Left to my own devices

Peter Lovesey has died . That name may not mean much to a lot of you. That's fine. He was one of my very favorite authors, though I haven't found many people on this side of the pond who've heard of him. I was at our local Barnes & Noble last night, and saw that they have four of his novels (though not his latest, which was published in December). He wrote over forty books, as well as dozens of short stories. He was prolific, but it never seemed to impact the quality of his work. Reader, I can't adequately convey how much enjoyment I got from reading Peter Lovesey's work. While writing is something I've liked to do since I was 8-years-old, reading is something I've always been more particular about. There are a lot of books I've started, then abandoned because I just couldn't get into their rhythm. You see, the style has to be just right. It's not easy to explain, but a few authors who have consistently been on go-to status for me are: P.D. J...

  "Be happy while you are living, for you're a long time dead."                                                                                          ---- Scottish proverb My dad died from pancreatic cancer 27 years ago today.  This year has been a bit different when thinking about his passing. It isn't because I miss him -- quite the opposite. It's because I realized, as the years have gone on, how I think about him less and less. Lewis is no longer present. That may sound like an obvious thing to take note of regarding someone who's been dead for almost three decades, but it's true that our deceased loves ones often continue to exist within our own psyche. We tend to think of them often, and it doesn't take much...

Well over twenty years ago, I made a mistake. It wasn't my first, and it certainly wasn't my last. This one, like so many others, was well-intentioned. It also resides completely within my own heart and mind. It is something which has been part of my psyche since the late-nineties, but today it envelopes my thoughts to a fairly large degree. Allow me to explain. My dad died twenty-six years ago today. He knew he was sick for almost the last year of his life. During that time, I would visit with him, in an attempt to finally connect with him on a deeper level. It didn't really happen, and there was a lot of anger and resentment on my part about it for a long time, but now I'm glad to have at least made the effort.

My dad, Lewis, was born on this day in 1945. He would have turned 78-years-old today. As regular readers of this blog may know and remember, he died aged 52. Too few years, though more than some. While it's true that sometimes I give March 21st a brief, passing thought (or have even forgotten its significance altogether), this year it looms more prevalent within my psyche, probably because of my mom's recent passing. So, here I am, writing another blog post about my father.

It's been nearly two weeks since my mom, Sally Newman, died. I've certainly written in these pages before about friends, family and loved ones who have passed on, and want to write something about my mother in these pages that is truly about her - the life she led, and the life that is now gone - but for now it will have to wait. There's still too much going on in my head and in my heart to write something cogent about her. For the best that I could muster, you can read her obituary . I do, however, want to write about me. Specifically, about how Sally's death has impacted me. That may sound odd, or even self-centered. And it is. But, nearly all mourning is at least partly fueled by our own self-pity at losing someone we knew. It's the difference between, say, someone telling you that a random 76-year-old woman on the other side of the world that you've never known has died, and being told that your 76-year-old parent has perished. Our feelings tend to follow th...

There may come a time when some of us realize we may not live as long as we'd wanted, or expected to. It may not come as a "Eureka!" moment, perhaps more as a slow, steady registering of potential reality. I use the word "potential" deliberately, as none of us knows precisely what the future holds. Still, we can have a fairly good idea after a certain point.

We are born into a world and a universe that have existed for billions of years. While we don't yet know -- and may never know -- all the secrets of our aged celestial home, what we have uncovered so far is staggering. In the age of the Internet, especially, knowledge is at our fingertips. And, if trusting potentially sketchy online sources isn't your thing, then places like libraries have been around for some time. As we grow, and learn how to talk and read and communicate and learn, the history of the world is there for the taking. It is with a mild amount of perplexity that I admit to having taken all of this for granted for many years. I just... knew things, you know? Anyone with access to books, television and the Internet can know things. The entirety of our known existence is available, should we care to research it. And that's why, starting just a few years ago, I began to realize there will come a time when I won't know everything. That time will, of course, ar...

Barry Rowe has died. For some of you, that may mean something. For others, you may be asking, "Who?" He was different things to different people (as most of us are). To me, he was, first and foremost, a teacher. Multimedia class. Centennial High School. 1991. That's where our journey began. Happily, it continued -- off and on -- over the next three decades, and his recent passing is deeply felt. Mr. Rowe -- he preferred that I call him "Barry," and was sometimes rather tetchy about it, but old habits die hard -- was a fan of old British cars and TV shows, MG automobiles and The Prisoner , respectively. He liked more than just those things, of course, but they are the ones that stand out to me.

  "There's a headstone right in front of you And everyone I know" - Vampire Weekend, 'Don't Lie' The passage of time is something that has long-fascinated me. It is deceptive in its simplicity. Some argue that "time" is a human construct. Perhaps how the concept of how we measure it is, but not time, itself. "Feet" and "inches" are simply contrivances of measurement, but there's no getting around that Person A, at what we term 6' 1" is taller than Person B at 5' 10". So it goes with time. "2021" is an identifier we created, but its placement in the continuum of time is certain. I've mentioned before how time is like a book -- all of it is there, the difference is what page we happen to be on. If the entirety of time is equivalent to a 1,000 page book, the fact that we, in 2021, are on page 300 doesn't mean that page 990 doesn't exist, just like someone in 1944 being on page 275 doesn...

There have been a few events during my life, some personal, some en masse, that have impacted my life profoundly. Their influence was profound, altering my perception of the world, and my life in it. I feel as though the current pandemic ought to be another one of those occasions but, honestly, I don't know what to think of it at the moment. There have been some short-term affects, but it is difficult to comprehend the long-term ramifications at this point.

A few days ago, Adam Schlesinger died from complications of the coronavirus. I'm not exactly sure why his death, amongst all the others , startled me so much. I'd forgotten all about his band, Fountains of Wayne, until learning of his passing, and couldn't even whistle one of their tunes. Perhaps it was because Schlesinger was 52, which is close (enough) to my own age? Perhaps it was just a culmination of the mounting death toll? I'm not sure, but it seemed to drive home the reality that this virus can not only infect, but kill. It cares not of class, race, religion, nationality, or age.

M y dad died twenty-two years ago today. He has now been gone for longer than I knew him. The other day I was thinking about how much of a factor time plays in the effectiveness of our relationships with people. While it is certainly important, I think it plays less of a role than we give it credit for. The bonds we forge with people can be made relatively quickly, their intensity dependent upon a multitude of factors -- time being only one of them.

I think about death, from time to time, and everything that flows from it; sadness, grief, contemplation, major and minor life changes, and life. I've known a fair amount of people who have died and, with all of them, there is a commonality: I don't like seeing them dead. As in, physically, I do not like looking at someone in a coffin, or simply looking at their coffin knowing they are in it, or standing over their grave, or next to their marker in a mausoleum. Indeed, I never go through life seriously contemplating what it would be like if someone close to me died. The only exception to this was my dad, who survived for ten months after his cancer diagnosis. With every visit, I studied him closely, silently, snatching a glance when he wasn't looking, thinking to myself: 'Right now, he's alive, with breath in his lungs and blood pulsing in his veins. His brain is functioning and alert. His voice works. I can talk with him. At some point, sooner rather than l...

My dad died twenty years ago today. I didn't think the 20th anniversary of Lewis' death would be anything more than a notation on the calendar, perhaps looming slightly more significant in the mind, given our propensity to fixate on the multiples of five and ten-year milestones. Cue my surprise this morning, when, on the way to work, I was listening a song that -- for whatever reason -- reminds me of dad, and I broke down crying. Had to spend close to ten minutes drying-up in the car before heading to the office. Wore sunglasses, even though it wasn't that sunny outside, to cover the puffy eyes. This morning, I thought about the concept of stolen time. The idea that someone dies at what we deem to be too young of an age, and how they really should have lived longer. In truth, we all die when our time comes, and it's different for everyone. When someone passes away aged seventy-five or eighty, we rarely think to ourselves how they should have had more years....

"Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting" - Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House Thursday, August 3rd, at 9:51pm, I was sleeping. It had been a long day that constituted a segment of an even longer week, thus, an hour or so earlier, I comfortably put head to pillow and entered a period of restfulness. Across town, a 53-year-old man named Gus Edwards was breathing his last breath, the victim of a gunshot wound inflicted earlier in the evening. The dichotomy of these two situations is something that occurs all too often in our world, and will, I fear, continue to do so for as long as humanity resides upon this earth. There is always a twinge of guilt that occurs whenever I learn of someone's premature death, especially somebody local. Awakening contentedly in my bed that Friday morning and reading the news of Mr. Edwards' death on my phone induced a momentary pang of remorse, coupled with gratitude. Remorse because it felt almost like an affront ...

"Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine." -Leonard Cohen  Do you ever miss someone? That's probably a fairly silly question, as most of us -- at some point or another -- tend to miss people we know. Sometimes the separation between us is death, or distance, or simply time. With death, we know we will never see the person again (unless you choose to believe in an afterlife and a sort of spiritual reunion). With distance, there can be the occasional get-together, but it is rarely satisfying on a permanent level. Separations by time (waiting for the work-day to pass) are much easier to bear. Of course, there is another reason to miss someone, to have their absence stand out in a peculiar fashion. That reason is the rift. This one hurts perhaps only less than death as a reason, though maybe even a bit more. There's something pervasively sad about a human relationship halted in its tracks due to em...

My father has had three funerals. The third (though perhaps not final) one, was last night. In reality, Lewis died in 1997. Cancer. Aged 52. He had a real funeral. I was there. The next two funerals occurred only in my dreams, yet they seemed real at the time, and their impact during the waking hours was keenly felt. You see, during the intervening nineteen years, Lewis has come back to life in my dreams, many times. It is more than simply having a dream about him. During these nighttime images, it is noted that Lewis shouldn't be there, that he died of cancer and is resting six feet under. How, then, could he be alive and, seemingly, healthy?

It was October 1998, and some friends and I were on our way to Peoria to 'the boat' (aka gambling). The alpha friend was driving, I was riding shotgun, and we'd picked-up a couple of acquaintances in Bloomington-Normal, and were on our way. It was the early evening, and we were all looking forward to a night of fun and excitement. Unfortunately, we had a bit more excitement -- however brief -- than we'd bargained for. There is an interchange to navigate, northwest of Bloomington, to head toward Peoria. While by no means a difficult interchange, if you're not paying attention it is possible to almost miss it. This occurred on our '98 adventure and, to compensate, our driver swerved over to the exit lane, crossing in front of two vehicles (including a semi), and I remember shutting my eyes because, if I was going to die like that, I didn't want to see it.

Reading Matt Zoller Seitz's remembrance of his wife , Jennifer, on the tenth anniversary of her death, filled me with a sense of dread, sadness and anxiety. Despite having read Matt's reviews on RogerEbert.com for years and being aware of the books he's written about director Wes Anderson, this was an aspect of his life of which I was unaware. I felt sadness for his loss, even though it is now a decade old. The dread and anxiety crept-in because such a read will invariably make one reflect on their own life situation and think, 'Oh no, what if it happens to me?!' Ashley & I will have been together sixteen years this June. First and foremost: if anything ever happened to him, I would be devastated. Of that, there is no doubt. It's not something I dwell on, though I do think about it perhaps more than I should. Every time he drives to work, or even goes off to the store on his own, I hope he comes back. I've known people whose spouses have died in...

It was years ago, probably a decade or more, that I first saw Andy Bendel. Sitting in the audience of the darkened Station Theatre, I was enjoying the production of Deathtrap , and especially the performance of one of the leads. This would have been Andy. Having watched the Christopher Reeve/Michael Caine movie, I was pretty familiar with the plot of the play, but it still managed to mesmerize. A lot of that was down to Andy. Then there was the classic farce Charley's Aunt , also produced at the Station Theatre. There, Andy played a butler, and nearly stole the show. He did so much just by standing there, raising his eyebrow. Everyone else on stage was great. It was a wonderful production, full of energy, and yet through it all my focus kept coming back to Andy's performance of the staid butler, very much the (extra) comic relief.