To Start At The Begining. . .Is To Start At The End

Diary - Entry 2

I have chosen to start with the end because if anyone reads this, perhaps they will be spared the grief, pain and nightmares (when I do manage to close my eyes) that comes from the place within myself where I currently reside.

When I got the call Wednesday night, that he had been transferred to the hospital in Jonesboro in ISICU, I did not even know that he was in the hospital. I said I would be there as soon as possible.  I live in Tennessee, my husband was traveling and at midnight when he got home, I jumped in the car and headed to be with Todd. I arrived at 2:30 in the morning. Because I had come in the middle of the night, they let me see him while everyone else was made to leave.  His nurse Consuela, told me that he was very, very ill but that they were doing everything they could to make him comfortable. 

I went into his room and what lay before me, was not the brother that I had seen on my last visit to the farm.
The jaundiced man in this bed had a dark red face, bulging yellow eyes where his whites used to be,  very pale blue irises that were once, as vivid as my own.  He was malnurished, dehydrated, skeltetal and the biggest thing on him was his bloated belly.  He was agitated, he could not get comfortable (as he also suffered from severe curvature of the spine) and the pain medication did not work because he could not process it through the liver and kidney.  I tried to soothe him as he ran hot and cold with fever and chills, and used his suction tube to rid his mouth of the foam that ran continually from his dry lips.

As I sat there, I looked at him and I realized that it wasn't just himself that was responsible for this death sentence, it was all of us. I began to wonder how can a wife, not see the physical deteroration of her husband on a daily basis (claiming that she is in control of his drinking and that he only has two beers a day!). Especially one as grotesquely obvious Todds.  He had been pissing blood and having such severe diarreah that his ass was bleeding, do you think you could see that?   How could the medical personal at Crossroads hospital in Wynne say he was just dehydrated. How could his wife have left him there at 7:30am so she could go to work and he was not seen till 2pm, then at 5:30 it was suddenly annouced that he was in full liver and renal failure. . . I just did not understand. . .at all.  The more I thought about it, the angrier I became.

I tried not to show him my feelings, so I just smiled and leaned down to him.  He looked at me as I held his hand and I spoke low in his ear.  I whispered " we can beat this but you have to help me fight, I cannot fight this battle for you alone, I will give you my kidney and  a healthy portion of my liver, I will be there with you, but you need to be willing to help yourself too.  If you don't want to fight anymore, thats ok too, because God will be waiting and there will be no more pain or suffering and you will see Perry, Mamaw, Roy Dale, Papaw, Uncle Taylor and all those that went before us. I have always loved you and I will always love you no matter what you choose."

He calmed down for a few minutes.  I stepped into the doorway to talk to his nurse, then, out of  nowhere, he projectile vomited blood and bile that was so black, it looked like tar. His nurse was afraid that I was going to get upset, but I said "blood does not turn red until it is oxegenated, I am not afraid of the color or the amount."   It was everywhere, down in his beard, arms, chest, and in a deep pool on the pillow next to his IV. He got upset again.  Consuela said she would call for help to get him cleaned up, and I said, no. "Just get what we need and I will do it for him."  She just smiled and left the room.  He kept looking at me and I said, "it's alright, it needed to come out."  We cleaned him up, I rinsed his mouth out and I washed his face, beard, neck, arms, chest. . .everywhere that I could see where the blood had gone. When we went to put a clean gown on him, I saw how distended his belly was and the bruising on his ribs.

I thought again, how does someone who is surrounded by family, has been to the hospital several times within the last few months. . . get to this state?  I went to the ladies room and threw up.

I stayed beside him, holding his hand, stroking his forhead and singing to him like I used to, when he was a child . As we shared a bedroom, he would often climbed into my bed crying, because of what we heard or had seen going on between our parents.  He finally fell asleep.  It was nearly 6am. I found his wife, her children and my step mother in the waiting room.  I looked at his wife and my step-mother and I said, "how did he get this way, in such a short time?"  They shrugged their sholders.

I went to the cafeteria and sat for a long time thinking about his life, my life, Victors life, the choices we had made and how each of us had coped with our traumatic upbringing.  It was then, that I realized Todd had never had a chance at what should have been a full and happy life. His sensitivity should have been shared as a Professor of Literature or something as equally gratifying to his tender soul and gentle spirit. He should have had a wife that cherished and loved him, he should have had normal parents that did not try to kill each other, every other day.  He should have been a whole person instead of the shell that was left after our parents got through with us.

One week ago, at 4am he left all the pain and suffering behind. . . I love you.

My Brothers Death

Diary - Entry 1

I have started this site in honor of my brother,Todd, who passed away on Saturday, November 14th, at 4am, two weeks shy of his 46th birthday and disrepectfully buried next to my mother, the next day, on her birthday. . .November 15th, with no obituary notice of any kind. . .one ugly plastic wheat wreath around a toy John Deere tractor, that they had recycled from my fathers 60th birthday party.

As a child, he was so much more than what the outside world saw.  He was tender of heart and spirit, almost ghostly in appearance and always smiled.  As an adult, his life, was full of pain, sorrow, sometimes homelessness, and always overshadowed by alcoholism . . . which I knew, he used as a coping mechanism. I believe it  is the fault of my parents, step-parents, his poor choice in a mate, and lastly, the visual trauma we so often witnessed at home, that left him a stuttering, deformed and wizened old man before his time.  He was made fun of, whispered about and surrounded by hypocrites, and those were just family members.

Our childhood was difficult at best, but not because of our love for one another, but because of the lack of maturity and framework within our parents, who never should have been parents in the first place and compounded the problems of marrying to young by, jealousy, rage, drinking,and physical fighting so vicious that one gave as good as the other got.  They were like oil and water together.   Divorcing, remarrying, divorcing and remarrying and having another child.  They could not leave one another alone.  Todd, Vic and I got lost in the shuffle and got passed from relative to relative within our small familial enclave. 

Why do I say these things?  To lay the foundation of what will be written here and because, like many others, we come from a well respected southern family whose patriarch was not only a large cotton and rice farmer, but he was a pastor in the Assembly of God churches (and I use that term loosley).  His revivals were as ledgendary as his ego.  Therefore, to the outside world and our neighbors, we looked normal. . .and like many a southern family, our skeltons run as deep and wide as the century and a half that we have lived here. 

In the end, all the dirty laundry will be washed and hung up for the world to see. . .