Tuesday – A Leaf On the Wind
Jun. 10th, 2008 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the day I first learned the Leslie's son had an aneurysm. It was spring of 1993, and I was a few weeks away from graduating from college at the age of 23, because I couldn't think of any way to put it off any more. I put a whole 6 years into getting that 4 year degree, because my father was willing to pay for it and because I still didn't know what I wanted to be or where I wanted to go in my life. To tell the truth, I still don't. Stalling, by taking a minimum class load and changing majors ever so often, in order to keep my diploma at bay was the best tactic I could come up with, but my scheme had just about run it's course.
I was born with brains and just enough charm to get me by, but these things could not make up for an appalling lack of ambition. I am one of those quaint, useless people born to follow where ever the wind blows me, like a small autumn leaf. When there is no wind, I lie on the ground and molder with all the other useless leaves.
I was alone in my college apartment sitting at the dining room table, when the phone rang. It was my kid sister-in-law, Pat, and she was almost hysterical.
"Your cousin Cameron had a brain aneurysm last night, and he's in the hospital in Houston and he's in a coma and they don't think he's going to make it," she said breathlessly.
"Oh my God," I said. Then, after a pause, I asked, "What's an aneurysm?"
Pat didn't know, either. "I think it's like bleeding on his brain or something," she said, "He's in a coma. They don't expect him to live. They told me your cousin Carol, his mom, is just beside herself." She sounded like she was going to cry, which was odd because she'd never met Cameron or his mother either one. She was 17 years old and she'd only been married to my oldest brother, Randy, for about 6 months (and wouldn't be married to him much longer than that). My 31-year-old brother had fallen in love with a child bride, much to our father's chagrin. Like most 17 years olds, Pat loved drama and since Cameron was now family she reacted to the tragedy like she had known him her whole life. It only occurs to me now that she and Cameron were the same age, but worlds apart. Pat was a small-town high-school drop out who married a man she barely know on a whim, because she never had much of a future to look forward to beyond being someone's -- anyone's -- wife. Cameron was an honor student looking forward to college in the fall, and his future was wide opened. At least, it was until he went to bed one night shortly before he was due to graduate and failed to wake up the next morning.
I felt for Cameron the kind of remote sadness you feel for a stranger because I didn't really know him. We'd played together as children at family gatherings, but the last time I'd seen him was at his grandfather's funeral 4 years before. I liked my Cousin Carol (as I still thought of Leslie at the time), but since she was almost 13 years older than me (and a 13 year age difference is an eternity when you are young), I wasn't that close to her, either.
Still, I knew I would need to down to Houston that weekend and put in an appearance to represent my branch of the extended family. My father wasn't going to do it, and neither were my brothers. I went because I was the daughter of Carol's Aunt Ruby, the one she had always turned to in her hour of need. I went because I know Leslie Carol would want my mother to cling to, but unfortunately my mom had been dead for 8 years and couldn't make it. I went to offer myself as a cheap, sorry substitute; a person with my mother's eyes, but none of the strength and wisdom that Leslie needed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
That Saturday when I arrived at the Neurological Intensive Care Unit at the Methodist Hospital, Leslie was nowhere to be seen among the crowd gathered for Cameron's vigil. Only two people were allowed to visit Cameron in the ICU at any given time, and Leslie was at his side. I saw my aunts as well a lot of my cousins, including ones who had never liked Leslie and who Leslie despised right back. A few of these particular cousins lived for funerals and tragedies and they weren't about to miss this one, no matter how they felt about Cam's mother. My aunt Jo, Cam's grandmother, introduced me to her pastor and ladies from her church that were there to offer comfort.
"This is the one that got arrested," she told them with a smile, and they all smiled and told me they'd all heard all about me. It seemed pretty surreal to have a Baptist pastor and my aunt's matronly friends all speak so approving of my encounter with the Texas A&M campus police, but I guess my vengeance on my ex boyfriend and his adulterous paramour struck a moral high-note with them.
Cameron's father, Jack, came up, shook my hand and said he remembered me. I, on the other hand, barely recognized him: the scruffy guy who could never get his act together when he was married to my cousin had gone back to college and was now teaching at a community college himself, and fully looked the part of a graying scholar. A few of his students were with him, trying to offer support and maybe bolster their grade point averages in the process. The rest of the room was filled with Cameron's worried teenaged classmates.
I was talking with my Aunt Jo and her pastor when Leslie walked into the waiting room. My aunt Jo, whose face was full of warmth and love a moment before, turned to stone when she laid eyes on her daughter and she began to criticize Leslie for random inconsequential things. Leslie didn't seem to notice and blew her off, like she was used to this. In the coming years, I would learn how complex and strained the relationship between these two women was, but at that moment I was shocked at my aunt's coldness toward Leslie. It dawned on me of why Leslie had always clung to my mother instead of her own.
After a few minutes of enduring her mother's company, Leslie pulled me aside.
"Nina, let's get out of here, I need a cigarette, girl," she said in her husky drawl reminiscent of the late Janice Joplin. The she stopped, pointed to a pretty teenaged girl with long brown hair, and whispered, "See that girl? She doesn't need to be here. That one," she pointed to another pretty teenaged girl with long brown hair who looked a lot like the first one to me, "is Cam's girlfriend from school. The other one goes to a different school, and they didn't even know about each other until today." The two girls sat on opposite sides of the room hunched over in their misery, occasionally exchanging baleful glances.
"Come on," Leslie said, pulling me from the cramped waiting room. We took the elevator down to the ground floor, and Leslie headed toward a side door. We sat cross legged on a short wall next to the stairs while Leslie lit a cigarette. She was pumped up on adrenaline and a little crazed from lack of sleep.
"We aren't supposed to sitting here smoking," she said, "We're supposed to move like 20 feet away from the goddamned building. I dare anyone to come up and ask me to move. Let 'em try, Nina. I feel like I need to hurt someone right now, and anyone who wants to give me crap about needing a cigarette while my kid lays upstairs in a coma has it coming."
"Nina, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in my life; you have no idea." I really didn't, I and I didn't want to have one. "Everybody's trying to help me, but all they're doing is getting on my nerves. I swear I'm going to bash in the head of the next goddamned person who tells to 'let go and let God.' I know where they're getting all that shit, I've been through AA and I've done the whole 12 steps myself. I can quote those damn sayings backwards and forwards, but they don't apply here. I'm not letting go of him, he's my baby, goddamit. That's my kid up there whose brain exploded! How the hell am I supposed to let go? Fuck them."
"You know who I wish was here right now? Your mama, because she would know what to do. She'd know how to handle the doctors, who to talk to, how to fix this. I know she would. I really need her right now, Nina."
"I know," I said, not offended in the least that I wasn't able to offer Leslie what she needed. It was the whole reason I was there that day: to apologize that my mother could not be.
The sun was setting, I was being charged by the hour for parking, and I needed to leave. It was obvious that Leslie had enough people around her. In fact, she had more people than she needed.
"I have something for you," I told her, "it's not much, just a little thing." I handed her an envelope with a bulge in it.
"What is this?" she asked. "Is it something that will make me cry?"
I don't her I didn't think so, but that she could open it later. She tucked the envelope in her jacket. What it had inside was a letter from me, telling her I knew how much she loved my mom and saying I knew she would want her help right now. The bulge was a single stud earring – a little ruby that had belonged to her beloved Aunt Ruby. I had written that I hoped it might make her feel like my mother was there with her, at least in spirit.
She never mentioned the letter, and I never saw her wearing the stud. Months went by; Cameron came out of his coma, and for awhile he showed improvements on a regular basis, but that is a cruel joke of brain damage; tiny glimmers of who the person used to be appear in the beginning and offer false hope, but after awhile you realize that the glimmers are just embers of a fire that will never again burn like it did before. A few years went by, during which I heard about Leslie and Cam through the family grapevine.
Then the letters started coming from her, and then the phone calls. Through these comunication I grew to be close to her as I finished growing up. In the beginning, I reached out to her because my mother was not there and someone needed to help Leslie since she couldn't. I reached out because I was Ruby's daughter and Leslie was her protégé, and Leslie began reaching out to me for the same reason. I started off as a proxie for a mother figure, but eventually I grew into the position of a sister figure.
I am one of those quaint, useless people born to follow wherever the wind blows me, like a small autumn leaf. Leslie was a gale force wind that made me rise up a bit, to be what she needed in a friend and in a sister.
"You were one of her happy spots," her husband told me on the phone after she died this last December. When her own aneurysm happened, it was merciful and quick; she collapsed and was dead before she hit the floor. In the meantime, Cameron still lingers after 16 years. "She kept everything you ever sent her, and she'd read it over and over. She'd read it to me over and over. She say, 'Hey, here's something she wrote that I didn't notice before, listen to this,' and she'd read me whatever you'd written."
I guess my life has more meaning than I thought. It turns out I had a purpose but didn't know it until my intended task was over and done with. At one time in my life, I was a happy spot for someone who really needed one. Despite all my wasted talent and my lack of ambition, I have this one shining accomplishment to my name.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
.
.
Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the day I first learned the Leslie's son had an aneurysm. It was spring of 1993, and I was a few weeks away from graduating from college at the age of 23, because I couldn't think of any way to put it off any more. I put a whole 6 years into getting that 4 year degree, because my father was willing to pay for it and because I still didn't know what I wanted to be or where I wanted to go in my life. To tell the truth, I still don't. Stalling, by taking a minimum class load and changing majors ever so often, in order to keep my diploma at bay was the best tactic I could come up with, but my scheme had just about run it's course.
I was born with brains and just enough charm to get me by, but these things could not make up for an appalling lack of ambition. I am one of those quaint, useless people born to follow where ever the wind blows me, like a small autumn leaf. When there is no wind, I lie on the ground and molder with all the other useless leaves.
I was alone in my college apartment sitting at the dining room table, when the phone rang. It was my kid sister-in-law, Pat, and she was almost hysterical.
"Your cousin Cameron had a brain aneurysm last night, and he's in the hospital in Houston and he's in a coma and they don't think he's going to make it," she said breathlessly.
"Oh my God," I said. Then, after a pause, I asked, "What's an aneurysm?"
Pat didn't know, either. "I think it's like bleeding on his brain or something," she said, "He's in a coma. They don't expect him to live. They told me your cousin Carol, his mom, is just beside herself." She sounded like she was going to cry, which was odd because she'd never met Cameron or his mother either one. She was 17 years old and she'd only been married to my oldest brother, Randy, for about 6 months (and wouldn't be married to him much longer than that). My 31-year-old brother had fallen in love with a child bride, much to our father's chagrin. Like most 17 years olds, Pat loved drama and since Cameron was now family she reacted to the tragedy like she had known him her whole life. It only occurs to me now that she and Cameron were the same age, but worlds apart. Pat was a small-town high-school drop out who married a man she barely know on a whim, because she never had much of a future to look forward to beyond being someone's -- anyone's -- wife. Cameron was an honor student looking forward to college in the fall, and his future was wide opened. At least, it was until he went to bed one night shortly before he was due to graduate and failed to wake up the next morning.
I felt for Cameron the kind of remote sadness you feel for a stranger because I didn't really know him. We'd played together as children at family gatherings, but the last time I'd seen him was at his grandfather's funeral 4 years before. I liked my Cousin Carol (as I still thought of Leslie at the time), but since she was almost 13 years older than me (and a 13 year age difference is an eternity when you are young), I wasn't that close to her, either.
Still, I knew I would need to down to Houston that weekend and put in an appearance to represent my branch of the extended family. My father wasn't going to do it, and neither were my brothers. I went because I was the daughter of Carol's Aunt Ruby, the one she had always turned to in her hour of need. I went because I know Leslie Carol would want my mother to cling to, but unfortunately my mom had been dead for 8 years and couldn't make it. I went to offer myself as a cheap, sorry substitute; a person with my mother's eyes, but none of the strength and wisdom that Leslie needed.
That Saturday when I arrived at the Neurological Intensive Care Unit at the Methodist Hospital, Leslie was nowhere to be seen among the crowd gathered for Cameron's vigil. Only two people were allowed to visit Cameron in the ICU at any given time, and Leslie was at his side. I saw my aunts as well a lot of my cousins, including ones who had never liked Leslie and who Leslie despised right back. A few of these particular cousins lived for funerals and tragedies and they weren't about to miss this one, no matter how they felt about Cam's mother. My aunt Jo, Cam's grandmother, introduced me to her pastor and ladies from her church that were there to offer comfort.
"This is the one that got arrested," she told them with a smile, and they all smiled and told me they'd all heard all about me. It seemed pretty surreal to have a Baptist pastor and my aunt's matronly friends all speak so approving of my encounter with the Texas A&M campus police, but I guess my vengeance on my ex boyfriend and his adulterous paramour struck a moral high-note with them.
Cameron's father, Jack, came up, shook my hand and said he remembered me. I, on the other hand, barely recognized him: the scruffy guy who could never get his act together when he was married to my cousin had gone back to college and was now teaching at a community college himself, and fully looked the part of a graying scholar. A few of his students were with him, trying to offer support and maybe bolster their grade point averages in the process. The rest of the room was filled with Cameron's worried teenaged classmates.
I was talking with my Aunt Jo and her pastor when Leslie walked into the waiting room. My aunt Jo, whose face was full of warmth and love a moment before, turned to stone when she laid eyes on her daughter and she began to criticize Leslie for random inconsequential things. Leslie didn't seem to notice and blew her off, like she was used to this. In the coming years, I would learn how complex and strained the relationship between these two women was, but at that moment I was shocked at my aunt's coldness toward Leslie. It dawned on me of why Leslie had always clung to my mother instead of her own.
After a few minutes of enduring her mother's company, Leslie pulled me aside.
"Nina, let's get out of here, I need a cigarette, girl," she said in her husky drawl reminiscent of the late Janice Joplin. The she stopped, pointed to a pretty teenaged girl with long brown hair, and whispered, "See that girl? She doesn't need to be here. That one," she pointed to another pretty teenaged girl with long brown hair who looked a lot like the first one to me, "is Cam's girlfriend from school. The other one goes to a different school, and they didn't even know about each other until today." The two girls sat on opposite sides of the room hunched over in their misery, occasionally exchanging baleful glances.
"Come on," Leslie said, pulling me from the cramped waiting room. We took the elevator down to the ground floor, and Leslie headed toward a side door. We sat cross legged on a short wall next to the stairs while Leslie lit a cigarette. She was pumped up on adrenaline and a little crazed from lack of sleep.
"We aren't supposed to sitting here smoking," she said, "We're supposed to move like 20 feet away from the goddamned building. I dare anyone to come up and ask me to move. Let 'em try, Nina. I feel like I need to hurt someone right now, and anyone who wants to give me crap about needing a cigarette while my kid lays upstairs in a coma has it coming."
"Nina, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in my life; you have no idea." I really didn't, I and I didn't want to have one. "Everybody's trying to help me, but all they're doing is getting on my nerves. I swear I'm going to bash in the head of the next goddamned person who tells to 'let go and let God.' I know where they're getting all that shit, I've been through AA and I've done the whole 12 steps myself. I can quote those damn sayings backwards and forwards, but they don't apply here. I'm not letting go of him, he's my baby, goddamit. That's my kid up there whose brain exploded! How the hell am I supposed to let go? Fuck them."
"You know who I wish was here right now? Your mama, because she would know what to do. She'd know how to handle the doctors, who to talk to, how to fix this. I know she would. I really need her right now, Nina."
"I know," I said, not offended in the least that I wasn't able to offer Leslie what she needed. It was the whole reason I was there that day: to apologize that my mother could not be.
The sun was setting, I was being charged by the hour for parking, and I needed to leave. It was obvious that Leslie had enough people around her. In fact, she had more people than she needed.
"I have something for you," I told her, "it's not much, just a little thing." I handed her an envelope with a bulge in it.
"What is this?" she asked. "Is it something that will make me cry?"
I don't her I didn't think so, but that she could open it later. She tucked the envelope in her jacket. What it had inside was a letter from me, telling her I knew how much she loved my mom and saying I knew she would want her help right now. The bulge was a single stud earring – a little ruby that had belonged to her beloved Aunt Ruby. I had written that I hoped it might make her feel like my mother was there with her, at least in spirit.
She never mentioned the letter, and I never saw her wearing the stud. Months went by; Cameron came out of his coma, and for awhile he showed improvements on a regular basis, but that is a cruel joke of brain damage; tiny glimmers of who the person used to be appear in the beginning and offer false hope, but after awhile you realize that the glimmers are just embers of a fire that will never again burn like it did before. A few years went by, during which I heard about Leslie and Cam through the family grapevine.
Then the letters started coming from her, and then the phone calls. Through these comunication I grew to be close to her as I finished growing up. In the beginning, I reached out to her because my mother was not there and someone needed to help Leslie since she couldn't. I reached out because I was Ruby's daughter and Leslie was her protégé, and Leslie began reaching out to me for the same reason. I started off as a proxie for a mother figure, but eventually I grew into the position of a sister figure.
I am one of those quaint, useless people born to follow wherever the wind blows me, like a small autumn leaf. Leslie was a gale force wind that made me rise up a bit, to be what she needed in a friend and in a sister.
"You were one of her happy spots," her husband told me on the phone after she died this last December. When her own aneurysm happened, it was merciful and quick; she collapsed and was dead before she hit the floor. In the meantime, Cameron still lingers after 16 years. "She kept everything you ever sent her, and she'd read it over and over. She'd read it to me over and over. She say, 'Hey, here's something she wrote that I didn't notice before, listen to this,' and she'd read me whatever you'd written."
I guess my life has more meaning than I thought. It turns out I had a purpose but didn't know it until my intended task was over and done with. At one time in my life, I was a happy spot for someone who really needed one. Despite all my wasted talent and my lack of ambition, I have this one shining accomplishment to my name.
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didn't even know it
Date: 2008-06-10 10:46 pm (UTC)Re: didn't even know it
Date: 2008-06-11 02:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 02:10 am (UTC)I try to make the next post a funny one to make up for it. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 02:09 am (UTC)Pardon the rambling, the word aneurysm makes me do it.
Date: 2008-06-11 12:53 am (UTC)Ruptured cerebral artery aneurysm. That's what got my dad. I think that's what got his dad as well. His experience was very much like Leslie's. He came home complaining of a headache, went to bed, and drifted off to the next life. Life is odd that way, you can live your whole life with a ticking timebomb inside your skull and never know it. Heck, you can be in your last moments and not know that either.
(/ramble)
Re: Pardon the rambling, the word aneurysm makes me do it.
Date: 2008-06-11 02:09 am (UTC)Leslie did not die of aneurysm so much as she died from being working class and uninsured.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 04:43 pm (UTC)I know you miss Leslie. I'm sorry (I know that doesn't fix anything.)
Maria
no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 07:34 pm (UTC)*HUGS*
no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 06:20 pm (UTC)i thnk thats the thing about most of our lives, that there is more meaning than we really want to give ourselves credit for... just because we start off in one role to pretend to fill it for someone else, i think thats just the universe's way of getting us to do and be in the situation where we'd accept the task that was handed to us instead of just saying "here's your task" for us to turn it down, if that makes any sense at all....
im sure leslie felt greatful to have you near, and she might have started off reaching out to you for the same reason you reached out to her, but in the end, thats the best thing about new found relationships is that they developed into something completely independent then what might have started.....
i dont think this was your only purpose, a single task, in your life.... and even though this is one of the few that you seem to acknowledge you have, im sure youve been that "happy spot" in more lives than you realize...
no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 11:57 am (UTC)thats true, and i always have this belief that our "purpose" in the world might be different from one person that comes in our lives to another... we might be there for one reason for one person, but for something completely different for another....
its the wonders of hindsight :)