24/7. I am not sure what else would explain this and other medical miracles.

Yet, no one lives forever. This is her time, and her death is on her time. No one knows when she will pass. We can't plan or predict, which is so contrary to our modern lives, when we get upset when the planes, trains and the rains don't arrive on time. Death makes fools us all, making us wait and wonder without schedule. I am learning patience, waiting without worrying about logistics. When the time comes, I will figure it out.

My mother loved to build fires. Let me emphasize "build," not "start." "Starting" a fire means you light something up and let it go. "Building" a fire means you start the fire and keep it going. You maintain, tend and care to the fire.

When we would go camping as a family when I was a kid, we'd arrive at the site and my brother and I would first hit the woods and look for kindling while my parents set up the camper. Friday night, she'd start a fire that would last the weekend. To my mother, building a fire was an art form, with several factors. It needed to look good and burn hot with minimal smoke.

She passed her love of fire on to me. Pedro is a third generation pyro, learning to build fires from sticks and rocks in the wilderness.

Tonight I was talking to Pedro about his grandmother, among other things. He had a busy day, and I spent the whole day talking on the phone with family and friends, plus dealing with a flat tire. It is a quiet and cold and snowy night in Seattle. When I told him I was tired and debating between going to bed and starting a fire, he said without hesitation 

"Build a fire."

So I did. He must have known in some deep, spiritual place, that was exactly what I needed. 

A fire.

Pictures of Costa Rica

My dad wants to see pictures from my trip. Here ya go! (I'm too tired to caption them all and put them in order.)

View from our hotel.

"The Damned United" and AITA?

[Spoilers ahead, but the movie has been out for more than ten years, so yeah.]

Flying back from Costa Rica, I had a seven hour flight from Miami to Seattle. 

It was a long flight. 

Since it is World Cup season, the airline had a bunch of soccer movies, including Fever Pitch starring Colin Firth and Bend It Like Beckham. (As much as I love Colin Firth and Nick Hornby, I couldn't get into Fever Pitch.) After Bend It Like Beckham, I watched The Damned United starring Michael Sheen about the soccer manager Brian Clough, considered the greatest manager in England. It was crazy good, probably one of the top ten movies I've ever seen. I don't know how true the movie is, but it is a good story of a guy before he became a legend.

Brian and assistant manager take an obscure, last place team and raise it to the top of the field. Along the way, Brian gets ignored by the legendary coach Don Revie of the Leeds United, the best team in the England football league in the 1960's and 1970's. When Revie is asked to lead England's national team, Brain is asked to coach Leeds United. He thinks Revie was a dirty coach, and he vows to clean up Leeds, so they can win but win honestly without cheating. As Brian's success grows, he becomes more confident, cocky and arrogant. You know the expression you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar? Brian didn't. He ultimately gets fired after forty-four days as coach of Leeds.

There is a scene at the end where Don Revie and Brian Clough are interviewed on television together after Brian has been sacked. It is a tense interview where Don asks Brian if he treated the members of the Leeds team like family, was he kind? Brian looks perplexed, dumbfounded, but was the interview goes on, seems to realize the answer to the question "Am I the asshole?" is yes. Brian is being called out by his nemesis for his miserable behavior.

Brian got the point, and groveled back to his assistant manager to work with him again, going on to become a successful and beloved coach. Revie's career ended in scandal.

So often the point of movies is watching people change, grow and develop into better human beings. So often, the protagonist has a eureka moment, the lightening strikes and voila! the person is changed, enlightened. This rarely happens in life.

Both men were called out by each other, but one of them took it to heart, and the other did not. Everyone at some point of their life is a jerk, a schmuck, an asshole. The question is what do we do with that information? Do we say, yeah, I know, but so what? I was born this way. I can't change.

Or, can we face our weaknesses, admit we were at fault, and then try to be better. The failure of Brian wasn't getting fired after forty-four days at Leeds. The failure would have been if he learned nothing from the experience.

Beetles

Beetles have poor evolutionary design. Last night on the balcony at my hotel in Costa Rica, a beetle flew against the wall and landed on its back. This morning when I woke up, it was still on its back, scrambling its legs to right itself, which wasn’t going to happen.

I found a piece of paper and flipped the bug right side up. It was stunned for a bit then then flew away.

I just remembered beetles have wings under their shell. Why don’t they just open the shell and use their wings to flip themselves up properly?