posted 2008/05/04 at 19:29
About a half-hour ago I finished the last of my students' portfolios from this past semester; I'm waiting a little while here to allow some people who had problems submitting things to me to get some last papers e-mailed to me, but then tomorrow afternoon I'll be submitting their grades. Contrary to what I thought earlier, I actually do get a week off before the next semester starts, and I probably need that time off right now more than ever. In addition to catching up on reading and writing and cleaning and all sorts of other things, I'm going to need time to just relax, kick my feet up and do nothing at all.
As I expected, the end of this semester was more painful for me than it was in previous semesters, and I'm not referring to having to grade all those extra portfolios here. I take a very deep interest in my students, and I try to do all that I can to enable them to succeed, not just in my class and their other classes, but in life in general. I take care of my students, and earlier this year after Dad died, well, a lot of them took care of me. I know that students coming and going is an unavoidable aspect of my job, and I'm looking forward to having a new group of students to teach here a week from Monday, but after losing Dad a couple of months ago, moving on from this group of students is kind of hard for me.
I think Heather summed it up best when she talked about how hard this Spring is for her. I commented here a week ago about how the trees in our backyard are starting to bud leaves, and Heather pointed out that it's a sign that the cycle of nature, like life, goes on. For her, as it is for me a good part of the time, it's still hard to think of life going on without Dad physically here with us. As much as I know that I'm ready to move on with life after Dad's death, and as much as I know that I have to move on, a good part of me still doesn't want to move on quite yet. I want to hold on everything, from the good of my students' support to the bad of the painful grief, because I'm familiar with it. Moving on means moving towards the unknown, and I fear that I'm not strong enough to handle the unknown quite yet. I have to move on, though. Somehow I have to move on.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/04/27 at 20:36
This past weekend I've just taken some time for myself and tried to decompress. For the first time since Dad's death I didn't have anything that needed immediate attention from my students, although starting Wednesday I'll have some fifty or sixty portfolios to look at and get graded by the following Monday. I also start teaching Composition I at MCCC that Monday, so over the next couple of days I'll have to look at the required textbook for that class and try to figure out some kind of lesson plan. Yesterday and today, though, I kind of took some time for myself here to relax and unwind, play some video games, do some shopping, and watch a bit of television. (Unfortunately I was out shopping during the Red Wings' game Saturday and wound up missing Darren McCarty's first fight since rejoining the Wings, guh.) I'd wanted to do some cleaning in my room, but that didn't wind up happening and I'll probably have to get to it two weeks from now.
Leaves have begun to spring up on some of the trees in our backyard, and I can't help but think of how Dad's not here to see them now. As we've been going through his stuff recently, we've unearthed a lot of the sketches and paintings he used to do back before he started his own business; I had pretty much forgotten he'd ever done them, but once I saw them I remembered, "Oh yeah, I saw those when I was a kid." He had this way of drawing leaves on trees when he worked in pen-and-ink where we just made these curlicues all over the place, and somehow it worked; I remember trying to imitate that style when I was young and failing at it. (As always, stick a writing implement in my hand and all my manual dexterity goes to crap.) I'll probably put some of his work online here on the .org soon -- I've been meaning to do an online tribute to him, but time just hasn't been on my side for that -- but it's painful to realize that twenty years ago he just stopped doing that stuff because he got so wrapped up in running his business that he cut all his fun, all his social activities, out of his life. (In case you were wondering where I got that from ... yeah.)
As I see spring turn to summer here (although we may be getting some snow overnight after hitting 80 on Friday ...), I can't help but wonder if Dad was able to appreciate the changing of the seasons. We had that lunar eclipse a few days before his death, and I can remember him and Mom taking a look at it after I pointed it out to him, but a full lunar eclipse is one of those rare, irregular occasions you kind of make a point of observing. Even coming from a family of Wiccans, I don't think we do all that much to recognize when the seasons change and all the beauty that's out there waiting to be explored. If I were to pass away suddenly, I wouldn't want it said of me that I was too wrapped up in my work and my other pursuits to be able to enjoy the simple beauty of the first green leaves budding on trees in the spring. I think I'm overdue for a trip to Wildwood or the Toledo Botanical Garden. I'll do what I can to make that trip before I start getting weighed down with portfolios.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/03/24 at 20:29
I'm the biggest packrat I know of, but Dad was close. Whatever extra ability he had to throw things out was kind of negated by the fact that he had a thirty-year head start on collecting things. Although he lost a lot of personal stuff in the fire since he stored lots of stuff upstairs, his business stuff was safe since we still had a separate office west of here back then. That stuff came over to the house once he built the addition a few years ago, and going through all of that stuff, while simultaneously handling the hundreds of other pieces of business his death has brought up, has been quite the task. It's been painful for me to try to resume some kind of a normal diet here, because most of this past month I've needed tremendous amounts of sugar and caffeine just to stay fueled up here. (I'm not denying emotional eating is playing a large part in that as well, but I think emotional eating is kind of understandable under the circumstances.)
Just before Dad's death I had started to go through my closet because I needed to clear space for some new clothes. Rather than throw out old clothes, though, I've only put them into "retirement" in a plastic tub out in the loft closet. I honestly don't even want to do that -- even if my clothes get too ratty to wear out in public I still think they'd be good for working out in -- but I need space for new clothes. I can't bring myself to throw any of the clothes out, either, because I can still remember how I got each shirt and from whom. Just like I've been learning this past month going through Dad's stuff, every little thing we have has its own story, and as much as the memories and stories matter more than the things themselves, I can't bring myself to throw them out.
As far as clothes go, though, Mom was in charge of cleaning out Dad's closet, and after we took out the things we wanted to keep or could repurpose (we have a thing in this house about converting old sweatpants into shorts to wear around the house), she's got the rest bagged up to send to Goodwill here shortly. Granted, most of the clothes I've retired are so raggy that I doubt they'd be of much use to anyone, but this is one of those things that makes me think about my own consumption. Being a packrat is bad enough when you've got so much stuff you have to find space for, but I have to admit that I don't think enough about how me keeping all this stuff around means that other people can't get enjoyment out of it. This is a matter that deserves a lot more thought than I've been giving it recently, but I simply don't have any time to stop and think now; I've got too much to do here.
posted 2008/03/21 at 21:24
Today would have been Dad's 62nd birthday. There's really not much more I can add to that, so let's just get to the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What was the last thing you filled out a written application for?
When I went to the BMV to renew my driver's license earlier this month I think I only had to sign a sheet after the attendant asked me a bunch of questions, so I won't count that. The last written applications of any kind I can remember are things regarding retirement funds and the like I filled out after I got hired at MCCC.
2. What computer application software last impressed you with what it could do?
I honestly don't have an answer here simply because I tend to use the same software over and over again. I intend on constructing Yggdrasil Mark II later this year, though, so perhaps I'll have a chance to try out some new stuff here soon.
3. Where did you last apply a Band-Aid?
Probably a finger; my hands certainly got cut to heck when I got a really, really bad case of winter skin about a month ago.
4. What’s a rule that applies to many people in your life but not to you?
Worry about the finances later. We will have some money coming to us here shortly, but I am perhaps overly paranoid in wanting to save as much money as possible here until we actually have the money that's coming in our accounts.
5. When were you last required to apply some elbow grease to something?
Fixing the keyboard drawer on my computer desk here when the screws on the right side came off. It's only on via a patch job now, but my sister finally found the anchor for my old articulating keyboard drawer here soon, so I hope to attach that to this desk sometime soon.
Labels: dad, fridayfive
posted 2008/03/18 at 22:06
I'm not in the mood to give one of my long birthday posts here, just like I wasn't in the mood to do my usual pre-birthday begging for stuff off of my Amazon wishlist. Suffice it to say that my birthday booty this year was a bit bigger than usual, and I'll get the specifics later (some items are still on their way here according to my sister), but obviously the events of the past month kind of put a damper on my usual biannual willing submission to materialistic desire. I think this may have been the hardest day for me to get through since the day Dad died. I was kind of tasked with doing the usual food run for my birthday (Mancino's pizza and Dairy Queen), and of all the things Dad used to do that I've been taking over, that was the hardest one for me to do yet. Even coming back down to Ohio from work, knowing I'd be making the pizza and ice cream run, I began to get sick to my stomach. I'm not even sure that I would have had a birthday party tonight if I hadn't known that Mom and Heather and Mark kind of needed the party more than I did.
There was an incredible dual quality to today. At once, I don't think I've felt Dad's absence more than I did today -- especially when we sat down for pizza and presents -- but at the same time, his spiritual presence with me, and with the rest of us, seemed stronger than ever today. I have to keep reminding myself of the spiritual aspect of this as the days go by here, as I have to fight my urge to save everything of his (although he wasn't quite as bad of a packrat as I am, he had a thirty-year headstart on me), but some days it's harder to deal with than others, and this day was a total pain to deal with it.
I wish I could say that things will get better, but Dad's birthday would have been this Friday (yeah, there's your peak ahead to the intro for this week's Friday Five). Normally there's a lot to celebrate this week (St. Patrick's Day, the anniversary of us buying this property), but this year everything's basically been turned on its head. I keep reminding myself that things will never return to "normal" because what was "normal" before will never be again, but I'm hoping that after we get through this week that things will start to become a little easier to deal with. Right now, though, I just feel like curling up in a ball on my bed and shutting the rest of the world out.
posted 2008/03/16 at 20:25
Again, my apologies for a lack of blog entries lately. I have lots of topics on my whiteboard here for when I feel that I can resume a normal blogging schedule, but that might not be for a while because there's still so much going on here in the aftermath of Dad's death. Just as a quick update on that, I had blogged earlier that the preliminary cause of Dad's death was determined to be a stomach aneurysm, but when we got his death certificate shortly after that, the cause of death there was listed as blood clots in his lungs. Complicating matters is the fact that the coroner's report is still not done yet, even though Dad was cremated two weeks ago; this doesn't seem logical to me, but I'm guessing that this is just one of those things where I'm basing things on what I've seen on television dramas like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and not on any real-life experience.
As a lead-in to what I'm about to say, and at the risk of sounding like I would dare to brag about something like this, when the actual medical emergency hit on the 23rd, I clicked over into Crisis Mode, that rare state I achieve where I manage to stop being absent-minded, stop screwing the small and big things up, take charge and do a damn good job of it. Just like I was the one to get the family out of the house and call 911 and all that when we had the fire here in 2001, I was the one to call 911 when we needed to, I got the paramedics and others marshalled through the house, called Heather and Mark, coordinated everything, and drove behind the ambulance that took Dad to the hospital. After we were told of his death, I likewise got the family banded together and helped everyone piece together all of the things we needed to take care of.
With the fire, though, there came a point where I could switch out of Crisis Mode, and that was fairly soon in the process. Once the family was huddled together in the van in front of our house and the fire rigs were getting the blaze under control, I could afford to relax a little, in part because the family was safe and secure (and that was all that really mattered at that point), and in part because when it came to the upper-level planning stuff, those were things that Dad had to take care of, and he was quite capable of taking care of them. This is different, though; Dad's not here, and even though Mom has to take care of the upper-level things, she needs to rely a lot on Heather and Mark and myself to take care of them. We're far enough along in the process here to know that we don't have to worry about anyone swooping in and kicking us out of the house or any of that, at least for a good long while, but at the same time there are still an awful lot of unresolved questions and a tremendous amount of business to take care of. I'm not feeling the same panic I was feeling in the hours before and after Dad's death, but at the same time it feels like I haven't really gotten out of Crisis Mode yet.
The two things that have gotten me through here are writing (for myself) and food. Writing isn't an issue here, but I've been off-diet for a while now -- I tried going back on-diet last week but my heart wasn't in it, and with both Dad's birthday and mine this week I don't think now is the right time to get back on it -- but at the same time I haven't been taking good care of myself. Granted, there are far worse things I can do to my body than eat bad foods (and don't think I haven't been tempted to do some of them), but I feel like there's an underlying problem with me still being unable to get out of Crisis Mode here. I really don't know what to do here, and in a lot of ways I'm worried about relaxing too much because, as I said, there is still a lot of work to do. Still, I don't feel that good about myself right now, and I don't know what to do to fix that.
posted 2008/03/04 at 19:09
I was hoping for a distraction from the craziness of Ohio having such a hotly-contested Democratic primary, but this wasn't what I had in mind. Believe me, the last thing I needed after coming home from the hospital after Dad died was to walk by our mailbox and see a full-page flyer from Clinton's campaign sticking out of it. I had thought that the Republican and Democratic primaries were the only things on the ballot today, but there were a couple of funding issues on the ballot here, including funding for our firefighters. The firefighters already had my vote for life, especially after the house fire, but I saw them do everything they could to save Dad in our living room and they have my eternal appreciation for that as well. I was probably the only person at that precinct to come in as a declared Green (or at least as close to one as I can get given how Ohio's laws screw over third parties), but I'll get my chance to vote in the Green primary next month. I'd originally planned to go to the statewide convention in April to vote, but right now I don't want to make any plans like that until the situation here at home gets a lot more settled.
It would figure that immediately after Dad's death I'd get Darren McCarty back on the Red Wings, a snow day, and Ralph Nader in the presidential race. However, as much as I appreciate Nader running, I don't agree with his strategy of running independently and trying to run a campaign "alongside" the eventual Green Party nominee to get progressive issues out there. I think it does help to have more voices talking about the issues that aren't being talked about by the major party candidates, but it's possible to do that without having two progressive candidates out there. I don't think Nader and David Cobb running separate candidacies four years ago was a good thing for either progressives as a whole or the Green Party in particular, given how it split an already small vote and cost the Green Party several ballot lines it won with Nader's 2000 candidacy. Particularly if Clinton manages to win the Democratic nomination through superdelegates, there is a tremendous opportunity for the Green Party to make huge inroads in this next election and make the five percent popular threshold to qualify for federal funds in 2012. Nader running as an independent -- particularly with Matt Gonzales as his vice-presidential candidate (one of the biggest stars within the Green Party) -- doesn't strike me as the best strategy for this year.
As for my plans, I'm going to continue to push for Nader to get the Green Party nomination whether or not he wants it. He already has a huge delegate count, and I think he may actually win the nomination even if he isn't campaigning for it. (If he does win the nomination, I highly doubt he'd turn it down.) If he doesn't get the nomination then Cynthia McKinney will likely get it, and as much as I want to vote for the Green Party candidate no matter what, there's no way I can vote for McKinney over Nader. I guess I'm stuck with Nader now no matter what, and the moment he has volunteer opportunities posted on his Website that don't involve actually talking with other people, I'll probably volunteer to do something for him. At least that should give me another outlet for all the emotions I've been feeling since Dad's death.
Labels: dad, greenparty, politics
posted 2008/02/29 at 18:40
Getting back to my normal activities is probably one of the things I need to do here in order to get healthier, so I'll do the Friday Five this week. A few weeks ago when I realized that I'd be doing a Friday Five on Leap Day, I kind of peaked ahead at Wikipedia's listing for this day to see if there was much of anything I could pull for the usual historical opener. I found some stuff that I thought I might be able to use, but I've kind of discarded it because there's only one lead I can go with here:
Today was Dad's memorial service up in Michigan. I love you, Dad, and I miss you terribly. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. How and when did you learn to swim?
I think the only real formal training I had in swimming came in second grade when we went to one of the local high schools (ironically enough the rival school to the one my sister was attending at the time). Given how often I was up at the vacation house my paternal grandparents had on Bois Blanc Island up on Lake Huron, though, and given how Mom always built small pools for me in the backyard in unused patches of her garden, though, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to swim. I've never done it that well, and I don't think I ever will swim again for obvious reasons, but I can swim at least.
2. How and when did you learn to drive?
I first started driving school when I was 16, but I didn't get my license until I was almost 25. The driving school I went to had a deal where you paid a one-time fee, and in addition to the state-mandated number of hours you had to drive with an instructor, they offered to let you keep driving with their instructors until you were ready to pass the test. Well, I kind of used a whole lot of those hours because I really sucked at driving. Finally one day I almost ran a kid over going through the residential neighbourhood east of the school, and five minutes later I somehow had my graduation certificate. I think they just got sick of me and wanted to cut ties with me, but the incident kind of stuck in my mind for a long time there and made me too scared to drive. I got over it eventually, and these days I think I'm one of the finest drivers out there, but it was hard.
3. How and when did you learn to tie your shoelaces?
I don't remember the exact age, but I learned later than most (for all that I grew up to be so smart, I had difficulty with a lot of basic things back in the day), and I learned by practicing on a brick with holes in it through which Dad laced an extra pair of shoelaces. I can even remember the shoelaces being huge, and this absolutely hideous shade of green. (Green was Dad's favourite colour.)
4. How and when did you learn to cook?
I think I made my first Chef Boyardee pizza when I was thirteen; I can remember that I forgot to grease the cookie sheet, so the pizza stuck on like crazy. After that Mom taught me various things, and I watched a lot of The Frugal Gourmet and Ciao Italia and picked up things from the cookbooks there.
5. How and when did you learn to type?
I've never learned how to type properly -- I use my right hand for nearly all the keys, and keep my left pinky resting on the keyboard to the left of the tilde -- but I had classes when I was younger. Given that I was doing computer programming when I was four years old on Dad's Sinclair ZX-80, I think typing was just one of those things I picked up before I even knew what I was doing.
Labels: dad, fridayfive, personal
posted 2008/02/28 at 20:18
My family and I wish to extend our deepest thanks to those of you who have contacted us over the past five days with your sympathies and condolences.
I wish I could say more about what happened to Dad, but at this point all I can really say is that he died at 1300 this past Saturday, and that we were told that the preliminary cause of death was believed to be an aneurysm in his stomach.
As far as how we are doing, we are doing about as well as could be expected at this point. I went right back up to teach on Monday, and I've been busying myself with writing and starting to get answers to some of the three million questions raised by Dad's death. This is going to be a very long process, and it will probably never be over, but at least it's something that's helping me keep busy. Being idle right now is probably the worst thing for me at this point.
I'll be trying to resume normal blogging activities here soon, but I may not have too much to say about Dad for a while. There is writing for others and there is writing for one's self, and right now I feel far more comfortable writing about Dad for myself than for others. That will change at some point, but I can't say when.
For now, cliché as it is, I'd like to make one request to all of you, if you are lucky enough to be in a position where you can do so: please, please tell your parents how much you love them as soon as you can. Don't assume that you'll have the chance later, because you never know just when that opportunity will disappear, and disappear forever.
Everyone take care and be well. I'll be back soon.
posted 2008/02/23 at 15:05
My father died from an aneurysm earlier today. Apologies if I don't blog here for a while, but I have more pressing issues to tend to right now.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon