Hold the Sky

for my granddaughter, Ember

My granddaughter

               Ember

just short of

her second birthday

reaches up, out, down

because holding

is new and

             how she understands things best.

She literally grasps

                   in order to grasp

but not just with hands

           as she did some months ago

--a tiny plastic dinosaur, a piece of apple, a stick

her grandpa’s glasses—

now with her arms, her whole body.

“Hold!” she sings reaching her arms out,

                                             her tiny torso arching to the effort.

(All her words are small songs, even

single syllables have at least two notes).

She sees a tree outside

and sings, “Tree.  Hold!”

She points to the clouds

and sings, “Clouds.  Hold!”

and the sky, “Sky.  Hold! Hold!”

this one with more intensity

reaching her arms almost straight up.

 “Can you hold the sky, Ember?” I ask

“Yeah,” she answers with two notes.

“And can the sky hold you?”

“Yeah,” two notes and a nod

                       of utter certainty.

She throws her head back,

    stretches her whole body,

               rises on her toes

as if to will herself

higher and higher

    until she can

         hold the sky

and by holding

                  know it.

Later in the day

    walking alone

I look up and think,                             

“I’m almost seventy

              and maybe I’ve forgotten

                             how to understand the sky.

I’m not talking about collisions of molecules

      or the scattering of light waves.

I’m talking about

                      knowing the sky

as only a mystery can be known

    by getting your arms around it

                       pressing yourself against it

                            letting your heart beat into it

and its heart beat

            into you.

Maybe I need to reach higher.

Maybe I need to reach harder.

Maybe I need to stretch my body more.

Maybe I need to throw my toes all the way into it

                    as I once did

                              long ago

                          when I first held the sky

and the sky

         held

                me.”

C 2014 Bob Kamm

Apologies to the Goddess

Kwan Yen--our little goddess of compassion.  We found her in a local nursery.  She is slim

and stands only four feet tall but weighs close to two hundred pounds from molded concrete.

A concrete goddess…how’s that for an oxymoron?  She is coiffed and clothed as a Chinese girl should be and would even warrant the adjective demure but for her small right foot—all five perfect little toes--boldly presenting themselves from beneath her floor-length skirt. Is it because she is going somewhere?

Did the artist capture her in the midst of a small but sure step or is this a subtle offering, a promise of a different kind of divine delight?  I guess we will never know.  Her lips are sealed.

When we stood her against the small arched wooden bridge in our front yard we thought it the perfect place for her energy to emanate and envelop our entire acre.  And for a number of months it was so. This goddess of compassion made compassion reign.  Flowers bloomed, fruit appeared, birds and butterflies filled the air.

But then, the plague arrived, the plague of oak moth caterpillars gnawing their way through our luxuriant oak canopy, rappelling down from the heights like an endless gang of warriors.  They covered   our walls and walkways with their skinny black and green bodies and copper helmets and their poop—which scientists have given the dubious name frass.  Frass descended from the leaves above blanketing everything, its smell spoiling every inhale.  A biologist friend told us this is a once every six or seven year phenomenon.  If you don't do commercial spraying (expensive!) right at the first sign, it's a waste.  The oak trees, though utterly stripped, will rebound. The caterpillars will become pupae and the pupae moths but once hatched they will move on and even if they don’t their children, the next generation of caterpillars, will die at the hands of a tiny parasite that takes but a single generation to catch up to its prey. Isn’t nature wonderful?  The balance!  Ah!!  It only takes one year for the parasites to overtake the marauding worms and set things right. So our friend, counseled, since we woke up to the invasion too late for commercial spraying, we should “become one with the caterpillars.” In other words, let Kwan Yen’s spell of mercy abide.

Alas, we could not. The smell of the frass was too “in your nose”, the sight of the caterpillars too icky.  Yes, so icky that a couple in their sixties had to reach back to the childhood word icky to describe them. And the final straw floated down when they covered Kwan Yen’s tiny toes, nose, eyes and ears.

Now you might say they were showing her affection.  One of the stories about her tells us that animals had an affinity for her, even helped her do burdensome chores in a monastery hundreds of years before St Francis spoke to birds in Europe.

You might say they were showing her respect.

You might say the caterpillars were worshipping at her feet, on her feet, limbs, hands, face and hair.

And you might say they were a dastardly pestilence

that needed to be mercilessly wiped

from the earth.

Believe me, we tried to be good students of our goddess, to be one with one with the worm, one with the frass, one with the pupae.  Unfortunately, like all humans except those who attain godly status we were weakened by our anger.  We attacked those worms and their little sleeping pods with environmentally friendly death sprays, wire brushes, power washers, blowers and outdoor vacuums strong enough to uproot an oak.  We sucked, squashed, smashed, blew and blasted them off our walls and deck.  As each day passed we embraced our murderous mission with greater zeal, driven to the precipice of madness by the pungency of frass.  

But finally, it was over.  

Every last worm was either dead or had spun its tiny sanctuary of transformation in the branches beyond our reach.  Then and only then did we approach our freshly washed goddess to ask for compassion when we had given none, mercy when we had been merciless.  For the legend tells us she refused to go into heaven because she heard the cries of the world and wanted to return to assuage them.  Weren’t those cries now coming from us?   Yes, but our cries, were not at first for forgiveness, because we did not seek it.  We did not feel guilty, initially.  After all, if we had not done the killing, wouldn’t the parasites?  How would that have been preferable?

We felt ambivalent and confused. We were both sorry and not sorry.  That's what we cried to have lifted from us--ambivalence and confusion.  We cried over our low tolerance for frass falling from the sky, sharp smells, gangs of insects that, unlike the migrations of monarch butterflies, had for us no redeeming qualities whatsoever; a low tolerance in general for beings—human and otherwise—that were different, and neither beautiful nor useful in their differentness.  We cried out not only for mercy and understanding.  We cried out for the the spell of being human to be re-cast so that compassion would live in our hearts, not just flop on the couch for a week from time to time.  We cried out for the strength to  trust more, allow more, witness more.  We cried out for our capacity for anger to be reshaped into a greater capacity for love that we might be one with nature and one with mankind and our wars against both might finally come to an end. 

Only weeks after the moths left, the canopy was full and lush again, in fact, more luxuriant than it had been before the caterpillars arrived.  The irony weighed heavily upon us.  Heavily.  We stood in the shade surveying our little piece of reborn heaven, trying not to notice that the ground was littered with tiny graves.

C 2014 Bob Kamm

A Poem of Thanksgiving

Inspired by elder Gerry Oleman

of the Coast Salish People of British Columbia

during his welcoming remarks at the 9^th Annual Imago Conference in Vancouver, BC, 2012

Long before us

 skies

    sun and moon

     oceans

         deserts

forests

                              meadows

                                 mountains.                                                          

Long before us

eagle

       and all that lived beneath her.

Long before us

               rain tapping on the beetle’s back.

Long before us

reflections in pools of quiet creeks

flowing and frozen,

   reflections of overhanging trees,

the movement of light on berries,

the faces of buck, doe and fawn,

               raccoon, wolf, cougar,

                      ovenbird rocking on twig,

the tightening of night’s grasp

       on trunks and rocks.

But no images

               of  human face

                       not one

not in puddle or pond

          not in the hand mirrors of ice-clad leaves,

               not even in the eye of predator or prey.

Long before us

      beings of all kinds

            writing their exquisite

and desperate

      life stories

on pages of earth, air, water, bark and stone,

leaving behind few traces

-- faint echoes broken by wind.

Not for us the great awakening of life

but each life for itself

and the shimmering whole

and the joy and sadness

of The Mother and Father of All Things.

The Mother and Father of All Things

who through their

restless risky dance

     made the universe

                          from a solitary seed

-the seed of all seeds

all beings

all things.

We are here now.

And though we strut about

proud parrots,

we are small,

         late-comers to the festival.

We still don’t know the dances.

If we are honest

we must wonder

if The Mother and Father of All Things

for a single moment

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity

imagined

we would become so discontent

with the abundant gardens They provided,

would set out

to live

not just outside them

                              but

       everywhere

with such fiery intention

our success was assured.

Did Mother and Father,

having birthed all things

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity         

from the seed of all seeds,

pause

     even for a moment

to imagine

that one day

their favored principle

of hunter and hunted

would run amok in us,

that we would

discard and devour

               so much of the earth

and hound so many species

as well as our own mothers, fathers

               brothers, sisters

               sons and daughters

into a Great Vanishing?

With such history behind and within us,

how is it that Mother and Father

still let us live

let us struggle to find our way

               toward redemption?

Are They simply indulgent weavers who cannot discard

a deeply flawed blanket

whose dark designs they have come to love?

Or are They truly possessed

of  a compassion beyond our comprehension?

At this moment

life is ours.

Let us set our feet on the path

with prayers

of thanksgiving.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to Mother and Father.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to all They put here before us

that led to now,

“Thank you!” to all that is,

“Thank you!” to all that will be.

For fourteen billion years

we

    were

not

                                     yet.

Mother and Father birthed the universe

without a hand from us,

worked out its drama

through cold and hot fury,

barrenness, solitude, roar and silence,

then

gave us

     the chance to wriggle

from long-ripening wombs.

Why us? 

Why was each of us born and not others?

Why did we make adulthood and not others?

How can we show our gratitude and worthiness

for such a chancy investment?

Let us offer still more thanks.

Let us give thanks

to The Mother and Father of All Things

 for having

the wild, foolish, restless impulse to choose

us

and not brother sperm

               or sister ova.

Let us thank the earth They made

which has given rise to all we draw upon

               for sustenance and succor

--to the waters we use

to grow and cook,

slake our thirst,

 clean our bodies,

          frolic and fish;

 to the soil that gives rise to plants

that give us sweet air to breathe,

 plants we eat,

 plants we use to weave, build, warm,

trap, hunt, play  and heal;

Let us give thanks

to all the beings

         from the tiniest we cannot see

to the largest

whose flesh, bones, sinews and skins

we have taken

with ecstasy and sadness

for we know they were not made for us

but for themselves,

for the shimmering whole

 and for Mother and Father

in their incomprehensible creative fervor.

Let us give thanks to the long bead chain of grandmothers

who

carried and birthed other grandmothers until

our own mothers ripened and carried us

and helped us wriggle into the wild,

beautiful,

sad and terrifying

world.

To all who were present at the moment of our births

we give thanks,

the family and tribe that cared for us

in our helplessness

when we were pure

and yet

 knew nothing

and all those who caressed and patted us

               along our way to discover

               how to become human beings

how to live and love

with elegance and awkwardness

                              brilliance and ignorance

               how to sing, dance, drum, whoop, laugh,

          whisper and weep

                              together,

how to hold each other with bold affection

               and yet step back so each of us can

                              hear

                              the song of his own being.

May we raise our children

               with such right love

                   --devotion without indulgence--

               that before long

               across the many lands

               each soul is a gathering place

                              where all souls are safe.

Then may our ways

                           be fragrant as spring soil

and tasty as ripe berry juice

                                                            to Mother and Father

so They might find us worthy

     of their work and worry,

give us

lives

   that are

good

               and long

and end

     with our cheeks

 on Their chests

as we listen to Their hearts

drum

  drum

      drum

before setting out

               for the gardens

in the bright reaches

of their eyes.

C Copyright 2012 Bob Kamm, reproduction by author’s permission only.

My Brother Lew Has Cancer, Part II

My brother, Lew, had cancer.  He died on the evening of July 8^th.  He was sixty-eight.

It still feels unreal.   He was only diagnosed in April of 2011.  I know, many others go much faster.  Our oldest brother, Larry, was gone suddenly in a matter of weeks back in 2004, at sixty-four.  If this were a hundred years ago, both of them would have been considered old.  But it isn’t and they weren’t.

Untimely death.  Maybe we call it that because when someone is taken too soon, it scrambles our sense of time. 

Today is 1955.  The latest national event is Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett on TV.  Our father, a New York City journalist, manages to arrange for us to meet him.  I am eight.  Lew is ten.  We walk into a hotel room in New York and there he is, all six foot five of him, in buckskin and a coonskin cap.  We sit on his knees.  He shows us the enormous bowie knife.  He tells us that the Georgie Russell character played by Buddy Epsen wasn’t a real person, but represents a number of sidekicks that Crockett had.  We feel as if we’ve been initiated into special information from a larger-than-life figure.  He gives us each a coonskin cap.  We have our pictures taken, sitting there on his knees, in our caps.  We are going to wear them for the next several months, go to sleep with them on our pillows.  We are going to be celebrities in our neighborhood because we got them directly from “Davy Crockett himself.”  We will spend the summer running around the little town of Highlands, New Jersey, where our grandfather lives, with coon tails flying—flags of boyhood.

This is today.  It walks with me.  If I take a quick step in the right direction, I can be running up Bay Avenue in Highlands, a mile from the ocean with Lew beside me.

                                                   ****

It’s also today that he is asking me again about our mother’s final days.  He wants to know the mechanics of going to sleep until the end comes.  She had morphine pills placed under her tongue.  She slept for five days and died.  He is going to ask Nancy, his oncologist about methodology.  He continues to have breakthrough pain at night and he and Nancy continue to adjust the medication to combat it.  Cancer not only consumes the body.  It consumes the mind.  Beyond a certain point there is nothing else to think, feel, talk or learn about but this treatment, that theory, this drug combination, the quality or personality of this doctor, nurse, lab tech, survival rates, the fate of others with similar afflictions and, above all, pain and managing pain.  The joys and interests of a lifetime are utterly upstaged. Lew has thought hard about the courage it took our mother to say, “I’m there.  No more.  This is it.  I want to sleep now until the end.”  He tells me, “This isn’t it, yet, but it’s getting close.  I want to be prepared.” There are discussions of “the sublingual approach” being “a general part of the hospice comfort pack” and “fentanyl lollipops for immediate control of pain.”  Fentanyl lollipops.  Could the inventor of lollipops ever imagine that phrase?  All at once, things are moving faster than any of us have foreseen.  I’m booked for a return visit.  I’ve been convinced he’ll still be alive and awake when I get there.  Now I’m not so sure.

Then, suddenly, this email from him:  “This IS it Bob.  The combination of pain, fluids, and this and that over the past 2+ days has reached the point where Anne and I have this very evening to stop the dance…this has happened very quickly.  Where does this leave you?  Staying home?  Trying to have one last visit when I don’t know what the situation will be?  It leaves you and me forever in one another’s arms in ways that I’m sure neither of us would ever have imagined.  I want you to have as much time as possible to think about what you might want to do (to come or not to).  No matter what happens, what events unfold, know this:  I love you tremendously and thank you once again for your blog and so much more.  I will give Mom, Dad and Larry a big hug from you and confirm that we hope it will be many, many years indeed before we are all together again.”

I call as soon as I read this.  He is sleeping.  I ask Anne to try to read a final email to him if he awakens: “Lew, I love you. I love you.  I love you.  That is all I can give you to take with you.  I am so grateful for the love we have shared over a lifetime and over these last few years but especially these last few months.  You did not run.  You did not hide from what was coming.  You opened your eyes and your heart to all around you so they could receive the last and fullest measure of your soul’s gifts.  Thank you, my precious brother, thank you! I am walking with you to the threshold and waving you across.  Bob”.  

I am planning on going anyway, even if he is in his final sleep.  I can support my sister-in-law and Lew’s grandson, Ben.  And maybe Lew will sense my presence.  But this is not to be.  The day before my scheduled departure, Anne asks that I not come.  “The last 2 days on Lew’s downward spiral have been a free fall…  So, Bob, since spirit energy knows no time and space, you are as much with Lew now and he with you, as you could be here.  Save yourself and take a walk to Montana de Oro (the state park with miles of rustic beaches that are special to us) and visit with Lew there. Coming at this time would be futile...”  She wants to devote all her energy to his final moments.  It makes sense to me.  I stay home.  The next evening, before I would have arrived, he is gone.

                                                 ****

This is today, too, perhaps a year after coonskin caps.  My mother gets a phone call and goes gray in the face.  Lew has had a bad spill from his bike going down one of our town’s steeper hills.  Apparently a dog ran out and startled him.  He is at Overlook Hospital.  We rush there.  My heart hammers.  How hurt is he?  I feel my mother’s fear.  I see my father grit his teeth.  This is the first time in my life that I have been faced with the possibility one of us could be badly hurt in a life-changing way, or even killed.  I am shaking inside.  I grip my mother’s hand as we enter the hospital room.  At the same instant, we all connect with Lew’s eyes.  He is sitting up, alert, bruised all over his face and arms but fine.  When he comes home the next day, he gets to sit out in the side yard on the chaise lounge.  His bruises are all dabbed with some kind of jelly.  He looks funny and knows it.  Mom and Dad buy him a huge quantity of comic books.  He burns through them.

This is today.  I think about that moment when we walked into Overlook Hospital.  I think how wholly unpredictable and unforeseeable most of life is.  I think about how little time has passed though the calendar says it is nearly sixty years.  I think about how the beaches of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, were playgrounds and holy places in our childhood.  There was one beach where our parents paid a quarter for us to get on.  Then we were given a small yarn—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, gray, purple—that indicated we had paid that day.  We tied it on our bathing suits so the lifeguards knew we had paid.  I think about how the beaches of California’s Central Coast have become my holy places in adulthood, and certain beaches in the Rhode Island and Massachusetts area his…and where his ashes will be scattered.  I think that calendars and clocks are tricks, illusions.  They have nothing to do with time as the heart knows it.  Time is liquid, not linear.  I need to get some yarn in different colors.

                                                 ****

Another today.  He is retiring from 36 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  I ask, “Do you think you’ll do some part-time teaching?”  He answers rapidly, “No.  I’m done.  I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my career.  But I’m done.”  I ask, “So what do you want to do?”  Again, he answers without hesitation, “Spend time with Anne, read, lay on the beach.”  For the past few years he has been sending me reading recommendations which we refer to as “Lew’s Book Club.”  He has done enough reading in his academic field.  These are wonderful novels, all the best contemporary stuff. He and Anne buy a little place to spend their winters in St. Augustine, Florida.  Anne, reading, beach (no yarn necessary).  All set up. Perfect.  What could go wrong?

                                                 ****

And this is today.  Our father has just died.  We take his ashes to a special beach at Montana de Oro state park here in San Luis Obispo County, Larry, Lew and myself.  We each pour some in the sea.  When Lew pours, a little wind tosses the ashes in a swirl around him, almost a caress.  Later, at a memorial service, we all speak some words about our father, the journalist, the lover of words.  Lew’s testament: “He was a man in full.”  Yes, not a perfect man, not a perfect father, but a man in full.  This day I can say the same of my brother.  He was a man in full.  A rare phenomenon in an angry time of half-beings.  A man in full whose bravery was met by the brute pain that cancer visits on its victims…and yet, a man in full to the end.

                                                 ****

Another today.  Some kind of sibling rivalry.  He is five years younger than Larry and only two older than I.  I guess I am an unwitting usurper, by dint of my position.  So, yes there are occasional struggles, a rare fist fight when I am six or seven (he wins with a fist on the top of my head that sends me crying), and some residual resentment riding into adulthood.  But this is generally not Shakespearean.  It’s run-of-the-mill jealousy, a peevishness that surfaces from time to time.  When our father dies, and I begin writing poetry in earnest for the first time in many years, he is avidly supportive.  He asks, “When are you going to start doing the thing you were born to do full time?”  Meaning, writing.  Meaning, specifically, writing poetry.  Meaning, life is short.  Who cares if you make money at it?  Just write.  I am touched by his enthusiasm and it continues and even grows as the last sheath of sibling rivalry is shucked away by the death of our brother early in 2004 and our mother in September of the same year.  “Write, Bob.  Just write.”

                                                ****

And this is today, toward the end of my visit in April of 2013, I am thinking what a good person Lew is.  He has never done any serious hurt to another human being.  He is a good man who has shared his joy of teaching and the French language and its literature with hundreds of students.  He has loved his wife, has been more a father to his adopted sons than their own, more a father to his grandson than his own.  There is no rhyme or reason to why this person gets cancer, or that person dies of a sudden heart attack or another person lives to 95 after being a royal prick most of his life. 

                                                   ****

This is a thought today.  It may be true that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but that is not the case with memory.  All these moments, thoughts and feelings exist simultaneously within me.  As I said, time is liquid, not linear. It has depth and breadth, current and cross-current. Conflicting truths flow together, forming something unforeseen in a new kind of present tense.  We are a family of five and yet now we are one.  “We thought we’d be boys forever…”  So I wrote in a poem after Larry’s death and it is still true.  We are boys forever.  The sandbox will always contain us, the pine limbs bear our weight.  Yet, we are also reduced to one now…one person to hold the elixir of memory for an entire family.  One person to carry the love and the loss.

                                                   ****

Another today.  I am in my late twenties.  I write Lew and ask him to share his sweetest memories of our childhood together.  The first thing he offers is the two of us on all fours as little boys, probably three and five, playing animals under the dining room table.  I am so grateful for this, for it has left my own ready-recall file, but the moment I read it, the memories come back in detail. 

More than sixty years later, in this today, I realize he has always been there, for I was the youngest.  They were all there, always—Mom, Dad, Larry and Lew, each pouring their own rich memories into the chalice, many of which I could never have reclaimed on my own.  I have never known life without at least one of them being at the end of a phone call or email.   But Lew is gone and I now know life alone, life void of contribution.

 As I try to understand why the bond is so strong, the grief so deep, I return to that space between the four legs of our dining room table, a table that protected us like a mother elephant, and those moments when we crawled around making animal sounds, so close to each other that his particular five-year old boy smell wrote its verse in me, and the feeling when our bodies would bump against each other, and the sound of his breathing and his voice as it manifested growls, purrs, howls, barks and trumpeting—verse after verse.  We knew each other only as little brothers can in the dawn light of life. 

It was a unique bond.  We were animals together, slept in the same room, knew that we came from the same people, looked up to the same faces, loved the same voices, rode the same hips and shoulders and were looked after by the same oldest brother.  We ran through the same storm door into the winter snows where snowmen, snow angels and sleds were the kings, queens and royal carriages of our little land, a land where together we discovered the neighborhood and friends, games and rituals, hiding places, magical trees, swinging vines and outcroppings of ancient faces.  We also ran through the same screen door into the bright summer air to dash through backyards and front, ride bikes, throw and kick balls, climb fences and trees, explore brooks and catch lightning bugs. And on trips to our grandpa’s, we tanned nut-brown like twins under the same sun on the same sand and in the same Atlantic waves.  There was only one person on earth right beside me from the beginning, each of us making our own marks on our lives’ first pages of poetry--my brother, Lew.

No words or deeds can fully honor my love for him.  But I am heading to the beach today…and I have yarn.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

My Brother Lew Has Cancer

for Lew

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is diagnosed early in 2011 at sixty-six.   He  has just spent a few weeks on the beach in Florida to get away from the New England winter.  Wonderful trip.  Then, suddenly, after returning to Rhode Island his left leg begins to swell.  What could it be?  A spider bite?  Some weird allergic reaction?  An infection?  A series of doctor visits and scans, from the local hospital to Massachusetts General and then the diagnosis.  Metastatic carcinoma of unknown origin.  It has probably been growing undetected for a year.  They don’t know where it started in his body.  Along with the multisyllabic diagnoses come multisyllabic drugs of, well, to us, unknown origin—xeloda , cisplatin, carboplatin, gemcitabine, taxol, pemetrexed, vinorelbine.  The names do not roll off the tongue.  They represent a new language to be mastered.  For all their strangeness, they might as well be the names of half-human, half-insect kings from the other side of the universe.   I feel as though I have razor blades in my mouth every time I try to say one of them.  There is, early on, also the possibility of multiple surgeries with “ectomy” at the end of each one…meaning cut it out.  Remove this.  Remove that.  Ironically, when a scan reveals microscopic signs of cancer in other areas of the body, the surgeries are ruled out.  They won’t give him the supposed quality of life they are intended to give. 

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  We have always said it that way in our family, from the time we are kids.  Not “roughly two years older”.  Not “two years and three months older.”  Twenty-seven months.  There is a certain love of precision in our blood, when it comes to some things.  Now that precision has brought us perilously close in a way we never imagined.  Twenty-seven months apart.  One of us has cancer.  The other doesn’t.  But now I am sixty-six.  Could I be next?  Only a pathological optimist would fail to wonder.

                                                  ***

I’m seven years old.  My father is a writer.  I am going to be a writer.  My first undertaking is a novel called “Little Lewie”.  My older brother Lew is the hero.  He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  Actually, he is twenty-six months and three weeks older.  I have just figured this out, at seven.  Precision is important. But I’ve learned you can round up and still be considered precise.  Lew is my hero in my first book because he is my older brother and I love him.  Even though we are close in age.  Even though there is some strange energy between us sometimes.  I later learn it is called “sibling rivalry.”  I do not have this with Larry, who is seven years older.  He is an island apart.  His thoughts and feelings are beyond us.  Seven years is forever, especially when you’re seven.   But whatever that energy is that I will later learn to call rivalry, there is something else far more powerful.  I love my brother.  I think he is really, really neat. My parents love him, too.  They think he is really neat.  I love how they love him.

I type my story on my father’s yellow copy paper, commonly used at newspapers these days, something that will vanish in about five decades as computers take over.  But right now, this yellow paper is my parchment, my holy scroll.  I type only short paragraphs.  I have to push hard, one finger at a time, on the keys of my father’s massive Royal typewriter.  Then I draw pictures on each page.  It’s a basketball story.  Heroism on the court.  Little Lewie is, well, little, but he can really move and shoot. I start with stick figures, then draw the flesh around them and erase the stick lines or shade over them, stretched out on my stomach in the grass under the dogwood tree.

                                                ***

My brother Lew has cancer. 

It’s now two years downstream from the moment of diagnosis.  The moment when a doctor says, “You have cancer.”  The moment when only you can know what it feels like to be the “you” in that sentence. Lew is beating the survival odds.  He is in the one tenth of one percent category.  But he still has cancer.  There has been no surgery, other than an arduous initial one to get a biopsy.  So he has all his organs.  He is a whole person, but his body is gradually experiencing the insurrection of rebel cells.  First radiation and then chemo have become part of the daily experience.  This is my second visit from across the country.  The first was this time a year ago.  His left leg was swollen to about two and a-half times the normal size. The initial tumor is in his left hip, inoperably surrounding the femoral artery.  Still, during the first visit he is in what our father often referred to as “fine fettle,” all things considered.  (That phrase, “all things considered” has taken on a whole different meaning. )  He wears a compression stocking which is hard to get on and off.  The swelling is due to what is called lymphedema.  Still, he is able to drive and insists on taking me all around the area where he has lived for nearly forty years…and which I have never visited in all that time.  He takes me to the campus at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth where he won eight national awards for being one terrific French professor and  from which he has just recently retired.  The campus is an impressive collection of massive concrete rectangles and open walkways.  I can imagine him in a lecture hall.  I can imagine him being stopped by a student with a question as he makes his way from one building to another.  I can imagine the respect, even adoration in his eyes.  I don’t have to see him lecture to know he is capable of spellbinding lectures of the richest kind.  He takes me all around the Rhode Island-Massachusetts boundary zone.  We drive across big metal bridges and onto low rocky beaches.  He shares memory upon memory, forty years of life I have missed being in California.  He takes me to the whaling museum and the church across the street where whalers worshipped before going out into the big sea after behemoths, the church Melville mentions in Moby Dick.  He takes me to a number of his favorite lunch places including the Inn at Castle Hill, a grand old building sitting on a hill above a bay.  It looks like something out of The Great Gatsby.  A broad lawn runs from the Inn down to the water.  There are lines of bright, empty white Adirondack chairs.  It’s still spring.  The wind has a chill.  No one will sit in them for a while.

My brother Lew has cancer.

I keep saying it, thinking that maybe it will fully sink in if I do.  Because it hasn’t.  It feels as if we are in an alternate universe.  If we just find a window we can wriggle through, we can get back to the one where he is enjoying his retirement, cancer free.  We lost dad in 02 at eighty-five.  We lost Larry in 04 at sixty-four.  For the first time in our lives, we are both older than our oldest brother.  We lost Mom later in 04.  Now it’s Lew and me and we are dealing with this demon again.  I’m looking for that window.  If we can only wriggle through…

The second visit.  This morning Lew is seated in the large reclining chemo chair at St. Anne’s Oncology Hospital in Fall River, just over the line in Massachusetts.  For two years, there has been nothing in his lungs but small dots.  Now, suddenly, a golf ball-sized mass in the lower left lung.  How does this happen in only a short time between scans?  The demon. Lew is holding his shirt above  his chest as he did when he was a kid to show our mother his chicken pox. This time, it is so the nurse can slip a needle that looks like a kitten’s claw into the port that has been installed just below the skin above his right pectoral muscle.  I ask if it hurts.  He says, “Yes, but just temporarily—a pin prick.”   The nurse adds, “We are penetrating just a little skin.” 

Fifteen minutes earlier, we are with his oncologist, Nancy, a woman in her late thirties, who talks to him as if he might be an old boyfriend from high school.  She is sweet, but she is also very direct and thorough.  Lew has a lot of questions.  He knows he is at the stage where the hope for any kind of enduring remission is a slim-to-none possibility.  He wants to know what the end is like.  When he can’t handle the pain any more, or when it’s too much labor to breathe, will they put him on a drip?  No, the doctor tells him, we rarely use drips any more.  The necessary pain meds are delivered orally in pill form, slipped under the tongue. He’s surprised but I tell him Mom was given morphine pills, under the tongue.  The doctor confirms.  Under the tongue.  The same tongue he stuck out at me when we were kids to make brilliantly outrageous faces.  The same tongue he stuck out for the doctor who examined him for tonsillitis.  The same tongue that helped him articulate millions of words as he lectured and coached university students for thirty six years.  The same tongue that he no doubt shared in the ecstatic clutch of love with his wife of forty years.   Now, the tongue that will be the mail box for pain suppression until there are no more funny faces possible, no more words, no more love.

                                                ***

A lot of us say we want to live to be a hundred…or more.  We don’t think about the potential dark side of that wish.  My mother lived to bury her first born child when he was only sixty-four.  Had my father not died two years earlier, he’d have been broken by Larry’s death.  Were he alive today, he’d be ninety-five.  If he knew his second son was unlikely to make it out of his sixties, he’d have gone from broken to pulverized.  My mother would have been crushed beside him.  People say they want the power to see the future.  They could get rich betting on the Kentucky Derby and Superbowl, knowing the outcomes. And they could get paralyzed foreseeing the coming calamities.  We all signed the lease of life without the term being filled in.  It’s an act of faith.  Without the ignorance of what is in store for us, it isn’t living.

                                               ***

Lew looks at the doctor straight on as she tells him that the recent onset of fatigue is the cancer, not the fentanyl patch, not the dilaudid, not the high doses of ibuprofen.  That’s why we’re trying this new chemo, docetaxel, to get you some energy back.  To give you some good days. 

He tells her, he has shared with me that he doesn’t expect to see his 69^th birthday seven months away.  She looks right at him.  We know where this is going, she says.  She doesn’t confirm the timeline, but the direction and the gist.  I am struck by how present she is, how honest, how empathetic without being unctuous.  This is her everyday life, I guess.  She is here to help people live a little longer and then leave comfortably.  Lew seems grateful for her honesty.  He is beyond struggling.  He doesn’t hit her with twenty “what if’s”. 

I ask Lew if he is afraid.  No.  I ask him if he is angry.  No.  He has told me in detail about his belief in reincarnation.  He is sure he has been here before and will be again.  He sees no tragedy, just some disappointment.  “I thought I had more time.  I ask if he feels sadness at times.  Yes.  Sadness.  For Anne, for his grandson, Ben, whom he has raised as his son for his two sons, Tommy and Jeffrey and their partners, Jackie and Tina.  He knows they are bound to him.  They’ll “be okay” whatever that means.  In that okayness, they will miss him terribly.  They will hurt for a long time.  But Lew has accepted he doesn’t have long.  His stoicism comes straight from our mother.  Certainly not Dad.  Though he was calm and accepting when his time came, Dad was eighty-five.  Had this happened to him at such a young age, he’d have been mightily angry, and mightily depressed.  I am more like him but Lew’s calm reaches me.  Besides, we are both old enough to stop asking why bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad.  As one of the mantra’s of our age says:  It is what it is.  But Lew does have a new mantra, a surprising one.  Several times a day he sighs from fatigue and/or pain, quietly uttering the old Yiddish expression, “Oy vey”.  It means, “Oh, where?” as in “Oh, where am I?”  Funny that a people should develop that habit of asking, “Where am I?” when they are hurting.  Ironic, since we have never been very religious or even ethnic.  I doubt Lew has been in a synagogue in decades.  Still, the words we heard from our grandparents and on occasion, our father, seem to say it best right now.  “Where am I?”  Am I still here where I get to be the person I have always been?  Or am I now somehow in a different place, in an alternate universe where weird multisyllabic kings dictate who I am and what I can do? 

                                               ***

The docetaxel is dripping into him.  He is in no pain.  He rests with his eyes closed, turned on his right hip.  A new nurse shows up, crouches down in his direct line of sight, touches him gently.  He opens his eyes.  “Jan!”  They hug and hold each other as dearly as lifelong friends.  “I’ve missed you!” he says.  She returns the feeling.  She was his first oncology nurse.  They got close.  She got transferred to another unit.  She heard he was asking for her.

The hugs, the deep direct gazes.  These people are either brilliantly trained or just brilliantly attuned (or both).  Why don’t we all look at each other this way every day?  Why do we wait for cancer to make gazing a true communion?

At least four different nurses interact with Lew and at some point, each one of them does a double take when they look at me.  Then, it’s either the straightforward, “You must be Lew’s brother!” or the teasing, “You can’t be Lew’s brother!”  Do we really look that alike?  Of course, we are family.  We have the same skin tone, high foreheads, the barest thatch left on top, similar hands…but aren’t our noses, even though they’re both prominent, actually quite different?  Our mouths?  The overall configuration of our heads?  Have we missed something, something that is both physical and sacred that is obvious to others…something that is the essence of what it means to be brothers?

                                                ***

During my visit, I have a series of dreams:  I am in a strange landscape…vertiginous cliffs, massive tsunamis, buses swept away filled with children, entire cruise boats disappearing into the valleys of wave mountains.  I do not recognize any place or any one.  I keep asking, “Where am I?”  “What is this place?”  “How will I ever get home?”  I wake up, heart pounding…not racing, probably not above 65, but pounding all the way to my ankles.  Maybe high blood pressure is generally a silent killer, but at this moment, it is loud and clear.  In another dream, I am told by a grizzled old man that I must follow the rules.  I object.  “I have been self-employed a long time.  I don’t follow your rules.  I follow mine!”  He points to pictures of my parents, Larry, Lew.  I wake up, again, heart slamming into my chest.

                                                ***

I’m at Tom’s Market in Tiverton, RI.  I have a list from both Lew and Anne.  I’m only here for three days but this is one thing I can do.  I can take a few tasks off Anne’s plate.  I can ask someone where the summer sausage is, where the prunes are, whether or not they have some of Lew’s favorites.  I can also walk the dog, Magnet, a 52 pound muscular chunk of Australian herder.  He has spent hours laying on the bed next to Lew, sleeping, but he is young and born to run.  I can also show Anne how to use the Jack LaLanne Juicer.  She’s not a tech person.  We put the juicer together and throw in some carrots, cumber, celery, apple. 

                                               ***

Lew has no quandary over the meaning of life.  His time has been beautiful and rich.  You have touched so many, I say.  Think of all those students who love you.  Think of the teachers who moved you.  Teachers never know the expanses of time and terrain their teachings will cross…but they travel.  Your teachings have wings.  People a half a world away at this moment might be talking about their time in one of your classes.  He smiles at the thought.  And think of the durability of those contributions as they move from life to life, without anyone even knowing their point of origin was a lecture you gave.   If you are right, Lew, if reincarnation is real and there is an upward progression to greater and greater consciousness and goodness, think of what might be next after a life as rich as this one.  The word “Wow!” would be appropriate.

                                              ***

He is laying on his bed talking about the final arrangements.  He has written his own obit, as he calls it.  He doesn’t want Anne to worry about it and he certainly doesn’t want someone who never really knew him slapping it together.  He will be cremated.  There will be no memorial service because he doesn’t need it, nor does Anne.  They know who they have been to each other.  All these years, he has had a nickname for her, a term of endearment in French.  Perfect, because she was also a French teacher. Perfect because uttering it was a daily gift.  Perfect because it implied both heaven and earth, defying and submitting to gravity.  Perfect.

                                              ***

I am sitting outside on the front steps of his house while he naps inside.  I notice the Japanese cherry tree in full bloom a few feet away.  Further down the lawn, the dogwood’s flowers are just emerging from their own buds and still cherry colored themselves.  On the other side of the lawn, a forty foot high maple is beginning to leaf.  I remember our childhood yard.  We had a Japanese cherry.  We had a dogwood under which I wrote and drew about the heroic exploits of Little Lewie.  We also had a maple from which we took the wing-like seeds, split them and stuck them on our noses.  Is this coincidence?  Accidental poetry?  Is it our mother and father’s hands reaching beyond the grave to shape our choices?  Is it proof of the themes that move with us from one life to the next?  Is it a montage of more images from mirrors within mirrors and windows with a little wriggle room?

                                            ***

My brother Lew has cancer.

It is tempting to think of the situation as a battle.  So many people do.  We can say that cancer is The Claw and The Fist and Lew and all those helping him are Tookie.  But the war metaphor doesn’t seem accurate.  In the war metaphor, if a person dies, then he has lost.  He is a loser.  But in my brother, I do not see a loser.  I see courage.  I see curiosity.  I see concern and gratitude and love.  A person can die badly or well.  My father, my mother and my oldest brother, Larry died well, with surprising clarity.  To die well is not a loss.  It is not a victory.  It is a beautiful gift to both yourself and those who love you.  It has so many layers and colors and movements.  It is music, art and poetry in one final act.  That is what I am thinking, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, as he sleeps in the room below.

                                            ***

I have to leave early.  Lew is still sleeping.  Anne comes out to say goodbye.  We kiss and go to hug and have one of those moments that could be awkward but turns out to be funny and dear…we both move to put our heads on the same side.  We haven’t hugged enough to have it down.  We will no doubt be doing a lot more.  We’ll get good at it.  She encourages me to go into the bedroom.  Lew is turned on his right hip, curled up, looking to me about eight years old.  I lean over and kiss him on the forehead and say, “I love you.”  He wakes up and thanks me again for coming and says we’ll talk soon.  I realize on the way to the airport that he didn’t have his hearing aid in.  He didn’t hear me say I love you.  I will say it again and again between now and “We know where this is going.”

On my way home, in the airport men’s room, I catch a sideways glimpse of myself in the mirror.  For a second, I think I am looking at Lew.  This happens more and more lately.  I catch a glimpse in a car or shop window and see my father or our older brother, Larry, or Lew. 

I am me and not me.  I carry the family with me.  Even my mother shows up in the mirror from time to time.   Is this a resonance from my earliest days when I struggled as the youngest to enter into the sphere of everyday exchanges?  Do I carry a primal uncertainty about who I am; or being the youngest, am I designated to carry the memories, the images, the family history, the endlessly rearranging montage of who we were and might have been?                                              

                                                ***

Over Arizona, the red landscape, the edge of the Grand Canyon, areas blackened by the shadows of clouds.  It looks like a cancerous lung to me now.

                                                ***

As little kids, Lew and I share a bedroom.  When Mom and Dad have said good night and gone downstairs out of earshot, Lew brings out the flashlight he has been hiding under his pillow.  The show begins.  He projects shadow characters on the ceiling with his hand.  There is The Fist.  There is The Claw.  These are not good guys.  But then, there is Tookie.  Tookie is the shadow of two fingers.  Tookie is our hero.  He leads us through endless adventures.  We lie with our eyes fixed on the ceiling.  I’m sure Lew doesn’t know from one moment to the next what his characters are going to do.  They take on a life of their own.  Somehow, with the exploits of The Claw and The Fist being played out above us each night, the daytime reports of “scary” Russians and Chinese and nuclear bombs from which we are drilled to hide under our desks at school are not so scary.  We have Tookie on our side.  Tookie will keep us safe. 

                                                ***

Another clear set of memories.  As kids, we say, “I love you,” all the time.  Mostly to Mom and Dad…and they to us.  I love you Mommy.  I love you Daddy.  I love you Bobby, Lew, Larry.  Then, somewhere along the way as our ages require two numbers, it stops.  Years later, when Dad is dying, then Larry, then Mom, those words come back to us.  Not as musical little toss-offs but definitive statements we enter, tentatively at first, but then with full ownership.  It’s as if we lost love’s seeds for years and ultimately found them in the bottoms of our pockets where they’d been waiting all along to be taken out one by one, delicately, between finger and thumb, to plant in each other’s hearts.  We were gardeners as children.  We learned it from our parents.  Then lost it…then found it again, thank God, in time. 

I love you Mom. 

I love you Dad.

I love you Larry.

I love you Lew. 

I love you Tookie. 

I see you, even in the dark…especially in the dark.

I see you gazing back at me

                                   in true communion.

C 2013 Bob Kamm