“Find Me”

I love Ro’s blog, but when you have more to say than what will fit within 200 characters, including punctuation and spaces,  it can get a little frustrating.  I’m pretty long-winded so I have to get creative with almost every question or comment I send her.

After finishing her book today, I had a lot I wanted to share with her.  I can’t help it… maybe I’m a wacko, stalker-like fan, but the more I learn about her, the more I find we have in common.  Mind you, there are also many, many differences.  But you know how someone tells you a story about something that happened to them and you had a similar experience.  How often can you shut up and say nothing when all you want to do is say, “Me, too!”?  That’s so funny that I said that though, because my parents used to call me “MeToo” when I was little.  Maybe I just identify with everyone, but I don’t think so.

 Anyway, if you haven’t read “Find Me,” and you don’t like to know details about a book you’re planning on reading, especially stuff about the end, then don’t read this post any further.  You probably wouldn’t find it too interesting anyway.  Just skip to the next one and have a nice day. 

But, I listened to “Find Me” on a book on tape, read by Rosie herself.  If you’ve read my blog before, and I know that no one has, you would have already known that I had borrowed the book on tape from my local library (see post “The Library”).  I’ve wanted to read the book for a couple years, but never did.  People started mentioning it on Rosie’s blog and she had it for sale there, too.  When I found out the taped version was read by Rosie, I decided that it was the best way to go for that type of book.  I’m glad I did.

I was quite surprised to find that it was not in the least comedic.  It was two stories that blended together.  I like when writers do that.  The story about Stacie was interesting, yet strange, and as Rosie put it, creepy.  But it was the memoir, the things that happened in Ro’s childhood, that captivated me.  As everyone knows, her mother died of breast cancer at a young age, leaving her five young children alone with a father who, well, it seems almost died along with her.  I will never know what that’s like.  That isn’t something she and I have in common. Not really.  My mother died, too.  But she was there to tell me about my period, she was at my graduation, she dropped me off on my first day of college, helped me buy my first car, she was there for my wedding, when I bought my house, the day I had my first son, the day I had my second son, she baby-sat frequently.  I can’t compare Rosie’s loss to mine.  But, it doesn’t matter how old you are when you lose your mother, you still need her.

I also lost my brother. He was 35, I was 33.  He was a good friend. He was my only brother.  No one can replace him. Not my step-brothers, who I did not grow up with, and hardly see. Not my brothers-in-law, of which I have five, if you count husbands of sisters-in-law.  Not my friends who are men, not my husband, not my father, not my step-father.  There is no one.  

There are similarities in the feeling of loss of my brother to the loss of my mother, but more differences.  I can’t really discribe it.  The only thing I can say is that losing your mother is something expected when you reach a certain age… not that she was old enough to die, but a few of my friends had already had parents that passed away from whatever.  So, unlike Rosie, when my mother died, I didn’t feel like I was different than most people.  That happened when my brother died. 

He left us, by choice in a way, before my mother got sick.  That’s what suicide is, I guess. A choice, right?  I don’t really think he had much of one, but I wasn’t there… I really don’t know.  The days after we found out he was gone are very much a blur.  I remember talking to Father Ralph about suicide and whatever it was that he said, helped me to deal with it at the time, but I don’t recall what he said.  My father described it with an analogy that seemed to explain it quite well.  He told us that if you’re in a lot of pain with a toothache and you don’t go to the dentist and get it taken care of, eventually you will rip the tooth out yourself to stop the pain. Kind of a mild comparison, but it was up the right alley, I think.

So, anyway, I wanted to write about how my story is kinda like Rosie’s.  It really isn’t but she wrote about how Parker all of a sudden out of nowhere said a little something that her mother used to say all the time.  Of course, Parker never met his grandmother, so it was her saying hi to Ro through him.  Well, that is where we have a similar story.  Actually, I have a couple of them.

The first one was after my brother died.  He died a few weeks before my birthday in 1999.  The morning of my 34th birthday, I was on my way to work, listening to the morning team on WAAL.  The main DJ, Oz, was moving away and it was his last day.  My mind was wandering, I was thinking about my brother as usual, since it was my birthday and he never forgot my birthday (except one year when, in a very ”Sixteen Candles” type way, everyone in my family did).  So, I was thinking about just after he died.  We had a memorial service for him… I guess that’s what they call it when the body is cremated.  Not a funeral, a memorial service.  There were a lot of people there.  He had a lot of friends and so did everyone in our family.  One person who was there, was someone I didn’t think knew my brother.  He was the mayor of a nearby town… he still is, actually. His name is Harry Lewis.  I was thinking that morning of my 34th birthday, “Why in the world was Harry Lewis at my brother’s memorial service?”  I know the answer now and I’ll share it later, but I had no idea then.  Not even 20 seconds after that question went through my mind, over the radio I heard Oz say, “Guess who has just come into the studio on my last day…. Mayor Harry Lewis!”  Now, I got the spingles or tingles or however Rosie described it.  Harry Lewis is not the mayor of the city from where WAAL broadcasts.  He is the mayor of the next town over.  So, that was about the weirdest thing that could have happened at that moment and I knew, without a doubt, it was my big brother wishing me a happy birthday.

That was just the first one.  I used to work in a branch office of a bank.  We’ll call it Branch #1.  One of the services our bank provided to our business customers is to refer them to a payroll service representative.  From the time I started working there, our bank refered people to ADP.  Then, in the fall of 1999, we switched to Paychex.  My brother worked for Paychex in the Albany area right up until about two months before he died.  He had quit all of a sudden and took a trip “to get his head on straight.”  That’s a whole other story, though.  So, when he was working for Paychex, he was one of their most successful sales reps.  I think he was quite well-known throughout the company.  Anyway, one day probably around September after he died, the new rep for Paychex came into our branch to introduce himself.  He was a local guy, young, very nice.  I told him that my brother used to work for the company and when I mentioned his name, he knew who he was although he had never met him since it’s a completely different territory.  We talked about him for a while.  I told him that I had found some pictures of the Paychex racing team in my brother’s things and would try to get them to him.  So that was that. 

A few months later, I was transferred to branch#2 about ten miles away, in the next town over. I kinda forgot about the Paychex guy. We never saw him, we faxed referrals directly somewhere and didn’t really need him.  My birthday rolled around again in May.  I was standing behind the teller line that morning at work.  I looked up and out the window and who do you think I saw coming toward the door?  That’s right, Paychex guy.  Happy Birthday, again! 

That was the last time I was aware that my brother was sending me a birthday greeting, but who knows, he may have tried and I just didn’t get it.  It wasn’t the last sign from him though.

One day, at a different job where I worked alone in an office, I was having trouble with an email attachment.  One thing my brother was always good for was computer questions.  He helped me many times step-by-step to conquer some task I didn’t know how to do.  So, I tried and tried to figure out how to print this particular attachment that kept coming out a quarter of the size because it was so large that’s all that would fit in the screen.  I tried many things that seemed logical.  I called my sister. She asked someone in her office. No one seemed to know what to tell me.  She was going to ask someone else for me, but they were at lunch and she’d have to call me back.  I hung up and yelled up at the ceiling, “WHERE IS MY BROTHER?!?!”  I then turned back to my computer and forwarded the email to my AOL email address, opened AOL, then the email, printed it out, and guess what?  It worked.  I didn’t even think about what I was doing until it was all over.  It wasn’t me who figured it out.  There was absolutely no thought process going on in my mind.  My brother was guiding me, showing me what to do, step-by-step, without my knowledge.

So far, that was the last “sign” I got from him.  That’s OK.  I know he’s there to help me when I really need it. 

The following March, my mother died of lung cancer.  Unlike Rosie, I knew a week ahead of time that she would die. I was there, holding her hand when it happened.  She did not suffer much, thank God.  My mom was pretty much always there for me.  I remember as a child, a teen, even an adult, if I couldn’t find something in the house, she would always have a suggestion where to look and it was nearly always there.

On the Friday before Easter, which was maybe two weeks after Mom died, we were on our way to Buffalo to spend the weekend with my father and step-mother.  I had to buy food coloring because we planned on coloring the eggs Saturday morning.  We stopped at a Walmart half-way to Dad’s.  My husband and kids stayed in the car and I went in alone.  The Walmart had a small food section, unlike the Super Walmart near our house, maybe about four or five short aisles.  I went up and down the aisles, looking and looking for the food coloring.  They HAD to have it! I did not give up. They seemed to have everything else.  After about ten minutes (maybe five, but it seemed like ten), and going down every aisle at least five times, I turned down this one aisle I had been down a few times already.  I was looking at the products on the shelves and I got to the end and there, smack dab in the middle of the aisle, so that I couldn’t go any further, was a kid’s bicycle.  I said outloud to myself, “What the heck is that doing there?”  Then I turned my head to the left and guess what I found…. yup! The food coloring.  Thanks Mom!!!

I never ever ever had any kind of communication with people who had passed on before these things happened.  I did go to see a so-called medium a few months after my brother died.  It must have been after the first birthday thing.  But, so much like Rosie’s experience, she was so obviously not in communication with him.  Saying things like he was right there with me and telling me how my children were handling his death.  My younger son was only a year old!  She knew nothing!  I threw the money at her and ran out crying.  I’d love to have a real reading from someone reputable, but I don’t want to go through that again.  And if I don’t ever find someone who can talk to my brother and mother, that’s OK.  I have heard from both of them directly.

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