Detestable

Episcopalian ministers used to call themselves ministers but these days they call themselves priests. It's an adoption of Catholic terminology and the Complete and Total Loser gets this. While "minister" and "priest" may be as equivalent in the religion game as "lieutenant" and "captain" are in the Navy and Army, when fighting demonic possession or administering last rites, people call for a priest. Even Episcopalians.

The Episcopalian minister who met with the Loser and most of his remaining family (one brother was absent) to help plan their mother's service following her death Tuesday told them to "use this opportunity to bond as a family."

Right.

The problem is the eldest of the three sons (the Loser is number three). The man is, by any description, an asshole. Nearly 60, his sense of humor is frozen in time from when he was an adolescent. He delights in making mere misstatements of fact designed to upset and worry others. He carries these lies -- they don't rise to the level of a joke -- for long minutes before telling people he was "kidding" and further humiliating them by telling them they have "no sense of humor."

This is teasing, not joking, a bully's way. It is like stealing the crutches from a cripple, laughing at his agitation, returning them only when satisfied at the level of torment.

The Loser's brother does this to everyone. The Loser, of course, friends, family members and even his dying mother. Earlier today, after the Loser told his brother to try to inflict less stress on their 91-year-old father, he asked the Loser, "Do you believe exercise is good for you?" The Loser answered "Yes."

"Well," the Loser's brother said, "if it's good to get your heart going when you're exercising, I'm doing the same thing with Dad."

You read that correctly. The Loser's brother, father of two, founder of a company that bears his name, owner of four houses in three states, has no idea that there are different kinds of stress and that not all are beneficial.

Stunning.

This photo's of the Loser's mother when she was a little girl. It appeared in an issue of The National Geographic Magazine in the 1938.

 

Insane Food

They draw the line at casseroles; there have been none. But people are bringing the Complete and Total Loser and his father ridiculous amounts of food since his mother died Tuesday at 80.

Crudites, which, if you're as ignorant as the Loser was until just a few years ago, are just cut up vegetables. 
Lasagna. A comfort food. Warm, soft, yielding, filling. 

Shepard's Pie, which is something no one with a personality would ever eat. 
Cookies, of course. Soups. Rotisserie chicken. And yesterday the parents of the Loser's sister-in-law brought a comically huge ham. It's the size of an entire pig. And the Loser and his family have never been fans of the meat, which they find salty and associate with forced Easter dinners with people they weren't even related to.

The Loser has seen comedians include descriptions of food brought after deaths as part of their stand up routines. They joke about grief and its relationship to hunger. He's laughed at this, but he gets the point of the food bearers. The attempt to nourish others is a direct way of helping, and it seems appropriate when the female head of a household—traditionally the one who cooks—dies.

Meanwhile, the Loser's father, 91, eats the food, as does the Loser. Except the ham.

Road Rage

He's always known this, but the Complete and Total Loser was reminded Tuesday that when you get so mad at the idiot driver in front of you for driving like the moron he surely must be that you want to ram his car, yank him out and pummel him, try to remember that he may be driving his elderly father home from the hospital in which they both spent an hour with their wife and mother's corpse and may be just a little distracted by the events of the day. The Loser is saying this and it didn't even happen to him. It just made him think about it.

The Loser's father contemplates the family koi pond a few hours after his wife's death.

The Loser's Mother

Below is the Complete and Total Loser's mother, who died early yesterday morning at the age of 80. The photo was taken well before the Loser was aware of what cameras were and possibly before his existence. He's unsure. He found it in a photo album when he was a boy and always liked it. The Loser can tell that there was love between the photographer (his Dad) and the subject. 

February 1, 1931 – October 25, 2011

The dash between those two dates represents, in this context, my mother's life.

This Horrible Event

What you won't know until it happens to you is that the hospital death of a loved one, besides being filled with grief, is grindingly dull. The same stupid stories and platitudes over and over again as new uninvited visitors come to express their sympanthy. Also, The Complete and Total Loser is finding while tending his mother during her final hours, much of the process is simply repulsive, but he won't go into descriptions of bodily fluids and the like.

The Loser's mother's last coherent sentences were demanding an end to her suffering, for the Loser to choke her to death. He half considered this early during the night shift, but decided that his resume would not be enhanced by an entry reading, "October, 2011: Matricide." It's awful, but the in the 220 million years of mammalian existence evolution has strove to maintain life at any cost. That means that although the Loser's mother's spirit is gone, her body fights on, and in the four long seconds after each exhalation it commands her to breathe yet again, even against her will.

Mundane Crap

He's learning firsthand things he's read about for years.

The simple, day-to-day stuff that he still does, even while fully, searingly aware that his mother lies in a hospital room knowing her end approaches. He's doing laundry as this is being written. He plans to shine his orthopedic shoes tonight and prepare his work lunches in advance (banana nut bread sandwiches with almond butter and honey, foiled, wrapped and frozen).

She's taking it fairly well, The Complete and Total Loser thinks. He can't help be a little surprised by this. Years ago, in the late 70s, the Loser worked at a movie theater and got his parents in to see the movie "All that Jazz," which is largely about death. It had music for Mom, nudity for Dad. Perfect! When they came home the Loser's mother cried at the Loser's perceived cruelty in getting her to see the film. A mean joke, she called it. Surely the Loser knew that she, now in her mid 40s, was depressed by the notion of her mortality.

He did not. Honest.

Now, beaten and dazed by time, the Loser's mother announces her coming death to the Loser and his brother as they enter her hospital room.

"I'm going to die," she said.

"So are we," the Loser said.

"Yeah," said his brother. "Everyone does."

"I won't be here tomorrow," she said.

"Oh? Where will you be?"

She pointed to the ceiling. "Up," she said, pointing heavenward. At this, she nodded righteously at the Loser, the family atheist.

"It's gonna get cold on the roof, Mother," said the Loser's brother.

(A side note: The Loser's brother, a winner, spent about 75 percent of the hour and a half they spent in the hospital room on his Blackberry, emailing workplace contacts, sending notes to his wife. In one way, this is fine; his mother -- obviously a bit preoccupied and hazed with illness -- didn't notice. But the Loser wondered if doing this won't come back to haunt his brother who, despite being an insurance lobbyist, does have some depth to him. At the same time, the Loser regretted slightly the fact that he is a smartphone holdout -- real contacts only for him! -- and had nothing better to do than avert his eyes while the cute Russian-born nurse checked his mother's tubes and things.)

The Loser is thrilled while at work, where it's busy, but he does find that he's making more errors than usual. But it's hard for him to care about that now.

Weeks

It's coincidence but memorable things have always happened to The Complete and Total Loser on October 18th. Memorable to him anyway. In his childhood years these events were on the order of beloved pets disappearing, returning, fighting, or having offspring. As a teen and early adult, they involved major rejections and departures. Early in his middle years, in 1996, he was robbed at gunpoint while sweeping leaves outside his apartment on a bright autumn October 18th. 

This time, now in his 50s, the date was the one the Loser heard official word from a doctor that his mother's life would end in a matter or weeks.

If you haven't lost a loved one it's always going to be a shock to hear that someone close to you will be dead in a determinate amount of time no matter how ill they've been.

The Loser's father seemed even more reluctant to accept this than the Loser, even though at 91 he's had several of his own close calls with death. The Loser attributes this to the momentum of nearly 59 years of life together.

"The only two people who've influenced my life are my mother and your mother," he told the Loser as the two sat in a tiny room near the ER room in which doctors were treating his mother. The Loser reminded his father that he did have three healthy sons, of which just one was a loser, and four thriving grandchildren, but his father was focused on his wife.

The Loser knows that when one spouse dies, merry widow stereotypes aside, the other often follows soon, but he had hoped that his father would be an exception to that. He has always been good around the house, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry for all; not the average man of his era who ordered pizza when the wife was out of town and couldn't run the dishwasher. Also, he has his own circle of friends and regularly does old-guy stuff. Prostate cancer support meetings. Discussion groups for Civil War buffs. Church gatherings despite his disbelief in an actual supreme being. 

But now, judging from how he took the news Tuesday, the Loser is unsure of this. In just minutes the Loser saw his father age five years, which at his age is a lot.

Soon, probably

Will she make it to 2012? Not that dates and numbers matter, but The Complete and Total Loser can't help wondering if his mother will be alive two and a half months from now. 

Not that he'd call her current state "alive." Yes, she's more alive than many. She gets up and eats, showers and all, but the majority of her waking hours are spent either making his 91-year-old father miserable with her petty demands (she bangs her cane against the floor like a hag in a Dickens novel) or just lying there, waiting. The Loser thinks that if he dressed like the Grim Reaper and entered her room she wouldn't be a bit surprised. 

He thinks these thoughts, light ones of her death, almost wishing it would happen soon, then feels awful. He wants his mother to die! When it happens he'll want to slit his throat for this.

But no. The Loser doesn't want his mother to die. His mother is a strong, smart woman who went to work as soon as the Loser, her youngest, was in first grade. She worked full time when many women married to men who made enough for them not to have to stayed home. She did well. She sold real estate before it was a cliche. The Loser's mother is funny, a good singer, stands on her head at parties, rides a motorcycle (for one summer in a vacation town, but still), has smoked pot when it was very illegal, drives too fast and is a good cook. His mother calls the Loser down from his room while washing dishes just for his company, laughs with him at reruns of "I Love Lucy" and Jerry Lewis movies on television when he get home from school, and splits a Tab with him while she's needle pointing, making room for the cat on her lap, and saw him through four leg operations, holding his hand to draw off the pain.

The Loser wants his mother to live forever. The woman he wants dead is the emaciated, feeble, needy woman who's responding to age with bafflement and pain, like a little girl slapped across the face by a stranger on the street. Who responds to the daily loss of life by trying to control others around her, never missing a chance to tell anyone in earshot about every ache. 

That's the woman the Loser wants dead. But when it happens, he'll know that his wished his mother dead also. 

Remember "The Secret"?

Remember the book "The Secret"? It sold millions of copies, was made into a popular DVD, had all sorts of testimonials to its powers and then ... faded away. The photo below is of a copy in a library bookstore in The Complete and Total Loser's city. (It's been sitting there for days.) Books there are only $2 and $3 (for hardbacks) because there are many more books than readers.

Back to The Secret." If so many people bought it and it worked, why are more people than ever having such bad times? The Loser knows why: It's because New Age, feel good, positive thinking things don't work in the long run. For ever one person you find who says something like this book changed their lives for the better, you'll find a hundred who did what that person did without success. But watch. The ideas in The Secret, itself a repackaging of old ideas, will be tweaked and retitled and be a best seller to a new generation of losers a decade or so from now. Maybe sooner.

Things in Common

Steve Jobs's death today saddens the Complete and Total Loser even though he and Jobs, a successful man with a family, have little in common except that both used Apple computers, are in their 50s and are bald men. Really, that's about it.

The Loser learned recently that he has a one in three chance of getting pancreatic cancer. Not bad odds. So there's a chance he and Jobs will eventually have another commonality.

The Wall Street Takeover

Like many losers, The Complete and Total Loser would like to see a societal upheaval of some sort. A zombie apocalypse, an alien invasion, an asteroid strike -- such things would be fine with him. He fantasizes that somehow the lack of skills he has to succeed in the world will morph into skills that will help him survive in a speculative fiction future. Really, though, he knows that he would be among the first on the zombie menu, the first to be vaporized by a spaceship's ray gun and the first to freeze and starve to death in a nuclear winter.

The Loser knows nothing will come of the current activity in Lower Manhattan. The rich are too rich and have their hooks in the politicians, who control the police and the military, and also control the media, which knows where its money comes from. As for bypassing the media with the Internet, nice idea but it won't happen. You need slick production values and, these days, a heart warming story line of some sort to hold anyone's attention for longer than a few weeks. Any changes in how we live now will occur in small, dull increments. Drat.

txt msgng

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we bth find it funy
i txt her whn im in th showr
she iz my litl hony
we txt n txt frm evryplc
wearng mittins or a glov
n i cant wait to c her face
i ges this must be luv