Two Funerals And A Wedding

No. I didn't get the title of the movie wrong. I just renamed it to suit my life. I just had my next sequal to the "Two Funerals" part as Sally Jo passed Monday, March 1st at 7:30 a.m. I'd been on the phone with her throughout the night talking into her ear as she was going through the mechanics of leaving.

Heavily sedated and in that coma we get to when it's close to time for the boat to leave, she could no longer respond, but she tried. Her sister Katy held up the phone to her ear while I cooed to her that it was going to be alright, that she could let go, and that I'd see her soon so save me a spot on the bench. Katy said she opened her eyes the first time I called when I told her I loved her and that she was a good friend. All I heard was Sal's moan.

I think she was trying to say, "EE-awk-eee!" It was our signal of hello to each other. I've had code words and signals with friends since being small. Always lets you know that the person outside the door really is of your tribe. Well. Sal's moan did sound a bit like EE-awk-ee! Or maybe she was just rearranging what was left of her spit under her tongue. She was pretty doped up. But the experts say that hearing is the last sense to go. I hope so. I wanted her to know that I was there with her in spirit and will continue to be.

The family had one service in Augusta. Another one will be held here. Sally asked if I'd write her eulogy the last time we had a phone conversation that made sense. I told her yes. Only I said, "Has a cat got an ass?" It's what she expects me to say as a definitive answer to the positive. I'm also getting some of her ashes to put on my altar down here at Dogpatch. I may have mentioned all this before. If so, forgive me. It's been a long month with all these life rituals going on and my synapses are fried.

The wedding part of the title comes in with a lot more joy. Longtime friend Jeannie Taylor asked me to 'do' her wedding gown. She brought me a traditional white 1980s number with a long chapel train, enormous leg-o-mutton sleeves, and 10 pounds of lace appliqués and beading. She wanted it emerald green. Dye is out of the question for acetate gowns as the fibers don't take it. So I got her to get some green pigment dye with a small jar of black pigment to drab it down from Dharma Trading Company. We both agree that it is one of the most gorgeous things I've ever made.

The dye streaked, pooled and puddled. It took heavier in some areas and on the appliquéd lace, tinted the iridescent sequins and glass pearls. You'd swear that fairy creatures imprinted themselves on it because I sewed bead eyes on them all over the skirts. I removed the damaged bead and pearl fall from the front and replaced it using some of the pearls removed and beads Jeannie had picked out.

There were three special strands: One for Shirley who was Jeannie's mentor and surrogate mother that had her star bead on it, one for me with one solitary vitrail teardrop I had for me, and I used real emerald beads and crystal for Jeannie. When she came down the staircase at the church, you could her an audible 'ah!' from everyone. She was just stunning! Her Cherokee coloring and wild mane of hair looked like she stepped from virgin forest into the room. I loved that she, along with her maids went barefoot. They also jumped the broom!

Her wedding theme was a Celtic one with her maids dressed in Renaissance Faire wear and the men sporting doublets and real Irish Claymore swords they used to salute. Jeannie carried a basket of ivy and herbs. I cried. I always cry at weddings.

The picture above is Jeannie at one of the fittings. I'll show you the finished project in a future post. All in all there are about 30 or more hours in the dress, hundreds of extra pearls and beads and several days of treating my skin to bleach to return it to my normal beige instead of cedar green speckles and blotches everywhere.

Suggestionss for reduxing a vintage wedding gown:

Think beads and embellishing for repairs and alterations. Instead of ripping seams and removing boning to take in the gown, see if you can pinch the seam up and anchor it on the outside with a beaded running stitch. Looks like it was built on purpose! I'll try to get some close-ups of what I did.

If the gown is too wide in the shoulders, try pleating over the very edge of the yoke towards the sleeve top and using the beaded running stitch to take it up. Hand sewing is diriguer because you need the control that can only be achieved by hand manipulating the ease of the fabric.

Instead of using the traditional method of removing the skirts and lining to shorten the gown from the waist, consider making a pleat in the bottom of the skirt or small, draped tucks and accenting them with appliqués or beads. Decorative hems are already a feature of wedding wear. You know my motto: If a little looks great, pile on some more!

The type of dyeing I did on Jeannie's gown is very eclectic and not for every taste. The color is purposely not evenly distributed and pooling and checking of dyes were wanted in this case. Don't consider dying your gown a different color unless you're into S&M, like having dyed skin and feet for weeks, have a huge yard or warehouse to do the chore in and at least 3 days to allow the dye to work and set. Oh. You'll also need a vat the size of a livestock feeder to accommodate the up to 24 yards of fabric involved. And a bottle of Advil for the backache of lifting and hanging 24 yards of wet fiber.

Pam commented on the Blue Moon post:

Hi. I have been trying to think of what to say but can't think of anything except, I am so sorry about your friends and I can't imagine what they (and you) are going through. Do you believe that our spirits live on (in other dimensions)? I struggle with it; it seems impossible but at the same time I've heard and read stories from people that makes me ponder. - Pam

Little Beauty, I have already wept, wailed, wallowed, and cursed for them all many times over enough to fulfill any lamenting custom in several lands. I know I'm being selfish about it, especially in Sally Jo's case because I just want them HERE, not THERE. When I wah for them, it's the blindered side of my Inner Child having a temper tantrum because some really fun playmates are leaving my party.

Death IS life! It's SIDS for Seniors. We Americans have a tendency to overlook that. I'd like to thank the predominant cultural religions for that: You die, you go before your god, get judged pretty harshly for your worldly stupidities, and depending on whether you ascribe to the Vatican, Yaweh, Mohammed, or to Dante Alighieri, you're sent to various hotspots around the universe with varying degrees of unpleasantries.

I personally think all this is an opague attempt at trying to control the masses and whip them into shape. Support the church, pay the tithes, follow the leader, even if the leader is telling you to believe some really stupid and irrational things. Crowd control. Think Jim Jones, the Inquisition, the 'Holy Wars', Jihad.

I lean towards taking the responsibility of my own actions while here and cutting out the middleman or priest to intercede for me as best I can. I know what kind of Didoes I pull that I shouldn't have - I was THERE when I did it. It cuts down on the coin, lets you sleep late on holy days, but more importantly, the guilt is incised right out of the mix.

So. We're scared to death of death and it's consequences, which I believe makes us bale on life, too. We don't want to face the big D so we live as if there will be no tomorrow wasting our time on piddling shit and overlooking the fact that this is a really good theme park here with lots to see and do.

As for our spirits living on, I've had this proven to me a number of times. I wrote about one physical manifestation of this in 'The Afterlife of Sam, The Dog' in January 2007. I've also talked to the dead on many occaisions. Before you reach for the Straight 8 - the jacket with eight formal ties, try asking the 'out there' for some help on an everyday project. It's fun and informative. I 'talk' to my dad all the time to ask for help with things mechanical or carpentry because he was a worldly ace with it. I more often than not get an amazingly quick solution on how to do something that I've not done before, something totally not in the vein I was thinking. Ascribe this to spiritism or Psychology 101. I don't really care as long as it works.

I wrote almost every single college paper on autodrive using the same approach. Whether you want to call this savantism or that I possibly could have been given the ideas, and sometimes, footnotes to support them from an outside source is up to you. I've quit trying to persuade folk around to my view of living.

Can I give you some directions on where to start your query on why I think psychism and 6th sense issues are real? Read " I am Psychic", also from January of this year. Read some of the new books out on fuzzy and quantum physics.

So, young Padowan, let Yoda be your guide on this matter. Remember the training of Luke. Listen, you should. Buy or rent the entire set of philosopher George Lucas' works and watch them.

When it comes right down to it, each of us has to believe in our own theories. I just offer mine. But one thing I know as utter, unmitigatable truth is that when Death happens, it won't matter what your beliefs or theories are. What awaits us (or not) will be there.

It is what it is.

You know now that it was the blue moon in May, as in ‘Once in a blue moon’ - two full moons in the same month? Well. Yes. Annie, Teresa and I used this to go on a Red Eye Turnaround to Augusta, Georgia to see Sally Jo.

You’ll also guess if you’re a reader that I tend to pidge around when I have something serious to write about. Just one tiny bitty bit of chicken shit to my nature of balls out, hair afire, Mach 10, 60 MPH in one spot. So. Sally’s dying, don’t you know.

She has this shit ass illness called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, as I've told you. It’s a wicked bad disease that mimics Parkinson’s and Lou Gerhigs Disease. She’ll die by choking. I watched her suffer through several of these spasms as she tried to eat orally on our visit. She refuses to give up the taste of food even though she’s intubated for direct meals and medications through a tube in her abdomen.

Sally always was stubborn like that. She refused to give up on me when I was a non-responsive basket case drooling on the sofa and contemplating a trip to the woods with Sara Jane, my Rueger. She and Carol Gray saw to it that I went on holiday to the hospital.

She refused to give up on her kids, too, her sisters, and any of the cases she ever worked as a deputy sheriff. Murderers confessed to her and showed her where they hid the bodies when they talked to no one else. Loonies told her about ‘Wonderment Sticks’ and I made one for her to shake at the most reprobate of speeders complete with grape root windy-ness and jewels to get them to slow down. She keeps it under the pix of me and her and Carol.

And she’s refusing this goddamn awful disease that will eat her nerve responses until every neuron in her tall ass ole body just shuts down and quits.

I told Katy and Sue to fly me up and we’ll see her out together. None of us want her to choke to death (a horrid way to go) and we hope that she’ll fall into a peaceful coma and sleep herself into the afterlife. If not, I hope the medicoes have the cajones to help her out.

I’ve thought much about the Three Norns with all this illness and dying. The Three Norns or Fates, the Great Wyrd Sisters who card and spin the skein of our life, then weave us into being, determine the length of our days, and then cut us from the weft of experience and age when we have wended our way to the other side ever recycling,

I read my mama the Book Of Fates by Z. Budapest on the stages of life – one that I was reviewing for the International newspaper, Goddessing championed and published by friend Willow Lamont - as she was dying under the aegis of Hospice in 1999. I read the last pages and squeezed the book Z wrote – something you do when a read has been so good and you could find no other words than The End or the copyright page. Ma looked up from the bed and said, ‘Just in time’. And it was. She passed very shortly afterward. I will love anything Z Budapest writes from here on out because of that book.

Now. Besides Sally Jo, I have my mentor Shirley DesRochers in a pickle in Tampa General Hospital with a hell of a hack and whack job on her colon for diverticulitis. This is the latest in several of them and she’s been fighting fistulas, infections, and you put on plastic when you go in to see her. She left me a fatalistic message on my machine before she went in over a month ago. I save it because she tells me what a good, good friend I’ve been to her. They told her there would be no more surgeries. She doesn't have enough colon yet to digest a taco, let alone take a shit.

I promised her tonight when I trudged up huffing to the 8^thfloor from a parking lot that was built in the back forty that I’d bring my cards and play straight with her when I read to say what I see. She asked me. I will. No matter how grim the news. She can take it. She has gonads, too.

Death doesn’t scare me personally. I just hate to leave a mess. And. I hate to be left behind by all the enormous Goddess women and men my life has wrapped around. Doesn’t seem quite right, although the sidekicks and good guys always get whacked in the movies.

When I gack, I hope some friend will write a line or two about me saying that they missed whatever quality about me that struck them as worthy. I know that I shall miss my girls and their faces.

Leaving....Losing

I'm losing friends. By attrition, mostly. But a few by death.

You see. I've come to what the French call un femme de certain age - a woman, mature. There's a point where we all start to watch the obituaries to see if there are familiar names. Sometimes, we hit the jackpot by attention. Other times, if we keep our friends close, we know when their bans to the Pearly Gates will appear in the paper.

I have three of my girls on the edge of check out at this time. Oh. There is always the occasional surprise where one of us 'young chicks' will phase out before our time in a sudden accident. Like SIDS, the mature can go too, unannounced, unexpected, and unwarranted.

I have one in hospital. Critical care unit in town. I'm too chicken shit to call and find out her status because I've promised her that if she dies, I'll kill her. Afraid I'll have to follow through because her son, a NASA scientist, tells me she's fatalistic. Another is in full term adult care, wasting away of a disease that struck her down. Like the Gaelic Boddicia of old, Sally is six foot tall. She was a cop - twenty years worth of manhandling the bad side of life. I have her marked on the doorpost on the archway in my living room to the dining room of my old house along with my child; his friends, my friends, and whoever made enough impact or asked to be tallied up to stature here.

So. Sally Jo was part of the conversation at the whenever number next get-together of The Committee. This is a group of us women that have been meeting since we all gathered for the first meeting of a Codependents Anonymous group I put together back in the 80s. We all bonded. Only one of us dropped the ball for a spiritual quest at Ba'hai. The rest of us have more or less kept covenant with each other since.

Sally has an incurable disease called Supranuclear Progressive Palsy. It will end up choking her as her throat muscles give up the ability to clamp down and loosen. Sal is sixty something. Awful shitting young to have to say adieu. I have told her sister Katy that I did not want her to strangle. Katy agreed. I will be second in the duel if needed. You understand what I'm saying.

Shirley, on the other hand, is as hard as rocks and as fragile as a lotus in her seventies. She's spiritual leader and divine hag and crone for at least three hundred seeking individuals she guides from her quaint book and herb store where there are resident spirits. She has worked hard all her life. She is integrity exemplified. She has taught me how to use my mean bones so that I wouldn't get stepped on. In her seventy-somethings, she still has the best gams around left over from a modeling career where she sported Russian Wolfhounds down a runway. She's had the umpty-umphth operation on a recalcitrant colon in ex many years. All leave scar tissue, a little less colon, and this time, fistulas.

Fistula. Sounds like a Roman Emperor, a Caesar that rampages through the good land of a body that was once brave and strong and beautiful. She is the one that I can't seem to bring myself to follow up on. I've talked to her son. He gives me news that isn't welcome. There is something in his reports that tell me she has given up. Fatalistic. Or almost. Either way. Almost is too close.

The third chasing Death is Miz Miriam down the street. She walked up to the house here about two months ago to tell me in person that she has CML - some kind of chronic leukemia that strikes later in life. Miriam is 82. She has raised her children. She's raised her grandchildren. She's also raised her GREAT grand children. She gardens. She curses. I've seen her dive in the creek to rescue a child overboard on a bike like she was 16 years old. She asked me to try to help her find some cannibus to treat the awful pain that she cannot take opiates for. She gets ill on pain meds. I am a friend. The mission was unsucessful. That's all I have to say about that.

So. What do I have to say to you tonight? Wisdom? I don't have any. I am wallowing in my own insecurities and skitters at being left with three less good women. I will be losing these very special people from my life. I don't know how to do anything other than honor them by kicking my own ass in gear and getting on with the Cosmic Cotillion that we sign onto when we check onto Planet Earth.

I believe in an afterlife. I must. Neither the purported rapture nor glory calms my soul as much as believing that I will have the chance to touch the ones I love, have loved again. Or that I will have the chance to come back and make it a little better the next time. I hope to see Miriam, Sally Jo and Shirley on the next taxi back to planet Earth. They are good company.