Messages From Beyond

There's a song in my mom's family that seems to play during times of loss or other momentous occasions.

It's called "When Will I See You Again" by The Three Degrees. It came out in 1974, and it isn't a song you hear often. And yet, in my family, it always seems to materialize on the radio as the soundtrack to major events. A message from above, if you will.

My mom first noticed it right after her mom died in 1978. At the time, the song was fairly current. Nothing unusual there. It was just a song that reminded her of her mom.

Eight years later, we were driving home from my grandfather's funeral (my mom's dad), and I suddenly noticed my mom was sobbing. And then I noticed the song playing on the radio.

When will I see you again?
When will we share precious moments?
Will I have to wait forever?
Will I have to suffer and cry the whole night through?

Through the years we noticed it playing at important moments: the day of my uncle's death ... on my grandma's birthday ... the first time in 15 years that my mom and her sisters had all been together, right as my mom was leaving ... there are more, but you get the idea.

My rational self knows this is probably a case of finding a pattern because we're looking for it. But the timing is always so unlikely. And I, for one, rarely listen to channels that play that kind of music.

On the day Steve left for Mississippi, his dad was on life support in the ICU but we didn't know what had happened, and we didn't know the prognosis.

When I turned on my car radio as I left work the next day, "When Will I See You Again" piped through my speakers. My heart sank.

I knew Steve's dad was gone.

Life Gets in the Way

I missed an entire month.

I have a good excuse. For the first half of the month, Steve was in intensive training that kept him working very long hours, so blogging time for me was nonexistent.

And then, Steve's dad died.

Steve's dad had been descending further and further into dementia over the past few years; he had early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He had trouble speaking properly and was very confused the vast majority of the time. He'd also been wandering, and had started walking around on the highway and refusing to come home. The situation had become unsafe. Steve's mom had checked Steve's dad into the hospital in the hopes of medicating him to calm him down to the point that he could go into a nursing home.

He'd always said he didn't want to go into a nursing home. Most people who knew him actually thought he'd like it there once he got used to it, because he was very extroverted. In a nursing home with a good dementia program, he'd have people to talk to all day long -- fellow patients who wouldn't remember that he'd already told them something or who wouldn't notice if he wasn't making any sense. But he seemed to have an idea in his head about what it would be like, and it brought him to a panic whenever he thought of it. So Steve's mom kept him at home, and every day he wandered.

For a couple of years, he had been walking miles and miles daily through the dirt roads outside his small Mississippi town. We had worried about him constantly. At his viewing the night before the funeral, several distant neighbors showed up unexpectedly. They said Steve's dad had been visiting them regularly on his long walks. One family said he used to come and sit on their porch. The first time, they called the police. But he came back again, and the neighbors realized he was just looking for company. They said they often sat with him and talked. Turns out, a lot of people were watching out for him.

His demise was lengthy, but even still, we had expected it to take years longer. He was only 65 and was in very good physical shape, no doubt thanks in part to all the walking. The end, when it came in the form of a pulmonary embolism, was sudden and unexpected. I don't think it's callous to say that many family members were relieved at how he died. He never forgot his family. He never became incapacitated. He was able to meet little Lexie and he knew he was her grandfather (referring to himself as "paw paw").

Lexie stayed in Virginia with my parents while I made a whirlwind three-day trip to Mississippi. Steve comes home tomorrow after what seems like a long time away.

RIP, paw paw.

My Funny Valentine

I don't talk too much about Steve in this space, but in honor of the upcoming cliche'd holiday I thought I'd talk about one of his best qualities, the one that drew me to him and keeps us close even while we seem to spend all our time working and taking care of Lexie. He has lots of great qualities -- he's intelligent, curious, and a great dad, to name just a few. But the quality I want to talk about here is his understated sense of humor.

When we first met, Steve was the ultimate gentleman, and he kept his sense of humor under wraps. It was around our third date that he really made me laugh for the first time, telling a story about how he'd gotten to hold a friendly three-toed sloth in South America, ending with the opinion that it would be the best pet ever. When I asked why, he said, "because it hardly ever goes to the bathroom."

He also re-enacted a later encounter with an UNfriendly wild sloth, which he and his officer friends were trying to poke at while they smoked cigarettes near a pier off the Panama Canal. That sloth tried to claw at their faces. But being a sloth, the attack went in super-slow motion -- snarling face, nasty-looking outreached claw and all.

Steve has a talent for defusing my irritation. A couple of summers ago, he took to leaving his flip flops in the middle of the living room. I finally complained that they were making me trip. He looked at me solemnly: "Me too." I laughed. He started putting them under the couch instead.

When I came home from the hospital last year, the house was pretty dirty. After a couple of weeks (during which I was recovering from an emergency C-section), I pointed out that there were dust bunnies the size of tennis balls under the dresser.

"You think that's bad?" he asked. "You should see under the bed."

Happy V-day, Steve. I couldn't imagine it with anyone else.