loss – Yearning for Wonderland

In Memoriam: Ethel Louise Russell

Sometimes bad news arrives without a hint of warning, during a comfortably pedestrian evening, after a glut of hash brown casserole and bacon. A terrible thought strikes you. And then, before you know it, you’ve confirmed it and everything falls apart.

I’d been worried about my friend Louise. She was back in Louisville, living on her own, getting more fragile. I’d said goodbye to her in June, took her out for lunch and to help her run errands, told her that Austin was the best place for me right now. She hugged me tight, twice, and let me go with tears in her eyes. If I am honest with myself, I knew then that I might not see her again. She was having more health problems, slowing down, but she had such an indefatigable spirit that I couldn’t even conceive of her not being in this world. Fast forward to December. I called her and got no answer, voicemail was full. I was mildly worried, but tried again on New Year’s. Same full voicemail message. It’s not uncommon for people to be absent-minded about their voicemail, but I was getting more nervous. I tried her cell phone. The number had been assigned to someone else. So I tried emailing her, convincing myself that people cancel their cell phone numbers for a variety of reasons. And then, and then.

I did what I probably should have done in the first place, exactly what I was afraid to do. I googled ‘Louise Russell Louisville’. It even popped up ‘Louise Russell obituary’ as one of the helpfully provided Google search terms. And even /then/, I told myself that it wasn’t that uncommon of a name. But then I came to this page and I knew.

She’d died November 6th. I’d missed her funeral, her memorial. I didn’t get to send her flowers. No one told me because almost no one knew how much I loved this woman.

This is how a heart breaks.

LCJ050018-1_20151107 I was barely able to function, couldn’t even see, paid the check in a haze, stumbled out to the parking lot. Luckily, Brian was with me and could drive me home.

To explain all this, I’d have to go back eleven years, to 2004. I was a newly minted manager at J. Jill’s at the Mall St. Matthews in Louisville. I was a little nervous – it was my first retail management job – and most of the ladies I was managing had a decade on me, if not more. There was one employee, though, that I especially wanted to know better. She had sass, personality…I would’ve called her a spunky old lady if it weren’t patently disrespectful. She was 67, she went by Louise and NOT Ethel, and she could run rings around all of us. The older ladies loved her – hell, I’m pretty sure most of our customers preferred her. She just had the touch. She was always dressed beautifully, with her hair and makeup done.

One night, we were closing together, and chatting as we straightened the tables. We were already friends, but I didn’t know how that evening would change my life. She’d mentioned that she’d worked at Bacon’s Department store, when it was still opened. My head snapped up and I grinned.

“Oh wow, my grandma was a manager there for a long time. Did you know Josephine Paris?”

I will never forget her voice and her glee, “Jo? Jo PARIS?”

Not only had she known her, she’d been supervised by her, had loved her. She had such stories of the two of them and their hijinks, left me dazzled with visions of a younger, more mischievous grandma than I’d ever known. Such stories, it was like my beloved lost grandmother blazed back into life at that exact moment, fueled by the strength of her memories.

And so that was that. We were fast friends before we’d even cashed out for the night. We stayed in touch even after I left the store, moved to Florida. I was in Florida for seven years, but I still called her from time to time. Every time we spoke it was if we’d never stopped. She was a touchstone for Louisville, for my grandma, for a lot that was now lost to me.

When I came back, I got to see her again and oh was it wonderful. She came to my wedding. I have a wonderful, priceless picture of the two of us there that I will have to dig out. Time had taken some toll, but she still kept a lot of what made her Louise. She was in a lot of chronic pain, had several surgeries. After my divorce, one of the first things I did was go see her again. And again. It was never anything fancy. One day we went to Paul’s Fruit Market and picked up a sandwich. I drove her to get her medicine from the pharmacy and one other errand. She kept thanking me, as if it weren’t a gift to me to see her.

Just before I moved to Texas, I saw her one last time. I’m haunted by that visit. She seemed sad throughout, but I thought it was just because I was leaving. I hugged her twice, took her cell phone number, told her to PLEASE put me on a list of people to call if anything happened. I was worried she’d end up in the hospital and I wouldn’t know about it. I didn’t know any of her family and was going to be half a country away. As always, I told her I loved her and she started crying. I don’t know if she knew then I wouldn’t see her again or if it was just an emotional moment.

It’s easy to blame myself, scold myself about calling her more often. But she knew I loved her. I told her every time we spoke. She knew that she was one of the stars in my sky, my connection to my grandmother gone, a little piece of my soul. Her kindness and love and friendship meant the world. And I will miss her so very, very much. I know I have to let her go, but it’s so hard. As long as I knew she was out there, I knew there was a soul who loved me the way my grandma did.

Goodbye, Louise. There’s at least one person in this world who will never forget you.
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Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there; I did not die.

– Mary E. Frye, 1932

Book Review:(S)mythology by Jeremy Tarr

Article first published as Book Review: (S)mythology by Jeremy Tarr, Illustrated by Katy Smail on Blogcritics.

(S)mythology bills itself as a contemporary fairy tale and that it is: a very whimsical, very adult fairy tale. This dark, yet touching tale stars Sophie, a dreamer and innocent naïf who searches for her ideal love. (S)mythology features a quirky cast of characters who both help and hinder Sophie in her classic Hero’s Quest, including Poseidon, a Guru, mermaids and all manner of fish and fowl, both fair and foul.

Many of the ideals of love are up-ended here. Sophie looks for love in the archetypal, bump-into-a-stranger on the street style and that is exactly how she meets Smyth, in a fateful rickshaw accident. They fall in love and wish to live happily ever after, except…Sophie is cursed. Anyone who loves her and looks upon her is turned to stone. She craves love and stability and a family, but she ends up with a collection of statues instead.

Like Orpheus, she goes into the Underworld to rescue Smyth. She fools Death once, but Death can only be fooled once. Without ruining anything I will tell you that people die and bad things happen to good people, as they do in real life (and in fairy tales). There are some sequences that are squeamish and not for the faint-of-heart, but the redemption of the story is worth enduring the dark bits.

One common theme in the book is eyes, and sight or seeing/not-seeing. Often, the blind characters see far more clearly than the seeing ones do. Sophie allows her ideals of love to get in the way of seeing the true love she actually possesses. But all ends up as it should, with lessons learned and an ending that is both delicate and sweet, like the last bit of summer’s ice cream melting away.

The website (http://www.smythology.co.uk/) is quite clever and deserves a visit on its own merits. You can read an excerpt from the book and visit the different locations (including Londontown and the Underworld).

The stylized and whimsical artwork by Katy Smail deserves its own special mention. This is a new breed of illustrated book, a novel with lots of pictures (64 illustrations in total). The illustrations capture the ups and downs of Sophie’s quest and blend with the story perfectly; it is a magnificent synergy of art and writing, one in which the one almost could not exist without the other.

I highly recommend (S)mythology for those who love the work of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and those with fairy tale sensibilities, those who know that when life intervenes to prevent the ideal, it sometimes offers a happy ending anyway.

Published by The Big Head.
http://www.smythology.co.uk/

Remembering Salvador

This post is more difficult than most for me to write, as it involves grieving and a dog that changed my life. He wasn’t even my dog; he was Paul’s, who is one of my very best friends. But he was part of my pack or, more accurately, I was part of his.

Salvador was rescued, in a most literal sense. Paul found him sitting on the street with a homeless guy, tied with a dangling bit of shoelace. He gave the man all the money in his wallet to rescue the dog, little enough to pay for a life companion. It was pure serendipity, an intersection of that perfect moment and destiny.

“Sal” was a powder puff of poofy fur and aggressive energy, half Golden Retriever and half Chow. A happy mix, aesthetically – it gave him the sweet face of a Golden with super-expressive eyebrows and masses of lion-like fur. I did not know him until later, when he was full grown, so I missed a lot of the chew phase.

The Chow in him was super-protective and often would not let other dogs even close. Dogs twice his size would inspire furious barking and yet those half his size left him bemused. He had a heart like a lion, Sir Loyal Heart.

Like most dogs, he loved long walks…in rain, in snow, in sleet and freezing cold. He liked walks at 3 am, when you could barely crack an eyeball open to see. He would take off running after anything that took his fancy; his retractable leash would snap to maximum length and dismantle your arm from your socket. He would search the bushes for what felt like hours to find the very perfect spot to deposit his gift. He would store liquid in his bladder like a camel and stop every three feet to mark an infinitesimally small patch of grass.

When he saw you, it was a moment of pure joy. He would spring forward and charge into you at full tilt and jump up and bark with joy, asking you “Where, oh where have you been?” Once the preliminary histrionics were complete, he would not rest until he trotted through all the rooms and found my cat, Ramses. They would touch noses in acknowledgment and then he would insist on securing the perimeter of the neighborhood for his pack.

I always felt safe with Salvador in the house. He would lie flat on my hardwood floors, splayed out in all directions. Not that it was always roses; he was notorious with unleashing fatal dog farts with no advance notice. He would lick your face, most frequently when his breath was truly horrific, and could always find the most foul, rotten pile within a mile to go roll in. He was the best pillow I ever held and his paws smelled of Fritos.

One time I was crying and he crawled up into bed with me and pushed his head into my chin. His big liquid brown eyes were infinitely wise and it was at that moment that I became convinced that he might be at the top level of reincarnation. That if I were good enough and brave enough and loving enough, that I might one day be reborn as a dog like Sal. He was the Buddha of all dogs and he made my life better than it was before he arrived.

The last few years, it was clear that Salvador was aging and slowing down. Perhaps it was time for him to leave this place and transcend to another plane. He had completed his mission in life; he guided Paul through his life until he had a child of his own, Sofia. Sal left us peacefully, put to sleep after a biopsy revealed terminal cancer.

He left us and my pack is reduced by one, but I know he is off somewhere in some Doggy Elysian Fields, barking and jumping and rolling in some celestial pile of stinky.

Salvador Doggy, Rest in Peace Old Friend, July 20, 2011 – 16 years