death Archives - Page 7 of 13 - Ramblin' with Roger

Dad’s grave

My dad wasn’t much on that type of sentimentality.

Visiting the gravesites, beyond the limits of geography, is a very personal preference, I believe. I don’t think I’ve visited my dad’s grave more than two or three times. Of course, when he first died, on this date in 2000, the headstone wasn’t ready.

I know I made at least one trip, maybe two, to the military cemetery 40 miles north of Charlotte, NC, with my mother and at least the sister who lives in North Carolina, and very likely, her daughter.

The last time, I’m sure, was when my mother died in 2011. Both of my sisters and their daughters, my wife and MY daughter all attended the burial. She’s interred next to dad, and the headstone has now been replaced to represent both of them, with information on each side. I’ve actually never seen mom’s side of the headstone, except in photographs.

But my dad wasn’t much on that type of sentimentality. His mom died in the early 1960s, about a decade before he moved from Binghamton, NY to North Carolina. I have no recollection of taking us to visit her grave in the Floral Avenue Cemetery in Johnson City, NY. And I just can’t imagine him going on his own.

Indeed, I didn’t even remember – or more correctly, misremembered – where she was buried until about three years ago, which I wrote about.

Spring Forest Cemetery in Binghamton I went by virtually every single weekday growing up. It’s three or four blocks from the house I grew up in, and even closer to my maternal grandmother’s house, where I went each school day for lunch. we used to cut through the cemetery to play baseball at Ansco field.

My paternal grandfather died in 1980, and he’s buried in Spring Forest, or at least I think so. I doubt my father ever made a trek up to Binghamton to visit the grave.

So I guess I’m trying to make myself feel less guilty – guilty may be overstating it – about not going to what is now my parents’ gravesite. I DO have pictures.

Keeper of the FantaCo flame

Annamae Hebert was a real mom, in the best meaning of the word, even to me.

The interesting and unexpected result of this blog is that I’ve become a keeper of the flame for things related to FantaCo, the comic book store where I worked from 1980 to 1988, and its early staff. A fellow named Jim Abbott emailed this picture of a sign by Raoul Vezina (d. 1983), the great artiste of Smilin’ Ed.

Jim writes: “I doubt you’ve seen this. It was on the front of 279 Fair Street in Kingston [NY], owned by my friend, the late Bruce Talbott, of New Paltz [NY – my college town]. I don’t know if his widow still has it in her garage or not. Take care.” Thanks, Jim.

In that vein, I should note:

My friend Penny, who is married to former FantaCo employee Broome – he who came in late to work on his first day at FantaCo so he could go on a first date with her – recently went to the hospital for appendicitis and a hernia. There are some complications; still I dare say Penny is faring better than Broome in this process.

FantaCo’s owner, Tom Skulan, lost his dad, Thomas, on April 20. I did not know him well, but Tom and his brother Joe spoke eloquently about his intelligence, eclectic nature, and love of music. Joe posted a version of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony – 2nd movement, which is one of my all-time favorites.

John Hebert, who drew and scripted the FantaCo comic book Sold Out that Tom Skulan and I co-wrote, suffered the passing of his mother Annamae. She was widowed at a young age and was left to raise her son John alone.

Her obit said, “The major highlight in Annamae’s life was when she became a grandmother for the first time at the age of 80.” That was probably true. I’d see her at comic book shows, or at Free Comic Book Day at Earthworld Comics in Albany with John, perhaps with his wife Jodi and one or more of her grandkids.

She was a real mom, in the best meaning of the word, even to me, and very proud of her son. I enjoyed the time I spent with her, as she was quite delightful.

And speaking of passings:

Prince, who died at the age of fifty-frickin’-seven, was a massive part of the soundtrack of my FantaCo days, and well beyond. I own on vinyl this extended, almost otherworldly, version of Let’s Go Crazy, which, naturally, I can’t find online, and I’m OK with that. Here are some articles from the Los Angeles Times, plus my source for an appropriate sign on a Tulsa, OK church. I will probably revisit this topic once I get over the shock and sadness.

I never watched Everybody Loves Raymond very much. But I was a huge fan of actress Doris Roberts, in dozens of TV appearances, plus her regular gig on Remington Steele. But she was tremendous in her single appearance on the first season (1982) of St. Elsewhere, as a homeless woman taking care of another mentally ill homeless man played by James Coco; they both won Emmys for the roles. I have the episode on DVD and need to watch it again.

Mom died five years ago

I felt that was operating on two levels simultaneously.

The interesting thing for me about my mother’s death five years ago today, from a strictly sociological standpoint, was the fact that it, in some fashion, took place in this blog.

I had written a post on Sunday, January 30 about my mother’s stroke two days earlier, and my need to trek down to Charlotte, NC. But I didn’t actually post it until Wednesday, February 2, the day she died. I was there when it happened.

When I finally got back to what had been my mother’s house and was/is my sister’s house, that afternoon, I eventually checked my email. There were several comments on the blog hoping for my mother’s recovery.

Then Denise Nesbitt, the doyenne of ABC Wednesday, emailed me and asked how I was. I told her that my mother had died. SHE must have contacted several others because I then got a wave of condolences from people, most of whom I knew but had never met.

If I ever find the need to cry, reading the comments to that post, quite possibly the greatest number of responses I’ve ever gotten on this blog, will turn on the sobbing.

The next day, I posted about her death, then the actual trip to Charlotte (written just before her death), then, after a Super Bowl post I’d written much earlier, mom’s obituary.

Three days later – thank goodness I write ahead – Mom’s funeral program. A week later, Random Post-Funeral Thoughts. Finally, the first part of my monthly rambling contained more musings.

What was useful in the process was the fact that my niece Alex, Marcia’s daughter, did a ton of photo scanning, some for the funeral, which I used in the posts. MANY of these pictures I had never seen, and others, not for years.

All of this was very therapeutic for me. Someone wrote, early on, that I seemed “detached.” It’s more that I felt that was operating on two levels simultaneously, one as the person grieving, and one as the journalist, for want of a better term, observing the process.

Speaking of therapeutic, a couple of months later, I recommended the book The Orphaned Adult.

When we got back to Albany, we received flowers from the aforementioned Mrs. Nesbitt, which was incredibly sweet. I went to church that last Sunday of the month when we sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, which I’ve sung for years. But I can barely get through it anymore without crying, and it started that day when I knew, profoundly, that my mom, and my last living ancestor, was gone.

The Late Great Johnny Ace, and other songs

I have always loved the backstory regarding Lennon’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night.

I’ve written often enough about John Lennon, especially on his birthday (October 9), and on this date, that I was musing on what to write on this 35th anniversary of his death. You’ll see I’ve mentioned SOMETHING about John EVERY December 8 since this blog started in 2005, except in 2007, although it was more oblique in some years than others.

In any case, I found this link to Top 5 songs written in tribute to John Lennon. Four of them I had actually put on a compilation disc together some years ago, along with:

songs written by one or more Beatles but performed by others, e.g., It’s For You by Three Dog Night; Goodbye by Mary Hopkin; Fame by David Bowie
songs about the Beatles: Beatles, Please Come Back by Gigi Parker And The Lonelies; I Dig Rock And Roll Music by Peter, Paul & Mary
*even songs by AND about the Beatles or their members: Glass Onion from Anthology 3; Early 1970 – Ringo Starr; When We Was Fab- George Harrison.

The one tribute song from the above list I was unfamiliar with was Queen’s Life is Real (Song for Lennon).

The others:
Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny) by Elton John
I have always loved the backstory regarding Lennon’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night; its success meant John had to play at Elton’s MSG concert in 1974, which eventually meant a reconciliation between John and Yoko.
Here’s a 1999 live version of Empty Garden.

Here Today by Paul McCartney
When I first heard it, I thought it was a bit treacly; I’ve quite changed my mind. Certainly, by the time I watched the live 2009 NYC version, I was in a totally different head.
I wish that John and Paul had shown up at the Saturday Night Live studio back in 1975.

All Those Years Ago by George Harrison
George modified the lyrics of a song he had written for Ringo because the drummer thought the song was too high in his range. It made a lot of people happy that the song featured vocal contributions from Paul and Linda McCartney, as well as Ringo’s original drum part because it was a big hit.

The Late Great Johnny Ace by Paul Simon
This song segues from a tale about a singer in the 1950s to Beatlemania to a final verse about how he first heard the news that John had been killed. From Paul Simon’s worst-selling album up to that point. The Phillip Glass ending instrumental for strings, clarinet, and flute is painful mournful.
Here’s the original acoustic demo

The Right to Die and other topics

My mom was not the greatest cook, by her own admission.

More from Chris:

– what’s your take on right to die and why?

Literally, I could spend a week’s worth of posts on this topic. This is the very abbreviated version.

In 1998, I watched Dr. Jack Kevorkian make the case for assisted suicide for the terminally ill on 60 Minutes. “From 1990 to 1998, he claimed to have helped end the lives of some 130 willing subjects.” I thought he made a compelling case.

After he “videotaped himself injecting Thomas Youk, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, with a dose of lethal drugs,” he ended up in jail and ended up serving eight years in prison. I’m convinced his gaunt look allowed the moniker Dr. Death to stick.

Meanwhile, there was that circus of the Terri Schiavo case (1998-2005), which I needn’t rehash, except to say that the grandstanding about protecting life from Jeb Bush and congressional Republicans I found repugnant because it was so clearly a quality of life issue, the nuance about which they clearly did not recognize. This 2015 TIME magazine article suggests that overreach has set the stage for the current right-to-die movement.

But I had been thinking about this for decades. Long before health care proxies became the norm, I had a pact with a friend of mine in college. We agreed that if either of us were seriously injured so that the quality of life had been severely diminished, the other would sneak into the hospital, if necessary, and literally pull the plug. Glad we never had to test this out.

Of course, we make right-to-die decisions all the time these days, such as Do Not Resuscitate in hospitals, applicable when my mom died nearly five years ago. I thought the whole characterization of the Obamacare “death panels” was fascinating because surely, there ARE limits of what services any medical system can/will provide.

Guess I’ll pass on the my general philosophy of the American way of death and how it is related to mummification, and the afterlife, and the rational evolution towards cremation.

– do you ever carry on elaborate imagined conversations with people? If you do, has Facebook changed these conversations, like picturing posting something and the imagining the responses?

To the first point, sure, now and then. This is usually some wish fulfillment. I wish I had said THIS rather than THAT.

To the second, not at all. FB is such artifice to me. I can have a decent “conversation” now and then, but I find too often certain tropes that for me are conversation enders, involving the false comparable designed to change the topic, or the “that’s unimportant”, designed to do the same.

About 10% of the time, maybe more, I write responses, and then delete them before publishing. I’m just not as invested as I am with a REAL, face-to-face chat most of the time UNLESS it’s someone I know in real life, or have gotten to know well enough from their previous online interactions.

-if you could pick any writer living or dead to tell your story, who would it be?

James Michener, who would turn my life into the epic that it is in my mind.

– what do you consider the most creative time in your life, when you were the best at imagining things?

I could make the case for right now. I’m writing a blog post seven days a week. Three or four or five of them might be substantial. Moreover, I see the whole arc of the blog as somewhat creative. If I write X and you’re not interested, hey, maybe you’ll be interested in Y, which I’ll tackle tomorrow.

And blogging helps my thought process.

Other times: the second through sixth years of the current job, when I had to find ways to interact with SBDC state directors when they had to be sold on the efficacy of that. Or some period at FantaCo, not the first year and surely not the last, when I was editing magazines, doing the mail order, balancing the checkbook, and managing the staff.

– what simple device would improve your life that isn’t on the market?

All my thoughts and dreams going right to the computer in comprehensible English.

– what were your favorite meals when you were a kid?

My mom was not the greatest cook, by her own admission. So I don’t have this great pool of favorites. I liked Kraft macaroni and cheese, chicken cooked any number of ways, corn on the cob. We used to go out most Fridays and get fish from W.T. Grant’s department store; I remember liking that.

My father spent hours making spaghetti sauce, and so that was good. He also had the capacity to throw leftovers into some delicious concoction he called gouly-goup; only later did I realize he stole the name from goulash. He also made waffles with such panache that it was always enjoyable.

We had eggs a lot. Fried, scrambled, deviled, omelet. We all became competent making those.

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