One more class next week and the semester is over. Grades are due May 15.

I had a wonderful night of sleep two nights ago. It was cold and that helped. I had a dream with my father in it again. It was two glimpses, just brief snippets. In the second snippet we were watching some Chevy Chase or Bill Murray comedy -- can't remember which -- also not an actual movie, an imaginary one. He was enjoying it, but after a while he stood up and said "I'm going to bed." I responded "it isn't even up to the good part yet" but it didn't make any difference.

Last night was cold again, and I slept horribly. So much for the temperature theory! My mother got a second stent today and it was on my mind. It went fine and she's already home.

Gary would be 59 tomorrow.

Full disclosure: I have been annoyed about the university's mascot change to a cropped-ear, mean-looking Dane, and as a result I have not donated since the image was revealed. I'm not a sports enthusiast, but I would be outraged by this even if I was a fan AND did not care about animal cruelty. What a weasel response - playing the victim. Ever heard of taking responsibility? I agree with this completely. Bravo. Ever hear of transparency and accountability? Last post I mentioned my trials with a class this semester. Part of the reason is a student associated with this team who has done nothing in class and blew it off presentation day. Student had zero involvement with this scandal AFAIK, but I wonder if it has something to do with the slacker behavior? I don't know because student is MIA. It's certainly no excuse, but regardless, it makes me even more pissed off. /end rant

14 weeks.😢

April 13 would have been my father's 95th birthday. When things were "normal" (whatever that means), we'd have had a gathering to celebrate another milestone year. Instead, my mother was in the hospital from heart issues (she had a stent put in on Thursday). 

My father was a demonstrative person. Today I was remembering that for the past couple years, he would take my hand and put it to his cheek and then kiss it whenever I arrived or left. He did that to anyone who would permit it. It's a very dear memory.

The weather has remained cold and today feels especially "Marchy." That's what Elwyn would write in his diary about days like today. Such a wonderful image, I don't think I need to explain.

I have started to read the second book in Moody's Life After Life trilogy. I think I may have read it before. I am fairly sure I have never read the third book in the trilogy, which I will read next. 

The semester will soon be over and this semester it's my graduate class that is trying my patience. They are all adept at google and searching so I can't share more, but it is very irritating and stressful.

4.5 weeks ago I drastically changed my diet. No sugar (I am an addict), no simple carbs (not too bad except for sweets), and somewhat unintentionally, I cut down on dairy, but didn't eliminate it. I've been 98% compliant, even yesterday on Easter. It wasn't making a difference in how I felt until recently, and I think I do feel somewhat better. I didn't do it for this reason, but I have lost about 10 pounds.

 I had an amazing dream last night. My father was in it. He was old, looked about like he did for the past 10 years or so. He could walk and talk and make things! We were at a house, in a big, roomy, bright kitchen. A one car garage was off the kitchen, and some delivery men were unloading supplies, because the house needed some modifications. I am not sure whether the house was his or mine or someone else's.  My mother was there, as was Bob, for at least part of the dream. We knew my father had died, but he was back. He was sitting at a bar in the kitchen. My mother was taping Christmas cards to the wall near the bar. She already had a lot up, but after my father died, she received a lot more, and now that he was back, she was adding them to the display. A boy came over to work with him on Halloween decorations. They were working on a big cardboard box that was kind of like a coffin. In the dream i didn't specifically identify the boy, but after I woke up I thought it might have been a nice kid who was in the first year of our faith formation class in 2012-13 that another boy in class picked on. A friend of Bob's and mine that we have not seen in a few years was coming over for dinner, and my father finished the decorations and said he had to get dressed. Our friend came, and when he was in the bathroom my father grilled me about what he did for a living, whether he was on drugs and said he thought the friend was strange. LOL! It was such a wonderful, realistic dream.

Twenty-nine years ago, on April 5, 1993, Mimmie died. I think of her often, daily in fact. But since I'm currently reading a book we extensively discussed when it was first published, she is on my mind even more than usual. I remember her telling me that she would think about her employers, the Kearneys, at night when she was in bed. They had died in 1970 from murder/suicide. She would envision their faces in the dark, not their entire bodies, just their heads. For some reason we both found that funny, and we laughed.

It's April. Weather is still fairly cold, but it hardly matters. I knew it would be a cold spring, and it won't be a surprise to me if it is a crummy summer. I am going to have a hard time this month. When the world was "normal" (whatever that means), preparations would be underway for celebrating my father's 95th birthday in two weeks. 

I finished "Hello from Heaven" and learned that they interviewed 2,000 people over seven years. I am now reading "Life After Life," which I first read when it came out in the 1970s. Moody is the best writer of all the authors on this subject that I've read recently.

 One year ago today, sweet little Rosie died :-(

I got a new Kindle and I am happy with it. I can read at night again!

11 weeks :-(

 A couple days ago my Kindle keyboard stopped working. Sniff. I bought it in September 2011 as a gift to myself for my 50th birthday. I looked at new ones and learned that I am going to be disappointed because features I love have been discontinued. Bob said I could have his old one (he has a Fire which he prefers and he is not much of a reader anyway). It isn't a keyboard and won't fit in my case, but otherwise it is the same as my broken Kindle (screen size and buttons to turn pages). I have a Fire and a smart phone -- not to mention several computers -- but the plain Kindle served a different purpose. Last night I tried to get my Hello from Heaven book on Bob's Kindle without success. When he got it, he made an amazon account to set it up, because he was not an online shopper at that time. Since then he shops using my account. I was otherwise occupied today (writing a grant) so did not have time to troubleshoot. It's a minor annoyance but I am pretty upset I can't get a new one.

I'm still reading the book about ADC, and naturally doing much thinking along these lines. I teach a lot of philosophical ideas in my classes, so debates surrounding materialism/realism v. idealism/spiritualism are right up my alley. I also like studying the subject of time: our modern conception of unidirectional progress over time v. cyclical v. chaos. Months ago I re-read (or actually listened to, since I could find an audiobook but not an ebook, and I am not reading paper) The Third Wave and enjoyed his mention of time during the Second Wave.

I'm working on a grant and loving it!

Spring ahead last night -- I hate that!

 Eight weeks. :-(

 I meant to include this in yesterday;s post, but I'll make a new one instead. The hospice nurse who came in the middle of the nigt when my father died had the same name as my uncle - my father's brother-in-law, who was very, very dear to him.

I am currently reading Hello from Heaven: A New Field of Research-After-Death Communication Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal. It's a qualitative study. The researchers interviewed a large number of people all around the United States about their After Death Communication with friends, relatives and colleagues. I haven't gotten to looking at the precise numbers, but I will if it is in an appendix (not sure yet; one of the few downsides of ebooks). Something the authors mention is the social stigma surrounding ADC. It is not a rare occurrence in our own society, but most people don't talk about it because they feel inhibited by skepticism or they are afraid of being labeled a nut. Even a lot of religious believers aren't accepting of ADC. In many other cultures, ADC is embraced as normal. 

As I have written a few times, when I was a teenager I did a lot of reading on the subject of life after death, and talked to Mimmie about it many times. From the Hello from Heaven book, I learned that having a compact, as we did (I will contact you after I die) is not uncommon. I have also discovered in the book that being contacted during a dream, as I was, is a fairly common ADC method. I wrote several posts ago that based on this, I am hoping to have a similar dream featuring my father.

I have had two glimpses in dreams, but I wasn't sure whether either were true ADC or a figment of my fevered brain. In the Mimmie dream, I woke up convinced it was her ADC promise. It was so vivid and real, and the message so clear, detailed and nuanced. The first glimpse of my father was a very quick, fleeting image. I couldn't see him too well, but I knew it was him. We were dancing. I was wearing a purple outfit that I recognized. I remember how much I loved it. The second glimpse was a little longer, although not by much. I was looking out of the sliding glass door in Samsonville. There were a bunch of people in the yard. My father was standing next to Marty. It was noisy, and he was staring straight ahead, not looking at me. I was yelling "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" But he couldn't hear me. Suddenly he did! He looked over, our eyes met, and then the dream was over.

The dancing dream was not too long after my father died. A couple of weeks ago, my nephew sent me some links to videos he has converted from VHS to streaming. One is of my MPA graduation party in 1991 at my parents' house. The number of guests who have now passed away is startling. My nephew texted that he hopes the party is what heaven is like. That day I was wearing the purple shorts set I had on in the dream! At one point, I danced with Bob; I remember the winter before, we had taken ballroom dancing lessons. I did not remember or think about any of this before watching the video. Did I pull the party out of the recesses of my mind, and the dream was a coincidence?

I read one chapter per night from the book. Yesterday's was about contact through animals, plants and inanimate objects, sort of the "pennies from heaven" idea (which I've always viewed as a little too Reader's Digest for me). I think about my father almost constantly, and he is the first thing I think of when I awaken. Usually I realize I didn't have an ADC dream. This morning I went downstairs to the bathroom and thought, St. Jude, God, Daddy, send me a sign that all is OK.

I came out of the bathroom and sat down at the table. Usually Bob brings my mail to me while I am in my office, but yesterday he put it on the table. I didn't notice it before I went to bed. There were two pieces, one was a fundraising appeal from MHHS, and the other was a letter from someone whose name I didn't recognize and my address was in handwriting. Unusual. I opened it, and pulled this out:

On the flip side it's a brochure from JW, and there was a hard-to-read handwritten letter combining boilerplate and personal information accompanying the brochure. I am not at all interested in that religion, but I was pleased to get the ADC. Bob says my father would find it funny.

Today is the 20 year anniversary of this blog. It is also four years since Uncle Bud died. And -- yesterday, my father was gone seven weeks. Years ago bloggers would write up reflections about sharing a journal online on the annual "blogaversary," and sometimes I did too. I wasn't consistent, and many years I forgot the milestone. I don't feel much like reflecting today, except to note that blogger has been an extremely stable free platform for keeping this journal.

The last words my father said to me were "shut up." That was as I was leaving on Sunday, January 2 -- a week before he died. He had not been awake much that day, and he had not been able to speak well, but those two words were clear as a bell. 

Shut up is not something I associate with my father or mother, it's not a phrase either barked at me as a kid. Somehow, it always had a tinge of vulgarity about it and they didn't like us saying it. 

On Black Friday 2020, I bought my father an Echo Dot so he could operate lights and play music. Because of his aphasia, it was a struggle to get Echo to consistently understand him. I created routines, after asking him what words he wanted to use. Through trial and error, he settled on "shut up" for turning off the Willie Nelson channel on satellite radio. It was something he could remember, say clearly, and because of articulating those two words every day, often multiple times, they stayed with him until the end. 

He said "shut up" to me on January 2 because I was reminding him to drink whenever the opportunity presented itself. He was dehydrated, and so I told him one more time before I left. He did not say shut up as if annoyed, but instead in his usual half-joking way, so it was funny and I laughed. But I knew he was serious -- he did not want to drink.

I had a few ideas for what I wanted to write about, but instead I wrote the prior post about the tie pin and eighth grade. I wanted to jot down here two things that my friend told me. First, when I initially told her that my father died, she emailed "there are not many words for timeless sadness." Later, in a sympathy card, she wrote, "the sadness will fade 'a little' but will be there. The memories will be there."

This enamel tie pin was in a small metal box with other old trinkets in my father's closet. I made it for him when I was in 8th grade. He was selling cars at the time.He was always meticulous about his appearance (or you could say vain), and had more fashionable tie clips, but I remember he did occasionally wear it. He was proud of our last name and his initials. In fact, if you bought one of our family's houses, it's quite possible you had to sandblast the fireplace to remove the letter "G."

I copied the above from my Facebook post, but a school memory has been triggered. In 8th grade I was "accelerated" in math and art. I'm not sure why those two subjects, and I don't know who decided. I like both, and I was good at math, but English strikes me as my "subject," especially at that time. My math experience was horrible. The teacher was an abomination. Today, he would be arrested, convicted and jailed. He'd be forever disgraced. I had him for both 8th and 9th grades and was assigned to his class again in 10th, but I told my guidance counselor I'd drop math entirely unless I was transferred out of his class. She was mostly inept, but she'd refused my request the year before, and she knew I was serious so she put me in a class with a competent teacher.

Donna was "accelerated" in art. I think that year we took the same two classes, enamel jewelry making and pottery. I don't remember there being any other students in enameling. I think it wasn't the teacher's passion - that was his photography class. Still, with few students, we were able to make a lot of jewelry. 

In pottery, the teacher freaked out after a couple of weeks, and was replaced by a young woman who was rigid. There were a lot of students in the class, because the teacher who freaked out was beloved, and basically allowed students to do, or not do, whatever they wanted. The class was bedlam after the new teacher took over; kids continued to do whatever they wanted, but now there was a teacher looming over the room, yelling constantly. This triggered Donna to act out, by becoming a vandal to the room and the other kids' projects when no one was looking (except me).

When I was a teenager the question of life after death really captured my attention. At that time, I read a lot on the subject: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross books (On Death and Dying), and some popular works, for instance Life After Life and The Evidence for Life After Death. I found a lot of comfort in that reading.

Mimmie and I talked a great deal about the topic. She promised she would let me know someday, as it was likely I would outlive her. The summer after she died, I felt the world was different; somehow less colorful. Oh, the grass was green and the sky was blue, but it wasn't the same shade or brightness or something. Then one night I had a dream. She was sitting there, as always, at the little table in her kitchen, but her mobile home had been transported to a stunning hillside, surrounded by hay and Christmas-tree sized spruce trees. We had tea. She was OK. I felt better afterwards, though I still think of her, and miss her, a lot.

Quite a few years ago, a friend gave me a book called Embraced by the Light. I was impressed by the book at the time, and even shared it with a friend’s father, when he was grieving the loss of his wife. I re-read it recently, and even though I still liked it, I was not as taken with it as I was the first time I read it. I am reading Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife and so far, I’m enjoying it. After I bought it, I learned he taught at Harvard and worked at MGH. How about that!

Due to the magic of the Internet archives, I discovered this story, Compost Pile:

So now it has been four weeks since my father died. Today I canceled the insurance on the van we bought him because the receipt for shredding the plates finally came. It made me sad. I remember he cried when he saw it drive in the first time, because he was so touched by what Bob & I did for him. He spent days thinking about getting a sign for it and what it should say, landing on "private ambulance." I teased him about wanting a big "G" for the door. Sometimes thinking about him being gone makes it hard to breathe.

On a totally different subject, the governor decided to pander to cretins, and announced she is lifting the indoor mask mandate tomorrow. She kept schools in place for now, but it is clear by her defensiveness that she will lift it in March. I guess she figures she needs every vote she can get, including the ignorant. Yesterday I was so annoyed by an email I received from my State senator urging me to sign an anti-mask petition that I dashed off a heartfelt note ripping her a new one. Not that it matters. Despite the CDC cautioning that it is too soon to lift restrictions, about eight governors did it anyway.

Tomorrow it will be three weeks since my father died. I often have the sensation when someone dies that I don’t want time to pass; that I don’t want them to move farther back in my life, away from now. Three weeks ago today I sat with him for the last time sometime before 7 p.m., gently rubbing his shoulder. He was asleep, or maybe that should be he was barely conscious. I carried on a conversation with myself, directed at him. He told me in the Summer of 2020 that he didn’t pray or count sheep when he was trying to fall asleep, but instead went through a list of car makes and models, trying to remember as many as he could. On Sunday three weeks ago, I asked him whether he was naming cars, and then I made an effort; Ford, Lincoln, Model T, Pinto, Taurus, Mustang, Toyota, Camry…I laughed and said that I wasn’t a car person and wasn’t as good at it as he was. I also told him that I’d hoped to have a 95^th birthday party for him. I mentioned that I thought it was likely I’d get the promotion I had told him about weeks ago. His face looked like it was smiling somehow. I don’t think it was my imagination.

On Wednesday January 26, the faculty voted unanimously with no abstentions to recommend me for promotion.

Daddy was imaginative. He created two characters, “Speedy” and “Good,” a pair of spiders. He acted out their antics with his hands. It was a moral tale, like most children’s stories. “Speedy” was the mischievous one; “Good” was well-behaved. It sparked me to make a version of Speedy and Good by gluing pipe cleaner legs into walnut half shells and drawing on faces with magic markers.

One of the most beloved memories is of the marionettes. The first two belonged to my sister Janette and brother Michael. Geppetto was hers, Pinocchio was his. I loved them, though, possibly even more than they did, although admittedly, they are dear to us all. As a kid, Pinocchio was my favorite book - the real story by Carlo Collidi, not the Disney version. My father would read a chapter, then work the puppets, acting out the story and other adventures, making up a dialogue between them. He even made a wooden puppet stage and other props for them; memory tells me he borrowed some of the furniture from Janette’s Barbie Dream House. I remember how I protested when they had to go to sleep in their shoebox home at night, to have their strings untangled the following day. Later, they hung from the pole lamp with the colorful hobnail shades, and so needed less untangling.

Over the years those two acquired some peers: a pair of Mexican puppets Michael got in California, and a spaceman complete with green light bulb head that my father made as part of a Halloween costume. The puppet who wanted to be a real boy and his woodcarver father expanded their repertoire and came to America, winning new fans among the grandchildren. In the company of the new marionettes, they adopted names like “Alan Jerkson” and made appearances on a cardboard stage that once was a washing machine box, taking part in a parody of a show on the Nashville Network.