LIFE, LOVE, DEATH, MEMORY: FOR MY DEAD NIECE WHO DESERVES MORE THAN THIS

"I said I came into this world not wanted and I will go out not wanted." 

                               Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 26, 2016.

My niece Ruth Ann Howerton-Luck died April 2, 2016, nearly two years after being diagnosed with colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. It kept metastasizing until it was everywhere from her lungs to her brain and ovaries. She tried to stop it and lived as long as she could through the pain and the nausea, the surgeries and chemo. On Jan. 30 she told me, "I will be gone in two or three months [because] my cancer is a rapid growing kind. I want to fight a little longer so Ryan and the girls have a mom." She fought. She was valiant and courageous, but no matter what she did, the cancer seemed to do one thing more, or two, or ten. It is what cancer does. She was a long time dying, and then she was a short time dying, and then she was dead. In that same Jan. 30 conversation she said, "I am not going to hospice. I mean it may look like a grand way to die but it really isn't." She had experience caring for the dying. On April 2 she died at home a few days after leaving hospital care. Her children were there, her brother, nieces and nephews, her stepmother. Her husband was there too.

It is now April 14 and no plans have been announced for a funeral or a memorial service and her family and friends cannot understand why. When news of her death was posted hundreds of people responded. People loved her, knew her, intimately followed her pain-wracked struggle, were sad for her, hopeful for her, awed by her. Now they want to share their love for her, bid her farewell, gather around their memories of her. We need to hear each other say things about her, weep together; her two daughters and her son need to say what they must and hear what they should about their mother. When? Where? Her husband spoke vaguely of "something in a few months." He has said nothing else. We don't even know what happened to her remains.

Meanwhile people talk, they text, we compare notes and messages Ruth left behind about her cancer and the misery heaped on top of the pain of her disease in the final months of her life gather into a stormy cloud. She needed for all of us to know what was happening besides cancer and made sure we did, but begged people to do nothing, say nothing, no matter how much we knew, fearing things would become worse for her and her son. We honored her request. Some of us wish we hadn't. Now that time has passed. She is dead and we are becoming impatient. The cloud is rolling and when the storm breaks it is likely to be ugly.

Ruth Ann Howerton was born in Greensboro, NC, to a teen-aged mother who already had one child by the time my brother married her. Her father was my brother John. He was a teen-ager too. It was an inauspicious beginning that grew worse as time passed. Ruth's brother was born a year or so later. Ruth's parents were hardly parents to their children at all. It is a tired old tale. They were children themselves, etc. It is an excuse. Sometimes my brother, his wife and children stayed with my parents in a house never meant for that many people because they had no money. It was crowded, noisy, always aswirl with people (mostly relatives of one sort or another. My grandmother lived next door). Sometimes they had their own place. Sometimes they left the children home alone for hours or days at a time while they went out to do the things childless teen-agers do. Their small children were left to fend for themselves and tend to each other the best they could. Their house - when they had one - smelled of dirty diapers and cigarette smoke. It was a shitty way to live and it couldn't last. They couldn't last. The life they were living caught up with them. My brother ended up in prison for something involving a carload of marijuana and an undercover cop. His wife found her own way and she didn't want her children along for the trip. Ruth and her brother were lost in the shuffle and seemed doomed to a life in foster care. Then, because my father insisted on it ("Nobody else is going to raise my grandchildren!"), they ended up with my parents. It was official. Signed, sealed and delivered. Abandoned children taken in to be raised by their grandparents.

The day that happened Ruth started looking for love. Abandoned children do that. She found it from time to time but it didn't last. She loved my mother (Ruth's Memaw, the only real mother she ever had) and was loved in return. She loved her children and they loved her. We loved her from near and far. She was not unloved and she was not unwanted. But she wanted more than that, she was greedy for it. She wanted more love closer to home. And she didn't believe she was receiving it. In the end, her fear of love lost seemed worse than her fear of dying. It was sad to watch.

Now, after the life she lived and the death she lived, the love she had and the love she craved, she deserves more than this. Soon.

 "I can't believe my life has come to this."

 Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 30, 2016

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NOTE: Since this piece was posted sketchy plans for a memorial service in Greensboro, NC, on May 14 have been posted. No further details have been announced.

ON INSUFFICIENCY

Insufficiency. The feeling has been with me since I was a child and felt I could not do enough to be sure my mother loved me. Love was not unconditional. Being was not enough. Love took lots of doing. And even all that doing never felt like enough.

I recently received at questionnaire at my doctor's office. It was supposed to measure my sense of well-being, at least that is what they said. Lots of questions, multiple choice answers. "Have you considered suicide?" When? Never? Sometimes? Today? Yesterday? The day before that? No matter how many choices they give, how do you answer a question like that? All of the above? None of the above? How about: "None of your fucking business." Circle one.

Next question:

"Do you feel you cannot do enough?" The possible answers ranged from "Never" to '"Sometimes" to "Always." A disturbing question, but the answer to this one was easy: Always. Let's make that, ALWAYS!

Enough never happens to me. I wouldn't know how it feels.

How much is enough? People say, "Enough is enough" or "Enough already." But no matter what, there is more to be done. More work, more love, more parent, more child, more husband, more marriage, more success, more words, more books, more of everything. Do more chores! More and still more. No matter what you do. Do more.

In exchange you will what? Pay me more? Love me more (or love me at all)? Be more married? More and more and more.

No matter what I will continue to feel that I have not done enough. Never. I learned it at my mother's knee.

HEART HURT: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

My niece Ruth died a few days ago. 

When my mother saw something particularly sad or bad - especially if it involved animals or children - she would say, "It just makes my heart hurt." There was a particular crimped and crumpled edge of sadness in her voice when her heart hurt. She could make you feel it even if you didn't particularly want to. It was a powerful thing to hear, but eventually so many things made her heart hurt that it lost its power.

My heart does not hurt. The only times it did the doctors suspected a heart attack and put me in the hospital. And I do not speak from the ragged and aching edge of sadness my mother visited more and more frequently as she grew older. But what my mother used to say makes sense to me today. And I can hear her saying it.

My niece Ruth died. It just makes my heart hurt.

MY OLD FRIEND HUGH

Hugh Merrill died in late December. We were very close friends for a few years in Atlanta in the early 1970s. We worked together at the Atlanta Journal, drank together, ate a great deal of unhealthy food, smoked some dope (pot made him go to sleep peacefully, hashish changed his personality in frightening ways) but beer was our drug of choice and the Stein Club down on Peachtree Street where the hippies came out to play was where we went to drink and talk the way Southern boys full of beer always do – truth and bullshit in equal measures – and there were lots of us around the table almost every afternoon, actors, musicians, other newspaper people and an alcoholic novelist . One of the actors ended up on Dukes of Hazard and I heard the drunken novelist died a few years later sleeping on the bar at Manuel’s Tavern where he mopped up after hours. Hugh knew about many things, but sports was not one of them.

Once he was hitchhiking in Tuscaloosa, got a ride and then was put out on the side of the road when he didn’t recognize the grinning driver. It was Joe Namath (Joe said, “You really don’t know who I am?” Hugh said no. And Joe put him out right there). Hugh was funny – and charming* too, but not everyone thought so – and did the best impersonation of George Wallace I ever heard, even did it for Wallace). We listened to lots of all kinds of music together and fooled around at the edges of rock and roll – including a scary evening spent onstage with the Jefferson Airplane that damaged my hearing and taught us we never wanted to be rock stars (from up there the crowd was terrifying, pressing, undulant, then there was an altercation with the police, settled when singer Marty Balin stopped the show, stepped to the edge of the stage, leaned down and reminded the police there were lots of us and not so many of them) and Hugh’s seduction of an actual singing star (surprised him so much he called me from her bed at a downtown hotel to tell me where he was, who he was with and how his groupie dreams just came true) – and wrote about it sometimes. He was terrible with money in those days. He probably borrowed a lot a little bit at a time, but I never added it up. I didn’t expect to see it again when I gave it to him. And I didn’t. He came from a famous Alabama family of lawyers, judges, politicians and at least one lieutenant governor; I came from a proper North Carolina family, well known in small, mostly local ways, and a busted marriage that their propriety had a difficult time accepting. I figured propriety had a lot to do with Hugh’s relationship with his family too. Neither of us wanted any part of all that. He preferred music, acting and magic tricks to a career in politics or lawyering; I preferred sin and almost anything else to the Presbyterian propriety I grew up around. We both were looking for something, someone, somewhere. What? Who? Where? We didn’t have a clue or a map or a plan. That didn’t stop us. Besides, we had Atlanta. Hugh’s turned out to be a who and he ended up marrying her and I heard he was devastated when she died, but I wasn’t around for that part. Mine turned out to be a where and I was already gone. By then we had lost touch the way friends like us often do. Completely.

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*How charming was he? One night we were driving north from Atlanta to a bluegrass festival somewhere in Virginia. We decided to drop in on my parents in North Carolina. Seemed like a good idea to a couple of guys who had been driving and drinking ever since they left Atlanta. It was nearly midnight, but the lights were still on in the house, so we stopped. We all chatted out by the car in the driveway about this and that and I figured we would be back on the road pretty soon. Then food came up. Hugh got to talking about sawmill gravy and talked about it so lovingly and longingly that my mother went into the house, fried up some fatback for the gravy, made a pan of biscuits to go with it and sat Hugh down in her kitchen and let him eat his fill. He kept her laughing (he did his George Wallace, too) and she kept him eating. We didn’t leave until sometime near dawn. My mother lived until 2006 and from time to time over all those years would remember that night and ask about Hugh, amazed and disappointed when I told her I’d completely lost touch with him long ago.