Category: Essay

Heartache . . .

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

aheartache7Heartache . . .

That mysteriously deep thawing of hope; that dank, on-going, torrential rain; that ache which hasn’t surfaced in almost 40 years; that ache of loneliness, of silence, of early dusks and late dawns; that aching pain of your soul being wrung like a dishrag; bookends of despair and pain on either side of sleep; the torture of sobbing in a diner.

Heartache . . .

That frightening moment which descends like a parachute upon throwing the deadbolt; ascending the stairs and sensing a household hollowness; this isn’t my home yet I’m its caretaker; he isn’t a parent, he’s my brother.  But my role has changed dramatically: his transference of authority known as power of attorney (durable and healthcare) has eliminated any aheartache2mourning I may have expressed.  I’m his representative and to an ignorant outside world he hasn’t really disappeared behind the safety of managed care, but has grown taller by five inches.

Heartache . . .

This designation has robbed me of mourning.  Instead I’ve got to be as sharp as a tack, thoroughly abreast of medical and financial details, composed at all hours in anticipation of that dreadfully somber tone of the caller. I’ve got to nurture relationships at the bank, his current residential facility, his physicians, his pharmacists, his auto mechanic.  My sleepless burden, borrowing a term from football, a handoff. He’s handed me his life like a principal to a ripe substitute teacher mumbling, “Good luck being Mrs. Brown: they loved her and will see you as an interloper.”  Imagine being someone else, especially someone that enjoyed a circle of friends, someone that will be surely missed.  Imagine filling those shoes.

Heartache . . .

This was my description of Rick’s working life to a social agency: “As a route/sales driver he was on the road early enough to arrive at his first customer by 7:00 AM.  Most customers were dry cleaners and upon arrival he singlehandedly unloaded an unpredictable variety of items: aheartachecarpets and rugs averaging 100 pounds apiece; fur and leather coats (five in each hand).  All items shifted while en route so he had to crawl inside a sweltering cargo bay.  Several customers were located upstairs or downstairs, so he would carry these awkward and cumbersome loads up and down stairs. Rick made as many as 100 stops in a single day in all types of weather. Carpets were by far the heaviest single item of significant proportion. Hauling carpets required him to stoop, hoist the carpet onto his shoulder and carry it into the customers store.  Most items for pick up were thrown haphazardly on the floor.Rick was required to crouch down, grab heavy carpets or garments, and under their added weight stand, and “sling”them onto his shoulder. He carried them to his van good-naturedly through deep snow or light snow concealing ice; against heavy traffic in urban areas, and in the dark during the short days of winter.”

Heartache . . .aheartache6

My admiration for Rick has never diminished; for seventeen years he worked a “hard labor job” which often kept him on the road for eighteen hours. He performed his job with integrity, commitment, and an unwavering pride. He did something I could never do: for seventeen years, day in and day out, in blizzards, hailstorms, and black ice; in unrelenting heat, cloud bursts, and flooding; and one wild turkey flapping its way into Rick’s van, he never quit. Ever. That’s called honor.

Rick’s been transferred to a sub-acute rehab facility.  Here’s where you can send him your “Get Well” card:

Mr. Richard Didrickson
Mitchell Manor West Allis
Senior Living Community
5301 W. Lincoln Avenue
West Allis WI  53219
(414) 615-7200

Related articles

 

My Brother Rick (aka Dikes, Rich) Condition Post-Stroke

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 3 Comments

asstroke3Last Thursday, a few minutes past noon, I called my brother Rick in Milwaukee (it had become a ritual of sorts especially while driving), and he answered in an odd tone which gave me pause. He began to complain of escalating nausea to which I urged him to see his personal physician.  He failed to remember his physician or the terrible diabetic wound which almost led to amputation or his two-month in-patient hospital stay. I astroke1told him I’d call 9-1-1 and ask that he be taken to West Allis Memorial Hospital ( policy dictates patients be taken to the nearest hospital). However the paramedics discovered atrial fibrillation (fluttering heart beats) which alternately peaked and diminished and therefore paramedics informed me that they were headed to a critical cardiac unit at St. Luke’s Medical Center.

However, St. Luke’s didn’t have a bed open, so Rick was taken to Froedert Lutheran Medical Center. After tests and a CT scan the ER team began antibiotics to stave off a small area of pneumonia in his right lung.  Rick remained on the general medical floor until the results of an MRI showed he’d suffered a severe ischemic stroke (an obstruction within a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain) in the occipital lobe (at the rear of the skull and is responsible for vision). On Sunday afternoon he was transported to the Stroke Unit (one of just astroke2a few in the U.S.) where he was resting comfortably.

On Monday, June 18 Rick suffered a significant seizure which greatly diminished his short term memory and eliminated the peripheral vision on his right side.  I’ve visited and talked via telephone with him this past week.  The cadence of his speech has slowed, he’s practically immobile, he’s approaching clinical blindness, and finds difficulty in fundamental motor movements like holding a cup.  But as he told me earlier this week, “I ain’t going to be like this forever, you know!”

I’d like to ask that anyone reading this post to consider sending him a get well card.  I’m sure your sentiments would help replenish a hopeful spirit during difficult times.  For those of you who send cards, thank you; for those that haven’t, please reconsider.  Send your cards to:

Richard Didrickson
Froedert & Medical College of Wisconsin
5-NW Nursing Unit
9200 W. Wisconsin Avenue
Milwaukee, WI  53226

Related articles

 

My Brother Once Said, “My Life Was Determined By Another’s Lie.”

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

“A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”

 

513Rick willfully shouldered a self-imposed burden his entire life.  Unsettled by our Dad’s violent outburst’s (routinely targeting our mother), he began to peek behind, beside, and beyond our parent’s staid alibi about their colorless and urgent courtship which usually quelled curiosities. Except for one widow that pursued, with neighborly caution, my mother’s dire dodging. “It was simple math,” he’d once said, “Simple math and the ordering of month’s to quickly calculate the truth. He was proud of his steely pursuit, wishing there was a merit badge for exposure of parental lies. “Then suddenly,” he said, “the whole enterprise soured.  The recently decoded shameful and moral secret they’d disguised as hushed urgency, longing, and the mid-fifties moral compass was, in fact, his birth which occurred  five months after their City Hall nuptials.

It was then, at that inconceivable denouement, that his conception was the root cause of bout after bout after bout of unbridled and disgusting epithets often followed by a round of brutish, physical taunts which, my mother learned too late, that if you retreat to the broom closet or the empty cranny next to the refrigerator, you raise your arms to protect your face like exhausted boxers stuck in a corner. Fear and submission killed my father‘s blood lust as though he’d been fed a syringe full of Ketamine.  Oh, but those few and far between times when her self-respect outweighed her self-preservation, her repressed anger putrified to man-slaughter.  She charged at him, disgust followed by anger followed by critical injuries helped to ignore his devastating kidney punches followed by multiple precisely aimed and explosive back-handed slaps which buckled her knees; by now, in his cold eyes she’d lost any humanity and devolved into the recipient of his fully expressed hatred for her.

My mother’s marriage, a litany of lies: loathing thinly veiled as affection; irritation disguised as intimacy; and an escalating and violent blame for Marge‘s moonless flight with their three children through thorn bush and brambles, and following her husband’s business partner who liquidated their company’s assets that afternoon.  Later that evening my father received a brief call from Marge confirming that all three children were safe and in her care.  And sternly warned my father that if he pursued them, she’d kill all three of them rather than spend another minute with you, then abruptly disconnected the line.  It was then that my father accepted that he’d been abandoned, ruined, and penniless.  My father was incapable of keeping his promises, especially when it came to monogamy whether married or single. But worse still was his continued punishment of my mother for Marge’s inconceivable disappearance into the thicket behind their home. Marge later confessed that it was his barefaced screwing of the nanny.  Who, coincidently, was our mother.

Rick witnessed just one of those bloodsheds and cursed his responsible birth as cause for these vengeful and sadistic rituals.  So he heaved the imaginary and backbreaking potato sack stuffed with the rubble of our mother’s self-esteem and character; up to his waist, hesitated, then at once swung the unbalanced sack up to his shoulder while tucking his short ageless frame beneath the load like a tire winch. From there he strained and distorted and drove the shifting load skyward until his swollen knees snapped open like a toy jack-in-the-box and steadied his load . . . for the rest of his natural life.

Related articles

 

Rare = “$$$$$”

~ Harlan Didrickson

arareobject1rare: adjective

DEFINITION: exceptional, extraordinary, rarefied, recherché, scanty, unimaginable, few, admirable, A-OK, cat’s pajamas, commendable, cracker jack, exquisite, hunky-dory, meritorious, praiseworthy, superior, valuable, worthy, superior, 24-karat, elite, exclusive, exquisite, popular, precious, top-drawer.

I’ve never owned or bought or inherited or found or stole any thing that’s been classified, determined, researched, and stamped rare.  The arareobect2moniker rare is itself rare!  According to the free website, Rarity Guide (www.rarityguide.com), the nomenclature “Rare“ is far more than the number of units produced.  “Instead, we factor in many additional factors including popularity, demand, age and collectibility.”  On their website they stress educating the public and collectors about collectible objects.  The sobriquet rare is mentioned only when an object reaches the threshold of eighty-one percent (81%) to one hundred percent (100%): The most sought after objects in a collectible category.
Except in medicine where a condition or disease when codified rare indicates under-funded research meaning that the tightly budgeted, yet interested researchers exhaust their paltry budgets thus terminating further research and flatten the idyllic hope for a treatment long before it’s ever presented to the prudent pharmaceutical companies.
arare oject4
It’s simple: It’s unprofitable to manufacture a treatment which less than one percent (1%) of patients living with these diseases will be prescribed.
So, diseases are rare as well, but no one is a collector.  Now, what am I going to do with the four I have?
Related articles

 

The Time Spent To Read This Post, Equals The Time You Have To Save Your Life

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 4 Comments

Back in 2008 when the shit storm incinerated the first 20 years of my adulthood, I made an oath while dragging what’s left of a . . . of a bespoke walking stick through four inches of gray ash – some sizeable went aloft and rode a breeze – only to land in some other year; this oath was directed at loss, or better, surviving loss which is always, always more painful than the combustion of mortality which is hard-wired to flee extinction.

Appointed to this life: Two tiny, perpendicular scratches amidst millions of other’s noting everyone’s start and finish on (what we’d like to believe) linear straight-edge of time. And my time – time as living – a selfish amalgamation of loneliness, caution, exposure, intimacy, maturity, judgement, patience, learning, strife, letters, confessions, achievement, and the likely propagation of another generation or the unlikely dog-eared page noting a dead end by a period placed unerringly after the last letter of the last name annotating The End, A Willful Extinction.  The simple decision to stop production thus beholden to past generations, or, the decision of propagation thus bound to the future.

We’re putting a stop to this tributary of our bloodline; my older brother never purposely or haphazardly discovered the merits of fatherhood, and I, being of the gay-persuasion fell in-love when fatherhood and matrimony were simply off-limits; thusly denying my partner and I any marginal hope to have children.  My partner yearned to have a child, Jack (because I simply grew tired of our constant referral to “It”), but by the time the stork delivered to same-sex households, I, in all honesty, was too old and too tired and too responsible to entertain my partner’s fundamental need to nurture.  My father was well beyond my reach; that life, that engaging and interested life, was at least a decade before I consciously understood that I was bereft of any gargantuan, mitt-like hand to hold.  And that sadness burrowed deep, deeper than any other heretofore denial ever tunneled.  And honesty foretold of my family’s dearth in the health department by my adult-life diagnosis of a mental illness, a disease, not a sickness or an infection or a fever but a disease, not an alien landing, not a vampire, and not a plague, but a disease nonetheless. Mental illness is handled, not treated but handled by this nation’s body politic.  It’s a dispassionate and treacherous handling, like the negotiating cop that placated the felon’s demands until one, perfectly aimed .32 caliber round stops the demands. “They” know how to dilute the alleged discrimination; the mistreatment of patients in county facilities;  blaming us, the patients, for their on-going ignorance and antiquated seclusion as a “well-informed, empathetic, and public safety response” to the irrational and grossly illogical . . . blah-blah-blah. . . Um, hello, hello? (is this thing on?) mental illness is a disease as bona fide as cancer or chronic kidney failure (except mental illness lacks a “celebrity endorsement).

And yet, we’re not alone: patients-in-general have devolved into a 15-minute generic; that is, the disappearance of importance, the disinterest of ailments, suffering, and cause.  Today’s Western Medicine Patient has become an Accounts Receivable entry in the ledger; a doctor’s statistic of efficiency; appointment number 58.  We as patients have been reduced to a test result followed by a prescription or passed along like a troublesome foster child to a series of specialists and more tests and more prescriptions.

It’s a cold and alienating model of efficiency and profit, and we, the patients, the commodity are fought over by insurers and institutions chanting “To Hell With Life!”

Related articles