Pause Button
Sep. 17th, 2009 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburgAs of 1:30 this morning, Cliff has been gone for eleven years.
I can tell you where I was when I got the news, what I was doing and what I was wearing. I can see my nephew waking up in the middle of the night to come tell me (and his mother) he had a sore throat, but didn't know why. (Yes, I was at Sis's house. I had to work the next day OR ELSE but Cliff's status had been poor when I saw him at the hospital that afternoon. He was septic as HELL - but the resident had released me when I asked if I needed to stay. Cliff had been worse, and lived - nobody said anything to me about that being 'It.' Turned out, it was.)
Nephew is a bit more like me. He might not always know why, but he certainly knows when something has come through the building.
My immediate reaction was relief and shock. Relief that it was finally over (it had been AWFUL far too long, with no hope of anything good ever again...too long. Waaaay too long - )and shock that oh my it really COULD happen, and it had.
Sometime in the next day afterward, I 'listened' for him - and was rewarded with a presence like searing cold champagne - bubbly, FAST moving, effervescent and jubilant. He had told me to celebrate his freedom upon his death - and oh, he was. He so very was.
I visit his grave on this day (and I'll go out later) if I at all can (and check on it when I'm in the neighborhood the rest of the year) and try to get a feel for how things are going with him. Lately, it's been very clear he's Not There. I've gotten a sense of the answering machine has been left on in the past - now, it's almost as if he's moved and not left a forwarding address.
But if I stick around a bit, tidying up the joint - I get a brief impression of irritation - 'what ARE you doing here?' He's busy doing other things. He's very clear that I really need to be doing other things as well, too.
Well, I am. This year more than any other. *thinks* He'd like Xander a whole lot - they share a wicked sense of humor, that's for sure.
Oh, I miss him. I miss him the most when I'm around people who won't know anything about him except what I tell them - and it will always be filtered around 'this is Donna's late husband' first and foremost.
People, he was so smart. (I say that about Xander, but here's why I wondered. Cliff WAS smart - and he'll be my touchstone going forward on the matter.) Cliff was bright enough to break brand-new plumbing by first finding the three-penny nails, and then dropping them from a high enough height to break the terracotta pipes (don't ask me why Dad used them, I don't know) - because he wanted to know if he could. About five years old or so.
By ten, he had devised a means to put an entire garden on the roof of the house using a pulley system cobbled together out of rope, buckets and the gears from his bicycle. Nobody even knew it was there until the earthworms started falling through the ceiling upstairs.
Dad was a thermionics guy at JPL - so at times, brought interesting things home. Like, the first samples of solar cells. They snapped so nice when broken in half. Yes, he did. He might have been younger than Xander at the time.
(He would have thought Phinneas & Ferb were pikers.)
He went to school in private schools because public schools wouldn't take a kid with diabetes. He had a healthy love/hate relationship with most organized religions as a result - and kept his Bible on the shelf right next to the book on Tarot (I still have that one) and the Joy of Sex (which he found dull). He also took the course on Human Sexuality in college and kept the textbooks, but warned people they were pretty pedestrian. I think I still have it as well - he wrote 'I AM NOT SANE' on the ribs of the pages. That's how you know which one was his.
He did three and four digit division and square roots in his head to keep from being bored. He would cover pages and pages of paper with Math just for fun.
So when a chance to work at JPL on a student project came along, he took it - and that's how he was programming for Voyager in FORTRAN at the age of 14.
By the time I met him in his early twenties, he had not only taken Basic Mountaineering with the Sierra Club, he had been teaching classes in it. He had bought a house. He had never worked for minimum wage - always knowing he was worth more, and asking for it. (When minimum was $2.90, he was working as a student engineer in Anaheim for $8.00, for example.)
Those happy days when the shuttle program was new and all that.
By the time he was thirty, complications had set in - he couldn't see well enough to climb. Soon, he would have strokes, heart attacks and then amputations, dialysis and disability that would leave him housebound inside of 600 sft. I said awful, right?
He wouldn't live long enough to see Y2K. The wii. Machines that had multi gig processor speeds, broadband internet in the home - none of that.
He also would never see any benefit or settlement on his workmans comp claims - they would never even consider it until he was dead and had said so to me with him sitting right next to me.
I miss him.
And I am glad he doesn't have to deal with any of that crap ever again.
So, husband of mine - I celebrate your freedom this day.
Give Freddie my regards, kick Michael Jackson's ass for me and tell Patrick Swayze everything is going to be okay.
I'll see you later.
I can tell you where I was when I got the news, what I was doing and what I was wearing. I can see my nephew waking up in the middle of the night to come tell me (and his mother) he had a sore throat, but didn't know why. (Yes, I was at Sis's house. I had to work the next day OR ELSE but Cliff's status had been poor when I saw him at the hospital that afternoon. He was septic as HELL - but the resident had released me when I asked if I needed to stay. Cliff had been worse, and lived - nobody said anything to me about that being 'It.' Turned out, it was.)
Nephew is a bit more like me. He might not always know why, but he certainly knows when something has come through the building.
My immediate reaction was relief and shock. Relief that it was finally over (it had been AWFUL far too long, with no hope of anything good ever again...too long. Waaaay too long - )and shock that oh my it really COULD happen, and it had.
Sometime in the next day afterward, I 'listened' for him - and was rewarded with a presence like searing cold champagne - bubbly, FAST moving, effervescent and jubilant. He had told me to celebrate his freedom upon his death - and oh, he was. He so very was.
I visit his grave on this day (and I'll go out later) if I at all can (and check on it when I'm in the neighborhood the rest of the year) and try to get a feel for how things are going with him. Lately, it's been very clear he's Not There. I've gotten a sense of the answering machine has been left on in the past - now, it's almost as if he's moved and not left a forwarding address.
But if I stick around a bit, tidying up the joint - I get a brief impression of irritation - 'what ARE you doing here?' He's busy doing other things. He's very clear that I really need to be doing other things as well, too.
Well, I am. This year more than any other. *thinks* He'd like Xander a whole lot - they share a wicked sense of humor, that's for sure.
Oh, I miss him. I miss him the most when I'm around people who won't know anything about him except what I tell them - and it will always be filtered around 'this is Donna's late husband' first and foremost.
People, he was so smart. (I say that about Xander, but here's why I wondered. Cliff WAS smart - and he'll be my touchstone going forward on the matter.) Cliff was bright enough to break brand-new plumbing by first finding the three-penny nails, and then dropping them from a high enough height to break the terracotta pipes (don't ask me why Dad used them, I don't know) - because he wanted to know if he could. About five years old or so.
By ten, he had devised a means to put an entire garden on the roof of the house using a pulley system cobbled together out of rope, buckets and the gears from his bicycle. Nobody even knew it was there until the earthworms started falling through the ceiling upstairs.
Dad was a thermionics guy at JPL - so at times, brought interesting things home. Like, the first samples of solar cells. They snapped so nice when broken in half. Yes, he did. He might have been younger than Xander at the time.
(He would have thought Phinneas & Ferb were pikers.)
He went to school in private schools because public schools wouldn't take a kid with diabetes. He had a healthy love/hate relationship with most organized religions as a result - and kept his Bible on the shelf right next to the book on Tarot (I still have that one) and the Joy of Sex (which he found dull). He also took the course on Human Sexuality in college and kept the textbooks, but warned people they were pretty pedestrian. I think I still have it as well - he wrote 'I AM NOT SANE' on the ribs of the pages. That's how you know which one was his.
He did three and four digit division and square roots in his head to keep from being bored. He would cover pages and pages of paper with Math just for fun.
So when a chance to work at JPL on a student project came along, he took it - and that's how he was programming for Voyager in FORTRAN at the age of 14.
By the time I met him in his early twenties, he had not only taken Basic Mountaineering with the Sierra Club, he had been teaching classes in it. He had bought a house. He had never worked for minimum wage - always knowing he was worth more, and asking for it. (When minimum was $2.90, he was working as a student engineer in Anaheim for $8.00, for example.)
Those happy days when the shuttle program was new and all that.
By the time he was thirty, complications had set in - he couldn't see well enough to climb. Soon, he would have strokes, heart attacks and then amputations, dialysis and disability that would leave him housebound inside of 600 sft. I said awful, right?
He wouldn't live long enough to see Y2K. The wii. Machines that had multi gig processor speeds, broadband internet in the home - none of that.
He also would never see any benefit or settlement on his workmans comp claims - they would never even consider it until he was dead and had said so to me with him sitting right next to me.
I miss him.
And I am glad he doesn't have to deal with any of that crap ever again.
So, husband of mine - I celebrate your freedom this day.
Give Freddie my regards, kick Michael Jackson's ass for me and tell Patrick Swayze everything is going to be okay.
I'll see you later.
