Today, Maria and I are finally celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary, which actually occurred on June 10, but we are just catching up with it. We’re heading to check in on Carol and Ed Gulley, then to Massachusetts to hole up for one night in a cheesy motel, go see a play, go see the Mr. Rogers movie, have dinner and hit a museum in the morning.
I have the perfect anniversary story to tell, it involves the crocheted gun (above) that Maria carried when she marched for sensible gun control some months ago after the Parkland, Fla., shooting.
Friday night, we invited some friends over for dinner, and I was cooking some pizza for dinner, and I couldn’t find the metal pie pan I usually use to serve the pizza at the dinner table. After much banging and crashing around, I yelled out to Maria if she knew where it was.
She didn’t answer at first, then signaled me to come out into the living room, where she was standing with a smile on her face and pointing to the corner. I was confused, all I saw in the corner was the crocheted gun (an old pellet gun she crocheted for the demo in a baby blanket.)
I couldn’t imagine why she was pointing to it. “It’s in there,” she said, a bit sheepishly. I needed to use it as a backdrop to hold the thing together.”
So the moral is if you live with Maria, you might well be living with a crocheted gun, and it is not surprise for the metal pizza pan to be commandeered in the name of art. Everything else I wear is.
“I needed it,” she explained.
This, of course, is what I love so much about Maria. We are excited to be celebrating our wedding, the most consequential event of my adult life, as it turns out.
I love you so much, Maria, and thanks for loving me back. We caught one another at just the right time, and for all of the best reasons. Be back tomorrow. Stay dry and cool.
I woke up feeling a great sadness this morning, my friend Ed is dying, bit by bit, and right before my eyes. So many people have and will experience this, yet it is rarely acknowledged or brought out into the open. Ed and I do not wish to continue that conspiracy, so here I am, at the keyboard, where I go to understand what it is I feel.
I’ve never quite been able to figure out friendship in my life, I’ve often been able to make friends, but I rarely, if ever keep them. There is hardly anyone in my life that I knew more than a few years ago.
I have a version, I think, of what the shrinks call reactive attachment disorder, when people get too close, I push them away. It is a very common abuse response, say the trauma people.
Like Dyslexia, it is one of those things that shapes and shadows life, baggage I am always learning to carry.
Maria is the first person who simply broke through that wall, the first person who really got close and stayed close, and I have never wanted to push her away or run from her. Well, hardly ever. She is a profoundly emotional and open human being, and I do sometimes tremble at that, but I also love it more and more every day. I could never have handled that for much of my life.
I think the reason that our love grew and deepened was that I was breaking into pieces, and the gates all opened up. Once you open up, it is almost impossible to go back, even if you try. Once you are broken, you can, if you wish, put the pieces together I believe love comes when you are open to it, the same is true of friendship.
Unlike Ed, I get to recover every day.
For many years, I was convinced the problem was them, all those people, that it was all outside of me. Then I came to see that it was me. Most problems end up that way for me.
Ed Gulley and I are, on the surface, not likely candidates for friendship. Our language and history is different, our core values are different. Ed is as at home rebuilding a tractor as he is milking a cow or making a farm sculpture. Basically, I just love Maria and my dogs, take photos, and write.
We live in alien worlds. I love his family, but I am always aware of coming from a very different place, I will always live outside of that circle, as gracious as they are, we often simply don’t know what to say to one another. They stay out of my way.
At the center, Ed and I have much in common. We grew up in difficult circumstances, came to consciousness later in life. I am drawn to his honesty, his thoughtfulness, his intellectual and creative strength.
He is an artist all the way, as well as farmer who loves his cows, his land, the natural world, the world around him. Ed talks to crows all the time, there are not many men like him. We have a creative connection, and also, a soul connection.
Somewhere in there, we are brothers from the same mother.
I suspect our bond is a respect for the intelligence of each other, we both seek the truth, even if we don’t always find it. We are both awakened, and think about our lives and what they mean. Ed, like me, accepts the worst parts of himself and has no secrets to defend. He is a presence, everywhere he is, he is the embodiment of the idea of Larger Than Life.
He tells me all the time that his cows have always been his best friends. I tell him I haven’t had any best friends, at least not for long. We both believe that death is sad, but not only sad. It can also be beautiful and profound.
Living where I live, I have come to know and love the small family farmers who live around me, and have taken thousands of photos of them. They are a wondrous and doomed culture shrinking in numbers every day. Ed is absolutely nothing like me in the way he lives, in the way he sees animals, in the way he sees life and family and work.
He sees no contradiction in the fact that he knows the small family farmer is lurching towards extinction, but he wants his farm to live forever. If strength of will is the barometer, Bejosh Farm will go on forever. If life and reality prevail, it is a fantasy. We talk about that all the time.
In our own way, each of us is a dinosaur, the world has moved past us in many ways. I am lucky to have found a new role for myself amidst the turmoil of the world, I am reborn, my life is just beginning in so many ways, Ed was in the middle of his own rebirth when he was struck down by life.
When he told me last year that we are brothers from the same mother, something inside of me recognized that it was true. Ed has always been generous in crediting me with his creative awakening late in life. It would surely have happened without me, Ed’s creative spark was ready to ignite in a big and loud way. Maria and I struck the match.
Here we are, at the edge of life, Ed and seem to be very close friends, the kind of friends I have always sought and wanted to have. Since he is the kind of friend I always wanted to have, I am becoming the kind of friend I always wanted to be.
Simply put, we would do anything for one another, no worries or hesitation. In deep trouble, he is absolutely the first person I would call, and he would come like a rocket.
Except he can’t come anymore, not now or ever.
I have never been so closely entwined in the death of a friend before, and that has challenged me in all kinds of ways, opened me up, shaken me up, enriched me and saddened my deeply.
Our videos together are a boon to both of us. Ed gets to get his message out, I get to find a small way to help him through this whirlwind. He wants his life and death to have meaning, he is making it so.
Death is, of course, the elephant in Ed’s room, and we both acknowledge to each other that he is dying, we both accept it, and we do not see it as a fight, as our culture often suggests, rather as one of the great and inevitable passages of life.
So we have entered into this great dialogue, mostly because Ed wants to use his cancer to do some good, and having an ego like a Tyrannosaurus, he is convinced his story will do good for others. I am coming to see that this is true, although I was doubtful.
In his last days, Ed has become a teacher to me, and a prophet. He is teaching me about death and friendship, i think we were always learning from one another. One of the things I am seeing and learning is that although we are terrorized by death and hide from it and see it as nothing but sad, it’s not all that different from birth.
Death is our universal experience, about the only place in life we shall all go. I don’t want to run from in horror, but accept it and kiss it right on the lips. I believe Ed feels the same way.
Death just happens, and in happens to all of us. I told Ed yesterday that I will not spent too much time mourning his him, I choose to celebrate his very wonderful and fulfilling life.He has left a big mark on the world.
Ed, after all, is one of those blessed few people who spent his life doing what he loved with people he loved.
The trick to monitoring cancer is to not think for a second that you can fully understand it or know where it will go. Thursday night, I thought Ed was in free fall, today he seemed to bounce back a bit.
Yet there is no doubt that he is failing, a bit more each day. The trajectory of his cancer is clear enough, the larger picture becoming clearer each day.
Tonight, a hospital bed came and he is sleeping in it. Nurses put a catheter in him, so he can sleep, and tomorrow, there will be an oxygen tank and tubes to help him breathe.
Today a nurse returns to begin the regular administration of anxiety and depression medication.
Today, a commode arrived, and Ed is no longer getting up to go to the bathroom or anywhere else. Yesterday, a wheelchair came to occupy a corner of his room. Tonight, a hospice nurse arrives to begin regular visits.
I’ve volunteered in hospice. I know what these rooms look like, and what they mean.
Carol’s children are beginning to spell her, so she can rest. Nurses and social workers from hospice are present and unfailingly helpful. It is different now.
Ed can longer take short walks around the farm. There is no more talk of trips to Maine or anywhere else. It more difficult for Ed to smile. His medication has slowed him time and made him sleepier. For the first time, he is in pain, now in his hip. Tonight, a wrenching and tearful video and blog post from Carol Gulley, whose sadness cannot be concealed.
Some days are up, some days are now, but this cancer is a process and Ed is right in the middle of it. He is, by his own words, accepting it and surrendering to it. “It is bigger than me,” he said, “two bulls banging into each other, one is clearly winning.”
I am happy to visit Ed each day, and talk with him, and tell him I love him. It is harder to talk to visit him each day and see this ravaging intruder chip away at his great spirit and drive.
There are no more platitudes about miracles or interventions, no more false hopes, no one is talking of miracles.
It could be days, or weeks or months, no one claims to know or could know. Today, Ed asked me again to produce a video of the two fo us talking. He said this is very important to him, and therefore, it is important to me. I suggested we talk about his legacy, about his passionate belief that Bejosh Farm should exist, now and well into the future.
Ed hopes his children will commit to managing and running the farm as passionately as he and Carol did. Carol says they will all do their best to honor his wishes. He and I talked about this, and I told him this sometimes made me uneasy.
This puzzled me, and I told him so. He laughed.
I asked him why this was so important to him and why he would want his children to enter a family business that he has always described as brutal and nearly impossible to survive in our current political and economic climate.
For years, I’ve heard Ed grump about milk prices and the decline of the family farm. It is really so that gravel pits and big brown cows can alter the destiny of his farm? If you know Ed, you know it is possible. But still…
Ed and I disagree all of the time, we are different, we are not people who need to hate people who disagree with us, or shout at them or vilify them or put labels on them. Our friendship is a testament to the power of love to triumph over the petty differences and arguments that plague mankind.
He would be the last person on earth to want me to bow to him or hide my feelings.
Ed’s answers surprised, challenged, inspired and also troubled me, and we had an honest talk about this, as usual. I can ask Ed anything, and he can tell me anything. I told him I have never had a family like his, never raised in anything like a family farm. I cannot imagine asking my daughter to be a writer in honor of me and my life. Nor can I imagine her doing it.
But I am not Ed and my family is not a farm family, and there is nothing much like a farm family in the outside world.
I know they will try their damnedest to honor Ed’s request and legacy, and it is not for me to have thing to say about it. If anyone can succeed, they can, and if any farm can survive, Bejosh can. As we talked, I had a much better understanding of how he feels and why, he gave eloquent testimony to the power and meaning of farms and families – the two are linked forever.
I think it was an important conversation. I learned a lot. Our bond is bigger even than cancer.
I left with a heavy heart. This is taking chunks out of me too, I will admit it, and would I be human if it didn’t?
Ed is no longer really mobile, he no longer trusts his body to walk or move as it always has. He knows where he is. He is not likely to ever really get out of that bed.
My heart goes out to he and Carol, they are strong, brave, loving and pure of spirit. I will go see him tomorrow, we will take our conversations one at a time.
A brutal heat wave is predicted for this weekend, temperatures close to 100 and the very high humidity will make it feel like a lot warmer, or so they say. That kind fo heat and humidity gets to me, I will stay cool and inside.
I usually at warnings for people with heart disease to be careful of this kind of heat, but I will be careful, it does affect me.
Tomorrow, Maria and I are going off to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary. We found a nice inexpensive hotel in Massachusetts, and we are going to see a play and then, the new Mr. Rogers documentary.
Sunday morning, we’ll head for Mass MOCA, the museum in Adams, Mass., and then home. We’ll be gone about 24 hours and the faithful Nicole is coming to watch the farm. The animals always seem to know when a heat wave is coming, Fate, who always sits out in the sun, has already retreated to the shade of the apple tree, and the donkeys and sheep are moving to the Pole Barn.
None of them – even the dogs – will move too much in that kind of heat. Me either.
