All posts by Chris

Zach's Dad

a special bond

While looking for the picture of Rosalie on my phone yesterday, I came across this one. It had no title or other indication of when and where it was taken. I emailed Jeremy and he filled me in.

He said: ‘Picture was taken in the Shining Rock Wilderness in NC. Zach and I went up to the mountains to go rafting, visit Greg McKee and some of our haunts in the Brevard area. September 2012.’

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I sense some pain in Jeremy’s response. He and Zach had a special bond as brothers. Now there is a special kind of pain to think about times past with Zach. While they did all the usual things brothers do growing up, I don’t think I really recognized the special bond they had until I saw this picture, taken on the shore of Stony Lake in 2002:

jeremy-zach.

Jeremy was almost 19 and Zach was 13. It was the first indication to me of the adult relationship they had developed. As with the North Carolina picture, they are relaxed and happy to be in each others presence.

It’s kind of not my place to represent the relationship between Jeremy and Zach so I will stop here. I just wanted to share these pictures.

priceless

Last Monday was Labor Day and as I was in Alameda for a haircut I stopped into the Labor Day picnic there afterwards. The Rosie the Riveter Museum had a table there with stuff to buy. I remembered hearing that Rosalie had gone there in July. I hadn’t heard or seen about any souvenirs so I bought a small ‘We Can Do It!’ shopping bag and a refrigerator magnet and sent them to Rosalie.

Also in the back of my mind was a comment that Ashley had posted on FB to the effect that Rosalie noticed there were no women in the pharmacy and wondered why.

It all became priceless when she sent me this picture:

2016090995195221

thoughts

Thoughts. Running through my brain all the time. Much of the time nowadays they are in the form of posts on this blog but in truth they aren’t much different from the kind of thoughts I’ve had for years.

My visit with Mom & Dad last Sunday. Labor Day in Alameda. Crappy drivers. Weird goings on at the Symphony. How I’m thinking these days about Zach. What I’m thinking these days about Jeremy and Sarah. Rosalie. Teresa wrote me a long response to my last post and I haven’t been able to digest it yet. Jane responded here. I want to respond to both of those. There’s more . . .

Any one of these could be an interesting post. Right at the moment I still have laundry running so I’m distracted. I decided I would just dash off this quick one and hope I can do a better one later. I have to work tonight so that deadline is looming. Unlike blog posts or exercise, that can’t be put off.

loss

My sister wrote me an email today with a quote in it from a book she’s been reading. She said it made her think of me ‘and others close to me that have lost loved ones’.

She stood quite still. Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.

     — Alexander McCall Smith  in The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

 

I believe my sister is without guile. She loves me and I love her unconditionally. So it troubled me that this quote does not move me. It has troubled me that most of my family does not seem to be affected by the death of Zach. This of course is grossly unfair. They did not see me weeping, as I did a few minutes ago, alone in my apartment. How do I know they do not grieve similarly? And what right do I have to determine how they, or anyone else, grieves Zach?

Well I wanted to write a response that is respectful of her feelings yet also representative of mine so I thought of the Ursula LeGuin book The Lathe of Heaven. It has quotes at the beginning of each chapter that have to do with time and permanence. Actually it was this book that began my interest in Chinese philosophy, in particular the writing of Chuang Tzu.

Sadly, no quotes seemed appropriate for my goal. Thumbing through the book, however, I remembered the story of the man who dreamed changes in the world. He has a wife he loves but loses her in the dream changes. At the end he finds her again and when I read that I started crying.

It’s a book I’ve kept in my library for years through many winnowings, partly through sentiment because of the introduction it provided to what is now my core philosophy. It’s a good book, not a great one. Arguably it’s a sentimental ending.

So why cry over the ending? It made me think of the last time I cried like that. A couple of weeks ago, the promo track for the Broadway show ‘Jersey Boys’ came up on my MP3 player in the car. It has snippets of the hits from the ’60s by the Four Seasons. Good, not great, I suppose, would apply as well. But there I was, driving on the freeway, crying my eyes out.

Zach had no connection that I know about to either the book or the tunes. I wasn’t thinking of Zach before I started crying. Thus the mystery of grief.

To go back to Teresa’s quote, I do not have any feelings of Zach watching over me. Indeed, one of the confusing things about the last couple of months has been a lack of feeling of Zach as presence. I’ve set aside his phone and ipad and given up on converting his texts. With one exception I haven’t read in his journals for quite a while now. I suppose you could call my arrangement on my dresser a kind of a shrine. (See the post ‘reaction’ at http://thezachproject.us/index.php/2016/07/20/reaction/ for a picture.) I do look at that every day and sometimes I just can’t connect to the idea of Zach as a living person. It puzzles me and perhaps that is contributing to my depressed state.

Here is a bit of Chuang Tzu via Thomas Merton’s ‘The Way of Chuang Tzu’:

“The Master came at the right time
Into the world. When his time was up,
He left it again.
He who awaits his time, who submits
When his work is done,
In his life there is no room
For sorrow and rejoicing.
Here is how the ancients said all this
In four words:
‘God cuts the thread.’

“We have seen a fire of sticks
Burn out. The fire now
Burns in some other place. Where?
Who knows? These brands are burnt out.”

feelings

I think originally this was going to be a post about being depressed. When I described how I felt to my therapist after the weekend in July that’s what she said it was. That led to some good conversation but minimal improvement until this week.

Actually it was a couple of weeks ago that I started to improve. I got a guitar lesson and did better with my exercises (PT). I look at my posts over the time before that and I see ‘reaction’, ‘more reaction’, ‘killed’, ‘reality’, ‘legacy’, ‘work’ – pretty bleak.

And that’s just what I actually wrote. It’s a lot less than I wanted to write and it’s not as bleak as what I was thinking.

Anyway, last week I took my guitar to the Fall Semester’s first meeting of the Skyline Jazz Band. There were many familiar faces and they were all glad to see me. That felt good. I was able to follow the charts reasonably well so I decided I would try to stick with it.

Now tonight is the first night I have at home this week and I had great plans but I happened to look at my work email and discovered some things that could not be ignored. Aargh! Now I’m all pissy again.

I whined and got tomorrow off so hopefully I can recover. I have work Friday and Saturday days only then two days off. Next week is the Gala opening for the Symphony so there is much chaos at Davies Symphony Hall.

I’ll try to post something more coherent tomorrow.

Rosalie

After getting all excited writing and feeling pretty tired at 10:30 last night, I went to bed without taking my usual sleeping pill (generic Benadryl OTC). 3 am came and I woke up and that was it. I was tossing and turning until I gave up about 15 minutes ago (6 am).

But partly what I was thinking about was the lovely post Ashley did on Facebook about Jeremy’s birthday. I thought this photo represented Jeremy at his happiest: walking into the forest with his daughter.

14102632_978884620788_4021627988925291642_n

This, on the other hand, is a vision of this girl at age 25! Try to ignore the foot in the foreground. She looks so sophisticated here! Thinking deep thoughts no doubt. Shades of things to come!

13962626_978884790448_8027527000920022898_n

work

Man, this working every day sucks! I’ve been trying to write a post for days and there just isn’t time. I get home, eat dinner, and poop out completely. I was off Monday (after a 16 hour day on Sunday) but went to PT  and then jazz band in the evening. I believe I didn’t turn on the computer all day.

Of course, there’s more to the story. The post I’ve been trying to write was titled ‘depressed’ so that’s the real reason. Monday those things happened but they were interspersed with lots of laying around. My therapist says it’s ok so there you go.

Honestly, today has been better. Is work the cure for depression? Hardly, but a better night’s sleep helped a lot. Sunday really kicked my ass although I was low before that.

The projects at work have been useful and, arguably, helping get me back on track. The easiest for a non-stagehand to understand is the canopy cleaning we did earlier this month. The first picture with the line array is from last summer. The second is partly done, so you can see the difference in the same light. The third is how it looks now. Yeah I am pleased to be part of making the old hall look better!

IMG_20150701_203112_305 IMG_20160805_155907_148IMG_20160805_155847_817

 

legacy

I went back and looked at some of Zach’s journal entries the other day. They resonate differently from how they felt six months ago. Am I changing or is the memory of Zach the flesh and blood person dimming? Maybe it was just that particular entry that struck me differently.

More generally, it started me thinking about how we are remembered. Once there were paintings, then photographs and now videos for images but throughout it all there has been writing. And writing, unlike images, requires the person to take active steps to create those memories. (We’ll set aside self portraits for now.)

I had reached out to my nephew Steve the other day about his blog that I remembered but didn’t have saved anywhere. He got back to me with the link and said he still went back and read it to see what kind of person he was then. Well, I think it’s too bad he’s not keeping it up, but that’s not the point. We write to be remembered – by ourselves and by others. Steve hasn’t taken the blog down. I spent a few minutes looking through some of the last entries. He’s moved on to other things I suppose. (Actually he’s a brilliant videographer. See his website at http://thedigitalagent.com/)

I’ve written a lot over the years. I generally have written more when I travel than when I’m at home so I’ve got lots of good records of that. When the kids were little I kept journals of their doings. Some of my more recent musings have been on the computer. Will the paper or the electron last longer? My bet is on the electron although there are issues with that as well.

I know I’d sure like it if my grandfather had written more. My mother has a couple of things he wrote but it’s only tantalizing. I can remember him but what about when I’m gone? A few fading photos like some others that I have. They’re of families – ancestors – but I don’t know who they are.

To be continued . . .

Here’s Steve’s blog address (last entry 2010!): http://backseatmusings.blogspot.com/

Jeremy

This blog isn’t really about Zach even though lately he’s been the top topic and his picture is on the front page. As it says on the front page, this blog is about understanding myself. It’s a way to make me write things that are on my mind. It’s been helpful to me to get this stuff out. I would like to generate dialog with others but that has been slow to develop. Hello, reader! Does my writing make you want to respond? Please do!

So, Jeremy. Jeremy started a blog many years ago. I think he was living in Montana then. He wrote something that his mother took exception to and he was upset. He was just being open with his feelings. I remember counseling him that he always needed to remember who his audience was. The subtext there was that if she might read it, then he needed to take that into account when writing. I think the experience took the wind out of his sails and I don’t believe the blog is extant.

Anyway, Jeremy’s birthday is coming up and I sat down this morning with a card to write something to my son. So many things came into my mind that I sat there for several minutes before writing anything. In the end, I wrote something brief and light for the card but I want to go a little longer and deeper here.

When I was a teenager, I railed against my father for his ‘perfect’ life. He went to college, got a job, got married, had kids, bought a house in suburbia … you get the idea. Despite (or perhaps because of) my own wanderings, this model seems to be lodged in my consciousness as an ideal. Jeremy hasn’t followed that path either. He’s done all those things but in a less orderly fashion.

Perhaps that says more about the changing times than it does anything else. Now he and Ashley are plotting to move across the country in an attempt to improve their living situation. How can you not admire that grand vision and steadfast purpose? In the face of unspeakable tragedy, Jeremy showed a grace and maturity that sometimes surprised me. That says more about me than anything else.It’s hard to let go of the idea that your child is in need of your wisdom. Jeremy has plenty of his own, hard-won, wisdom.

So Jeremy I just want to say how proud I am of you and what you’ve accomplished. From your doddering, sentimental dad.

a happier Zach story

I thought I might have details on this in my own journals but a trip down memory lane found only a note that we went out for dinner. A dedicated journal writer I’m not, although in fairness who could have guessed how precious those encounters would become.

I was surprised to find out that I didn’t go to Louisiana to visit Zach for almost three years after I went with him down there in 2011 on his move from Oregon. Of course we saw each other once or twice each year in either Georgia or California.

So it was February 2014 and he was in the midst of trying to find a doctoral program. He had driven by himself to Lawrence, Kansas in January through snowstorms and now he was going to have an interview in Tallahassee at Florida State. I drove with him and we went on to Georgia to visit Jeremy afterwards.

Anyway, the night I arrived in Baton Rouge we went out for dinner to a sports bar he knew. They had an order counter near the front and after we ordered the girl asked Zach his name so they could call us when it was ready. He told her, ‘Roger’, and started walking to the table. I looked at him with a question and he said he just liked to use different names in those places.

A few minutes later they called out ‘Roger’ & we went and got our food. Zach’s quirky humor!