Category: family

Starring: Ralph (Grandpa), Kent (Uncle), Craig & Gerry (Dad & his wife), Holly (Girlfriend) & her family, Speck (our dog), and Matty (Ralph’s dog).

Categories
family life

Kenette Happensack, RIP

Ben, Karla, jae, Kenette, and Holly on Independence Day (US)

February 14, 1956 — February 18, 2026

The following is a lil speech i wrote to read at my mother-in-law’s funeral.

I first met Kenette and Tim sometime around 2004 I think. My dear friend Holly from work was their daughter, and i went to visit her in the hospital when she was recovering from a surgery. Not long after that i started dating lovely Holly, and they were just so warm and welcoming and sweet to me. Their smiles were ever present and so genuine. Not the kind of smiles i was used to getting from girls’ parents – i was always just some weird, hairy, rock & roll degenerate to most people so i was always used to seeing smile-until-it’s-over type smiles. But Kenette and Tim always showed me crinkly-eye smiles, the kind where you can feel the room get just slightly warmer and infinitely more comfortable. My name was jeremy then, but Kenette always called me “J.” for short, which i always loved because, for whatever reason, nobody ever gave me any nicknames before. At least not the kind you could say in a church.

In time, my sweet Holly and i got married, and Kenette and Tim were there, and my favorite photo of them is from our after-party at a restaurant in Columbus. They just looked so sweet and happy and satisfied. It’s my favorite because you can see the kind of smiles i was lucky enough to have gotten used to seeing.

Sometime during the pandemic, like a lot of other people, i had time to examine my life and how i see myself in the world. I come from a long line of woodworkers, and through a process of whittling away whatever i wasn’t, i discovered that what was left was, among other things, a non-binary transgender person. For those who might not know, that just means that i don’t think of myself anymore as the boy i was raised as, but as someone with both masculine and feminine traits. For me, i just prefer to hang out on the women’s side of the world more often than the men’s. Anyway, at that time, Kenette was already post-cancer and was having some memory issues, and so she had moved in very close to where Holly and i lived.

So when i started dressing more appropriately for my own self-image (which is to say, way less appropriately), and wearing makeup, i would come over to her apartment to visit, and we’d always have a grand old time, watching weird movies and listening to wild rock music. Over time, it occurred to me that she never said a word about the way i was changing. No questions, no comments, nothing. I was wondering if it somehow wasn’t registering! I started to crack jokes about myself, and she’d laugh, with her eyes all squished up and her smile as big as her face. But still nothing. I simply remained her J. At some point, it dawned on me: she was always like that. She’d always had good friends from all walks of life, all skin shades of human, she always hung around gay people, and she never had anything to say about any differences. There never was anything “different” or “less than” or “unusual” about anybody she ever met. Just people. Her only interest was always just in people to fill her heart with. More people for her to hug and love and share her life with.

I believe in a sort of memetic theory about identity and what lives on after we are gone. We are all personalities. Our bodies, they can be anything – any of us could have been born into any other body, and we’d still be exactly who we are, because it’s our personalities which define us and create our identity. Everyone here has a personality made of things we’ve taken from others before us – mannerisms, turns of phrase, the ways we walk and laugh and leave behind our own bits and pieces for others to pick up. We all have some part of Kenette within us. This is how we live on in others when we are gone. Keep and remember and cherish what you have from her, and i would implore everyone to also keep her alive within you by having her open heart and a genuine love for your fellow human beings.

My name is jae, and my dear friend and mother-in-law Kenette was the very best person i’ve ever known.

Kenette and Tim Happensack at a restaurant after my wedding

Categories
family life

John-John, c. 2001 – 2020

John-John; my dear, deceased Chihuahua best friend

Today I had my best friend in the world euthanized.

We adopted him in 2008. I don’t know from what sad, terrible hell he came, but he had a bad case of PTSD the whole twelve years we had him. He was missing his whole entire top row of front teeth. He flinched so hard whenever a hand would suddenly come into his sight. Even after twelve years, he still expected the worst.

I think we only ever had to scold that boy maybe a happy dozen times in all those years, and he never got more than a firm pat on his little butt.

He and I didn’t really bond that first year or two. We adopted his little young wife Zooey with him, and she was gregarious and outgoing. Little John was bashful and meek. But over the years we grew closer together, especially after our first dog Speck died, and not long after that John’s little companion Zooey.

It would be an understatement to say that we were merely best friends these last few years. We were very, very close. He was my heart.

But he was very, very old, and he had become mostly blind and deaf, and his trachea was collapsing, and he had a mass pressing on his little lungs.

He hung in there for so long for us, but in the end, his little tiny body could only handle so much. He wasn’t having a very good time, and had even begin to refuse food. Unthinkable for him.

So today we let him go.

I am devastated beyond words. I am planning on drinking until my mind is gone.

Goodbye, Honey Bear. We’ll be best friends forever.

John-John and i say goodbye for the last time
saying goodbye forever to my very best friend

Categories
life Speck

Let me tell you about a dog who changed my life

“I don’t know if i want a dog. I’m still not even sure that i’m really over losing my first one yet.”

His name was Speck. We babysat him one day, twelve years ago. He was a character. Holly fell in love. I have to admit, i did like the mischievous little guy. So she talked me into adopting him from her uncle and his wife (her best friend).

He used to race around the house like a mad creature, butt held low for supreme speed. Once he managed to grab a french fry off a plate somehow, while racing across the sofa. He didn’t even touch the sofa as he arced across the entire length of it, from one arm down across to the floor. That was among the first of many hilarious misdeeds.

He did bite me more than a few times, even drawing blood several of those times. He also would destroy a lot of my things. He even peed on one of my guitars. He had a thing, especially, for socks. The things he would steal, he would jealously guard with no small amount of feral ferocity. I bled a lot for that damn dog.

But i pledged never, ever to give him up. Never to adopt him out or take him to a shelter. I knew nobody but we could be guaranteed to ensure his safety. Anybody else might drop him off at a shelter, or have him put down. I couldn’t have lived with that possibility.

Aside from being an evil little bastard, he was also a fucking Jedi when it came to snuggling. That alone was worth the sometimes fairly high price of admission. The way every inch of his tiny little rat terrier body would seemingly cling to every possible inch of one’s own. He’d bury his face in the crook of your arm, or you’d look down and he’d be nestled between your body and your arm, looking up at you from under your armpit.

He was so worth it. Damnable little beast of a dog. He was his own man, but he was fiercely loyal to us, too. The only thing which scared him was thunder, and then he became like a tiny little child who needed to be held closely, lest the monsters get to him.

He was our special little guy for twelve years – close to his entire life, and almost the length of my relationship with my beloved Holly. (When she adopted two Chihuahuas, and then later, a pug, he didn’t mind – although you could tell he really was meant to be the Only Dog. But he never really mistreated them. In fact he’d come to their rescue if they got into trouble of their own.)

He had his own Twitter account.

These past few months have been difficult. He stopped eating his regular food. We found out he had kidney disease. It became an arms race to find food he would eat before he’d begin refusing that too. He began throwing up a lot. He lost a lot of weight. From his normal 12lbs, he was down to about 7lbs the last we weighed him. These last few days he’d lost even more, and was down to skin and bones. He looked like a character in a Tim Burton animation. It was heartbreaking. Then he stopped eating even treats, and started struggling to get around.

Things had already looked bleak enough, and then this week he took a turn for the worse. He could barely stand, and wobbled like a drunkard when he tried to walk. We knew the damned end was drawing ever nearer. He was brave, though, and never once complained.

We all laid down for one last family seepybye last night. Poor Speck was so limp, so fragile, so weak. We made plans to wake each other up if one of us found him dead, which we expected to do. He could barely move. I tried my best to show him i love him with soft caresses but i just didn’t know if i was getting the idea across. A few times he kind of wiggled weakly, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to get up in the middle of the night for a jinka wa-wa (i’d relocated the water upstairs next to the bedroom to save him the trip).

I had a hell of a time getting to sleep. So did Holly.

Then a couple of hours into my sleep, i woke up to find him snuggled so sweetly into my arm. The classic snuggle, the one i had longed so heart-achingly for: between my torso and my arm, with his tiny little knuckle-head resting on my shoulder, throat on my armpit. The very best kind of snuggle for a last day of nightynight with a sweet little troublemaker we would never again get a chance to go sleepybye with. I was so happy and so sad. This is precisely what bittersweet feels like.

Unfortunately my sad bliss was interrupted later this morning when he threw up the most foul vomit i’ve ever seen. Food he hasn’t eaten for days came up. I assume. I had to do laundry. We had to bathe him. He did really well in the tub, but we only had a half-inch of warm water in there. After that, we swaddled him in mommy’s towel and laid him in a fresh bed again.

I’m home from the vets’ office. We took him in, hoping for the best, but fully expecting to wind up making that terrible final decision we’d been dreading.

They gave him an injection to put him to sleep, and sleep came heavy and quick. He was limp as a wet rag within seconds. We kissed him and stroked him and told him tender things about our love and admiration for him. Then they injected him with the lethal dose. He died almost instantly. It was absolutely devastating. I’ve bawled my eyes out all week, and now i’m far, far worse off.

My poor little pretty boy. I’m going to miss his beautiful big eyes and his cute little Snoopy-like butt-spot and his Popeye elbows and his black lips and his beautiful, beautiful big bat-ears.

My special little boy.

Goodbye, little mouse.

Collage of our dearly departed dog Speck
Our little mouse

Categories
family life

Dad, we needed to talk….

Dad at the Ohio Mars Society's 2008 State Science Day, May 10, 2008
Dad at the Ohio Mars Society’s 2008 State Science Day, May 10, 2008

Last Monday, after staying up all hours Sunday night hearing about how bad my dad’s health had slipped, and so quickly, i got in the car to make the two hour trip up to New Carlisle, to see him in the nursing home.

He was only there for physical therapy, because he’d been in the hospital the full week before, with pneumonia and a very high and erratic heartbeat. He was only going to be there for about ten days. It was going to be a step up.

Only it wasn’t. I think, him being familiar with the place, from a clown’s perspective, it freaked him out to find himself there. Then again, he had wasted away and was down to around 130-140lbs. He couldn’t eat anything. When i saw him the week prior, he was alert and talkative, but rail-thin, and ate only a few thin slivers of yogurt.

So i get there. I pull up, and try to remember where the front door was to the place (around back, more or less). I walk into his room and his wife is there and she’s not looking real happy and he’s not looking real good at all. He’s struggling and trying to move around, while rasping out vague syllables. The syllables weren’t too vague; they made the following sounds:

“Help – help me – help me – help – help me – help”

Talk about horrifying. No, you really had to be there. To hear your father say that, in that way. Like this frightened, helpless, frail, incredibly vulnerable creature. It took the wind out of me.

I won’t get into the politics of ambulances and which hospitals they steer towards here, but that’s what happened next, after all the “uh, well i mean i don’t know i mean… what?” about the question posed by the nursing home staff: hospice care? Or hospital? (Strong emphasis on the former – but it all depended on how he wanted to be treated should the worst happen: full code (rib-cracking CPR and all), or nature-plus-nice, soft, warm, billowy opiates.)

So we get to the hospital, and he’s kind of vacillating between the desperate, sad rasping for help and laying calm and relaxed (they gave him sedatives, but not much, since he needed oxygen badly – his CO2 was dangerously high; he’d come in with ~100 mEq/L, versus the 30 which is normal… they were able to get his down to around 50).

His wife is there and her sister, and we’re all really quiet and just trying to keep him calm and be there for him, and lobby for whatever moisture he might be allowed to have in his mouth. (When we could understand him, it was usually him asking for water.)

Pretty quickly, he became much more difficult to understand. I asked for paper and pen for him, and a staff member brought us a clipboard with blank pages and a pen. I asked if he could write what he was trying to say, because between the space-chimp oxygen mask and his dry throat, he was just too difficult to understand, i explained.

This is what he wrote. I quickly uploaded it to Facebook to crowdsource a translation, although i wasn’t able to check back until much later.

Hours of this sort of thing went by. I was going crazy. I don’t really know his wife that well, and had only met her sister a couple of times. But more than the terrible awkwardness was the horrible reality of my father’s situation. Around 5:30 i asked my girlfriend if i could come pick her up from work and take her to the hospital to be my emotional support during these harrowing hours. I assumed that, although he looked like he could make it a few more days, maybe, he might not. I needed her there with me. I am thankful she agreed. But it would be at least another hour and a half of driving before i could get back (he was in Dayton; she in Cincinnati).

I took too much time. Not long after i got a text from his wife that he had been moved into a room in the ICU (preferable to the ER), i got another text from her: “Jeremy, Craig is gone.”

The relationship between my father and myself has rarely been what anyone might rationally call “normal” or “good.” He was never around. Being gone was always the baseline. I pined for that man throughout my whole childhood… but he was always either in another city far away, or (as i’d come to find out later) in jail, or crashed out in somebody’s apartment, boozing, or living under a bridge down by the river. You might be able to imagine the top of the iceberg of words we never exchanged. You might. But that would be as a photograph compared to the real thing.

That iceberg has risen now and the god damn thing is crushing me. Although i tried to comfort him by telling him how cool and spacey his oxygen mask was, and by holding his hand and stroking his head and touching his shoulder, and although i did tell him i loved him, there was so. much. more. which i wanted to say to him before he slipped away.

Whoever said that crying for the dead was really just for the “benefit” of the living must have believed in an afterlife. As near as i can tell, there is simply no evidence which suggests that any sort of life after death is anything more than wishful thinking. Not to parrot Sagan, but it’s true. I don’t like that idea any more than anybody else would. But my dad didn’t deserve to die so scared, so helpless. He was so brave for the vast majority of his battle.

And he deserved to hear me say some things, finally. He’s gone now, forever, and he won’t be able to know any of this, and that kills me. But here’s what i think i would have liked for him to understand before we parted for the last god damned time:

Dad, i’ve been awfully hard on you. You were a terrible father, even though you were generous beyond your means. But no matter what resentments i harbor or how outspoken i’ve been about them; no matter how much rejection i’ve thrown at you as an adult, the fact is that i love you. I have always loved you. I never loved you any less, even when i hated you. My whole childhood was defined by my longing to be with my father – to be in your company. My most precious moments were when you were around, and my worst were when you had to leave (or get taken away by mean old bastards with guns and badges).

I love you, and i’m sure you kind of know it, but really: i love you more than you probably ever suspected. I needed you. I idolized you. You were the most important person in my life, absent or present.

And i forgive you. I forgave you long ago, actually. That much should have gone without saying all this time. Unfortunately, it has. And i should have goddamn said it out loud. I do, and i did, forgive you.

And i will always love you and remember you and, lastly and again, miss you terribly.

Craig E Jarratt with Ralph E Jarratt
Craig E Jarratt with Ralph E Jarratt

Categories
family life

Bon Voyage Craig Jarratt

careful-1Craig Edward Jarratt, aka Careful the Clown, aka Eddie Sehota, et cetera, blasted off for Mars the evening of Monday, May 19, 2014, after a protracted and spirited battle against lung cancer.

Craig was born in Denver, Colorado to parents Ralph and Paulyne Jarratt on June 12, 1948. As the child of an USAF officer, he lived in Germany, Morocco, Colorado, Delaware, Oklahoma, and New Carlisle, Ohio; as an adult, he lived in Wisconsin, the Cincinnati and Covington area, and many parts of Ohio’s Miami Valley, including Xenia, Fairborn, Dayton, and, again, New Carlisle.

During his lifetime, he was a son, a brother, a father, a friend, an accountant, an army recruit, a biker, a Mars Society volunteer, a scholar, a clown, a computer hacker, a Segway pilot, a UFO enthusiast; and a raver, a seer of visions, a painter, a piper, and a prisoner. In any event, he was often an overly-generous and deeply sensitive soul who alternated between being alarmingly smart, smashingly irreverent, and outrageously amusing.

Craig was preceded in death by his parents, and his brother Stephen. He is survived by his wife Gerry, his brother Kent, and his son Jeremy.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his honor to The Mars Society: 228 South Dutoit Street Ste. B, Dayton, OH 45402.

Categories
family life

Craig Jarratt has died

We haven’t got an official obit yet, but I wanted to put news out on the internet because I know my dad’s friends and fans are far and wide and largely citizens of the web. My father Craig Jarratt, aka Careful the Clown, aka Eddie Sehota, et cetera, longtime Mars enthusiast, died in Dayton, Ohio the evening of Monday May 19, 2014, after a protracted and spirited battle against lung cancer.

Categories
family life memories

Why your religion is none of my damn business

I was raised as an ordinary kid in a family that didn’t really attend church every single Sun-day but still did so frequently. My friend Mark Carper took me to an anti-rock & roll preacher sideshow at his church, the Colonial Baptist Church in the hills to the East of Nuke City. It was through that incalculably bizarre experience that i came to accept Christ the Redeemer into my heart, lungs, knees, ears, nose, and throat. I even destroyed some of my favorite LPs.

Later i became more moderate.

My grandparents (she a lapsed Catholic, i’m not too sure what he was before they became Methodists), right-thinking they were, didn’t have me baptized, reasoning that i’d do it myself if that’s what i truly wanted. So at the age of 14 i cleansed my spirit like good old St. John (but with just a dab of water, not a whole damn river).

But the whole time i was a devout Christian, i kept asking questions of our Sunday School teachers: Why are there so many religions? How do we know that Buddhism isn’t the one true religion? If killing is wrong, why does god kill so many people all the time when he gets in his moods? &c.

I’d also heard about how the Beatles found enlightenment in the East, and wondered how it could be that those four English chaps could make records so vastly incomparably better than our own Pat Boone, he of such good moral standing and strong Christian faith.

By and by, i grew up, started smoking cigarettes and screwing girls and reading books of dubious moral value. I got turned on to pot and LSD and started realizing that there is so very much more to the universe than this nice, tidy little story we’re all told in Sunday School. I realized that there are simply cultures that are incompatible with the overall Christian blueprint, much revised over the centuries as it had become. It seemed to me that Christianity obviously couldn’t be the One True Religion it heralded itself to be.

Then my uncle Stephen found himself dying from AIDS. Why should god be so incredibly crappy to us humans? After he died, my grandmother noticed that his name was no longer printed in the church directory under our family’s listing. She was understandably incensed, having taken that as an indirect denial of his continued presence as part of the hallowed twinkling in the Lord’s eyes. She pretty much lost her shit over that.

That was the final straw for me as well. I figured out real quick that Christianity, at least in its current incarnation, is about the most phony fucking gig in town.

I explored elsewhere: first Wicca, then paganism and other namby-pamby New Age spiritualities, then North American Indian shamanism, then Taoism, then Buddhism, then Hinduism, then various forms of the occult, then Qabala Judaism (not the Hollywood crap), then more occultism (including Satanism). When i finally found Eris and read the Principia Discordia (i am now a full-ass Pope*), and dove into the Church of the SubGenius (where i am a reverend), i realized what i should have known all along: all religions are full of crap. As far as i can tell, they all DO point to the same thing: lies and self-heresy. I took from all this only two things: the concept of WILL (Crowley) aka INTENT (Castaneda), and the simple damn idea that you should be nice to your fellow organisms, whoever they are, avoiding stupid, fruitless endeavors like hitting them over their heads with rocks (wherever possible).

Having had an interest in science from a young age, i always valued truth over fiction, lies, fabrications, or embellishments. I still see truth as an unalterable thing: all things being measurable, one must have mass and either be at rest or in motion. Relativity does not mean that these values are subjective. Killing another human being cannot possibly be “wrong” for one person, but “right” for another. It is either right or it is wrong. The fact that individual humans can measure the same thing and come up with wildly varying answers only points out the flaws in each of our lenses. There must be a correct solution which is not invalidated by any other.

Therefore, i reject god in all its forms, because it makes no sense in the context of the rest of nature which we have studied for the same number of millenia and have a pretty good grasp of in contrast.

*actually, my title is CounterPope

Categories
family life Speck

New Dogs

Holly adopted two new chihuahuas, named John and Zooey. They’re three years old. They were rescued from abuse, which is always the best way to get a dog. Never, ever get one from a puppy mill, or even a pet store (which are usually supplied by puppy mills). Always rescue, and always get them fixed.

Until i get my Flickr stream integrated here, you can click on over to see them.

So far, Speck has been pretty kind, and puts up no fuss when they share his food. John, on the other hand, guards the community food dish zealously. The big fatass.

Categories
current events internets life Speck work

Not no news

  • Just got back from the Emergeny Veterinary Clinic in Moraine. I had hit Speck full-force in the eye with his latest favorite toy, a Kong tennis-ball dumbbell. He likes daddy to throw it and bounce it off the wall at the top of the stairs so it goes bouncing all the way downstairs. So i threw it hard, but he’d gotten a head start and i popped him right in the eye. No permanent damage, just blunt trauma to the eye – mainly just discomfort. He seems fine now, but we’re out $164 – which digs into our rent, unfortunately. I feel like such an asshole right now.
  • I’ve just started playing Anarchy Online. It’s pretty cool, and you can play the non-expanded version for free. I’m a froobie.
  • I’ve STILL got that damn cough. It’s just not going away. It’s a little better now, though. And when i take my antibiotics, which i’ve been on for a couple of weeks now, i get nauseated and sleepy. I hate this.
  • And i’ve been depressed as hell lately about my life. I’m trying so hard, but i’m going nowhere. I’ve applied at so many places in the last few months that it’s not even funny. I rarely ever seem to get any response. I’ve had a single interview in the last couple of months. It went well, but it looks as if that employer is going to be extending an offer to an earlier candidate.
  • My voter registration has FINALLY been processed. I’m all set to help Obama get elected to the Presidency of the United States.

And, if you haven’t seen it already, check out the Sarah Palin prank call:

Categories
family friends life work

What today was like

  1. Our mice have become entirely intolerable. Sometime during the night last night, one (or more) of them have somehow managed to Indiana Jones its way onto the kitchen counter, and ate a big chunk of our bread. Seriously, wtf? This, likely, because we are now even hiding our dog’s food lately, which i’m sure is not a popular decision with our dear little Speck. I have renewed my war with the rodents with vigor and prejudice. Our landlord must rectify this. Conditions are approaching unlivable. Failure: landlord.
  2. Oops, somehow missed a credit card bill. I’m not perfect, but i don’t know how i forgot that one. Failure: mine.
  3. Vectren, our fuel provider, informed us that our incredible $700+ bill was, in fact, incorrect. Due to – ahem – underestimations, it should actually have been more than twice that. Yes – read that again. We owe $1500+ for gas used over the past year, because of underestimations. I should have been suspicious that our water was, in fact, hotter than the surface temperature on Venus, and yet our bill was never unbelievably high. In fact, they had sent out notices a few times over the past several months, requesting an inside read off of the meter, but i, being an online bill-payer, assumed they were paper bills and simply ignored them. Thankfully, we have a year to pay it off in full. Failure: mine, with a little help from Vectren (hey, they had my voice number & e-mail).
  4. Holly’s friend from work called us “idiots.” Holly, apparently for putting up with me; and me for not going out and getting a gas station job months ago (believe me, i’ve been searching, but maybe i set my sites a little too high for this crummy town). Failure: my own. Though her friend’s callousness was a little over-the-top.
  5. Holly’s student loans have come due six months earlier than expected. Failure: apparently the lender, as she was quite clear that they would be due six months after graduation. It’s of course possible there was some nefarious fine print hidden away somewhere in obscure legalese.
  6. Holly is so very exhausted and just completely strung out from all these awful stresses, which of course now also include her newly-diagnosed diabetic neuropathy (her latest round of medical testing is costing around $1200). Failure: again, mine.

Final tally? Don’t even tell me, i already know.

So you can see how i might be feeling a little crappy about myself, and about life in general lately. Things have hit critical mass, so to speak.

Oh, i didn’t mention a few ongoing issues, like the killer mold that is growing in our bedroom, from water leaking in through the windowsill. Those things weren’t specific to today.

On the positive side, i did have [what i think was] a good phone interview for a corporation i’d actually love to work for. I’m really hoping for the best, but you never know in this town. Just in case, though, i’ve also applied for a couple of menial positions. We shall see how things unfold soon enough.

Categories
family friends uncategorized

Happy birthday to Holly!

Dear Holly,

You are ah-THE bomb.

Happy birthday, dear sweet Miss Thang. Hope you enjoyed your Freedom Toast.

Love & kisses,

~jer

Categories
family internets life uncategorized web design work

absent? i have been absent?

I have been absent for a few months, due to a huge variety of reasons. I’ve been having system issues. Some of these issues are ongoing and may eventually require me to reinstall my OS. Some have been resolved with new hardware and some vigorous kicking.

I’ve also quit my job and have been taking time to myself, to play and think and forget about the increasingly troubling world outside my immediate environment and all the long hours of often emotionally demanding work*. You could call it a complete mental breakdown if you want. I would not stop you. I was having a hard time getting anything done and was feeling very overwhelmed. I still have a hard time and am feeling overwhelmed, but i’m also learning to live forwardly, if that makes any sense, and to commit to fewer obligations so that i can focus more and not spread myself so thin. Another thing was that, after my grandfather’s death, i almost immediately jumped back into the mandatory 50-hour work weeks. I do not think that was the healthy thing to do. I should have argued for a leave of absence, or just quit then. I recently found myself re-grieving, and it was not fun.

Anyhow, all this boils down to the announcement that i will soon be overhauling this site yet again. This time, it will not be a radical overhaul, just an update of the back-end, and some cleaning up of the bloated CSS.

In other news, i have also recently begun to quit smoking. It is going surprisingly well, and i am down to just a few hand-rolled cigarettes a day.

On a completely separate note:
XBox 360 gamertag: transmothra

Lastly, my car is making weird klonking noises, so if i die tomorrow, please make sure my funeral and headstone are hilarious and completely lacking in both taste and respect.

*The next time you curse out or yell at a customer service person, remember that they are not paid particularly well to listen to people like you for eight to ten very long hours every workday of their miserable lives. Be calm, speak clearly, and don’t expect more than is fair to all parties, and things will get worked out.

Categories
life local Speck uncategorized

gah!

Ok. We found out that our landlord has definitely sold the place.

And i keep hearing his words from right after he took the buyer on a tour through the house: “I really love your dog… if you ever want to get rid of him, let me know, I’d love to have him!”

i am beyond frustrated.

Categories
family life uncategorized

black hole

it’s starting to really hit me. the initial shock and numbness is done with. today is somehow different. it was already really bad for me (it’s been a deepening pit of hell for 2 1/2 years now, with the absolute worst part of it starting just two weeks ago). but now it seems even harsher somehow. i feel like i’m trying desperately to escape the immense gravity of a black hole.

it’s sinking in.

hell, i’m sinking in.

someone i knew and loved, lived with and shared experiences and conversations with for years and years… dead. gone. forever.

no more talking. no more sharing. no more gestures or hugs or ironic smiles. ever.

i should point out that, as a devout agnostic who leans rather heavily towards atheism, i do not believe in an afterdeath of any kind. extraordinary claims, after all, require extraordinary evidence. so this is… difficult. to say the least.

life. gone. over. finished. done. kaput. a fire is snuffed forever.

this may be even worse than when my poor sweet grandmother died in 2001, if only because now, the other shoe has finally dropped. it’s like the floor itself has been pulled out from under me, and all that exists is empty space underneath for me to fall through. the bottom, as it were, has dropped out!

i am starting to freak out

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family life uncategorized

Goodbye

Col. Ralph E. Jarratt, USAF, ret.
Col. Ralph Edward Jarratt, USAF, ret.
August 4, 1920 — April 29, 2007
Best Friend & Grandpa

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family life uncategorized

terrible happiness

My grandfather’s back home now. We’re all, basically, on Death Watch. He’s home; home to die. I hope he knows he’s home, anyway.

He is now beyond being able to communicate. I remember this part all too well from when my dear sweet Grandma was at death’s door. It’s the most frustrating thing. You sense that they want something but have no way to determine what and give it to them.

Not only that, but it seems like my grandfather is thinking on an infant level. Maybe not; in a way, though, that would be preferable. I hate the thought of him knowing full well the extent of the damage to his verbal and motor skills. But the oxygen deprivation from last Thursday’s terrible ordeal virtually guarantees that he’s brain damaged.

It’s horrifying, and heart-shattering, and there’s not a god damned thing that anybody can do.

The poor guy has been through so much. To think that he’s laying there with his ribs all broken, just fading out, piece by piece… I’m completely heartbroken.

Sometimes, when he’s awake, he’ll just stare and stare at you. No words. No words. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know if he knows who I am. My bud, my lifelong best friend, my teacher and mentor… is he in there somewhere?

So I’m trying to get on FMLA so I don’t lose my job. After giving them 50 hours of every week of my time, I have earned a whopping $0.30 raise, which I do need, since Dayton-area employers seem to think it’s completely fair to pay a person with over 10 years of call center experience $9 an hour. Unfortunately, I have to prove that he was my legal guardian.

Much easier said than done.

So I’ve been digging through countless drawers and boxes of memories. Ever have a moment of terrible happiness? That’s seeing a picture of my grandparents, young and sweet and smiling, knowing that one is gone forever, and the other is leaving soon.

My grandparents raised me, so this has been exactly like losing parents to me.

But I cannot prove it.

I think that I am going to lose my job very soon.

What could be worse than that?

I know that I am going to lose my grandpa very soon.

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Grandpa’s pain

Today was another mostly shitty day.

My grandfather was due to be taken to Hospice at around 1pm. Getting up around noon, I didn’t want to show up at the hospital just to turn around, pay $2 parking (let’s remember that I really have no income right now), and leave again. So I waited around at home for the call to action.

Finally, at 6:30pm, he was moved. I could have been at the hospital the whole time with my family. So that was irritating, and now I feel guilty for something I didn’t even cause.

At hospice, he was settled in and Holly and my uncle Kent and I went out to get Subway. We came back and finished our food. I went out to smoke and came back to find Holly sitting in the dining area alone. We went to my grandfather’s room and this is what we found:

The door was shut. After knocking lightly, I opened the door and beheld four Hospice staff and my dear uncle standing around in some vague state of chaos. Here’s what was going down:

They needed to change the dressing on his wounds (he’s got pressure sores – essentially bedsores, having been in bed for pretty much the last 2 1/2 years), and had just given him morphine so they could roll him over to change them without excessive pain. Remember that he’s got multiple cracked ribs from chest compressions, when the doctors in the ICU brought him back to life a few days ago.

So the bones in his chest are probably killing him when they do this. They’ve got to be. I heard him loudly moaning. “Oahh! Ooh! Aaahh! Oooah! Ohh!”

So what’s the problem, exactly?

My father and, mostly, my uncle want him to not have morphine. My uncle made no friends in that room tonight. He was aggressive. I do not blame him for that, since many health care workers have failed us terribly in the past. Still…

I’m not at all certain what alternative they want, exactly, because my uncle tonight did not want to elaborate with me on the other side of that coin. He only wanted to emphatically and adamantly defend his position that Grandpa NOT be given morphine.

At the end, after trying to voice my understanding of things, he simply walked off. I told him: “I’m not trying to fight with you or anything, I only want to understand all of this.” This he would not hear.

He said that Grandpa made more noise when they were moistening his nose. I remember: “Dad, dad!” It was not as loud. It was not a horrifying sound. Not like when he was being turned over. “Ohh! Aaaah! Ooooh! Aaa-ooh! Ohh!”

He would not hear anything that I had said. It was Know-It-All vs. Know-Nothing. Many times, my voice goes unheard, or, worse, talked over. I am not to be taken seriously in any opinion that I give. This fact has been presented to me in practice many, many times in the past, and in the present. I’m just this perpetual sixteen-year old kid.

I used to wonder why I felt so inconsequential, so ineffectual. I have been treated like this all my life. One thing leads to another, and soon enough everybody else does it, too.

(I am a densely angry thirty-five year old man. I understand more about people, and about the way the universe works, than anybody else I know, including the blow-hards who only claim to know. I understand the great “mysteries” of life. (There is no mystery, only cause and effect. There are only events, in varying orders, at various frequencies. People behave according to their chemicals, steered by their recorded experiences.) I can do any task presented before me, and have proven this many times over. I am tougher than many. The things that I have seen and experienced, other people only emptily brag about. I am far more powerful than I let on – I am only weak because I am not usually brave enough to try.)

So I left, too. I walked right out of that place, and I drove home. I wanted to smash something. Had Holly not been in the car with me, I would have driven fast and crazy and mad. When I got home, I changed into shorts and a tank top and ran as hard as I could. I found an abandoned shopping cart and threw it to the ground: “chank!” I punched a street sign: “smak!” I wanted to beat the holy living hell out of something – to break something, anything into tiny little pieces. I broke nothing, and maybe that means something, or not.

The more I think about it – and why not think about it? What I think doesn’t matter! – the more I think this: “So what if he’s stoned out of his poor, already-crippled mind for a couple of hours, every other day or so?”

Think about having your ribs broken. Then think about having someone forcibly roll you onto your side. Think about the raw, cracked bone rubbing up against bone, under your meat. Surely bone, muscle, and sinew must all scream with pain!

One good thing: possibly the only coherent sentence my grandfather spoke today was when he looked at me and said, “I love you.” That was maybe the sweetest moment of my entire life.

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Tides

Ralph Jarratt and his pal Matty

Two and a half years ago, my grandfather suddenly took ill. I will never forget the late-night phone call. This was a couple years after his triple bypass. Up to that day, he was a completely normal person, as healthy as you’d imagine an 84 year old ox of a man to be. He’d forget words now and then, but was otherwise just like you or me.

He’d had leukemia for over thirty years, mind you.

After he took ill, he was never the same. Greene Memorial Hospital did everything wrong. Every little thing. They tried to put him in their nursing home (his doctor Taylor has a stake in that facility, FYI) over and over, where he only continued to do worse. They did not allow him the chance to get any better. And he didn’t!

In that system, he has lost his ability to walk and to swallow. Almost 100% of the life on this planet survives largely because of those two underrated skills. But what do I know?

His general health has declined steadily ever since. He became confused. So much that I am not 100% positive that he knows exactly who I am anymore or how we are related. He doesn’t seem to know his general layout in the universe anymore.

Which brings us to now.

Last Sunday night, he was having some trouble with breathing and a very rapid heart beat. We called a squad to take him to the hospital (not Greene Memorial). He had some pneumonia. He stayed in ICU for a few days.

Thursday: I was sitting with him, trying to make some kind of conversation (he’s a man of extraordinarily few words these days, alas), when he said “help me.” I got a nurse and she said that he was “guppy breathing” (exactly, more or less, what you would imagine a guppy breathing like) and he had some crap in his throat they found difficult to suction out.

His blood oxygen level was dipping below normal. When it fell below 85%, a doctor advised that they would have to put him on a ventilator, which itself could be fatal, due to his weakened condition and his low platelet count.

They ushered me out of the room to put the tube down his throat. There was an undeniable sense of emergency to the situation. I called my dad and paced around in the hallway outside of the ICU. About a half hour later, the doctor came out and informed me that they got the tube in him, but that his heart had stopped.

He had died. Died.

CPR was performed, which, par for the course, broke some of his ribs from the compression. He came back and was breathing with the ventilator.

When we went in afterward, his blood oxygen was well below 90%. He was not looking too good. In fact, he looked real bad. His left shoulder, I noticed, was gray. He made no movements or sound.

We all gathered around, my dad and his wife and I, plus nurses and doctors and a clergy woman. We had a terrible time. I cried and grieved and told him how much I loved him and how good he had been, etc. His blood oxygen bottomed out at around 45%. There would most likely be brain damage if he managed to survive at all, which was not likely at all.

He slowly became more responsive, and was eventually looking up and down with his eyes, and moving his arms. He’d take his arms and push them out above him, as if punching the air in slow motion.

I think now that he was saying: “God damn it! Stop talking to me like I was dying! I’m not dying, you bunch of assholes!” I think he was scared and more than a little pissed off.

He recovered from death. Unfortunately, little, if anything, can be done at this point, should his poor sweet old heart give up again.

This Sunday, a few days later, they took him to a room near the ICU, but out of it. His blood oxygen has been ~100% ever since a couple hours after he died. Later today (Monday), we will be taking him to Hospice for a week. After that, assuming he is still with us, he will go back to his home, where he has lived, off and on, for 35 years. He does not know whose house it is, but he will be home, with his poor broken ribs (which he has yet to complain about), where he can die, hopefully peacefully, and in relative comfort among his family.

I am 100% not ready for this. I love this man so much that it’s just killing me. He and my grandmother raised me. The flood of memories that assault me constantly is overwhelming. I drown in them hourly, revive, and drown again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My poor father, who has been taking care of him for the last two years, is beaten and it’s showing. I worry for him. He has beaten a lot of odds himself, and is a fine, good man. In sheer kindness, my father is second only to his dad – who is lying in a bed, unsure of his world, and dying.

The floor is dropping out of this family. There are no more kings or queens in our domain; only two princes and a minor count. We are haphazard and spent, our empire having fallen to dust.

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family life uncategorized

the long goodbye…

spent something like the last 20 hours in the ICU. grandfather: “help me” – phlegm, breathing rattley; some suction helped little. not oxygenating enough (level should be ~100; under 90 not good, under 85 bad – he was dropping to low 80s). concern raised: due to leukemia problems=platelet count low, trache tube could be fatal if laceration occurs. had to wait outside for several extraordinarily tense minutes. dad on his way. Doctor comes out, says they got the tube in his throat, but his heart stopped. he died. they revived him with CPR, breaking ribs (par). oxygen level bottomed out at 45.

my god how i cried and how i loved.

that fighter, that ox, that superhumanly strong man – his vitals are god damn near normal and have been for several hours. that is exactly like him, too. i hold no great hope, though.

need sleep now will return to hospital later.

you=regret nothing starting now!

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family life uncategorized

My Grandfather’s long boat, sinking downly

My grandfather is exhibiting end of lifecycle signs. My dad told me last night that he’s been having some rapid breathing episodes, among other things, which some nurses have agreed are signs.

Signs never have good news. It’s always warnings, bad portents of some sort. “Don’t come here,” “Ingredients: poison,” “Keep away,” “Bad juju involved,” “No more running over retarded children allowed,” “The end is nigh!” and the like. You never see a sign that says “Today is not so bad when you think about it, is it?” or “Welcome invaders!”

Last night we had him ambulanced to Grandview for uncontrollable bleeding around his feeding tube and congestion, which the hospital now tells me is pneumonia. My work is probably not going to let me take any additional time off, but we’ll just have to wait and see. My grandfather was my primary father figure in childhood and until he took off later on, raised me with my grandmother, who died about six years ago now (i was there when she left).

Between being overworked and working over to compensate for the expenses we have with an uninsured diabetic, Holly and i have not been able to be around my grandfather much. On my days off, i have been taken over by an unshakable funk which prevents me from leaving the apartment, much less going over there. Plus, there’s some guilt and shame for not having more time off to help my father and grandfather, and the general weird vibes re: his caretakers, who are all very nice; it’s just that i really wanted him to have licensed health care professionals, from an agency, people who could take shifts so nobody would have to sleep on the job – but we’ve had so many complications in that department. So there’s a lot of complicated feelings swirling around within me, not the least of which is a deep, deep feeling of regret for not having spent more time with him, especially back when he was more coherent.

One last thing: it’s been utterly, utterly heartbreaking watching his health decline. He is so incredibly skinny now. I mean you could wrap a single fist around his thighs, for fuck’s sake. I’ve always known him to be this big strong powerful (and cogent) ox of a man. Now he thinks it’s 1975 and he’s not sure what the President’s name is, and looks as frail and helpless as an infant.

These next few weeks are going to be pure, absolute hell no matter what.