Forgiving Myself?

Probably the first person I have to forgive is myself. I've done a lot of dumb stuff, maybe not as much as some people have done, but more than I should have done. But mostly that's small stuff. There's one thing I did that has left me conflicted for nearly 40 years. That 40th anniversary is coming up in a few months I realize, and I don't think I've ever told the whole story of why I divorced my first wife.

We got married in February, 1969. It was a shotgun wedding, though no weapons were involved. Truth be told, her mother was dead set against it. Not only were my parents against it, Dad let me know that he would help me get out of marrying her, though no specifics were ever discussed with me. I was stubbornly set on marrying her. Not only did I believe I loved her, I was determined to know my unborn child.

It was not a political statement but a personal one. A year or two before that time, I had seen the movie "Blow Up," which as I remember it from this 50 year distance was about a young woman who seeks out her photographer father and poses nude for him (yeah, that was the movie's initial draw for horny old me) and then reveals their relationship. I remember thinking then--before I'd ever had sex--that I would never abandon any child of mine without at least knowing her, and her knowing me.

And so we got married in February of 1969 in a civil ceremony. Since we were both Catholics, the parents seem to have decided that if they were going to give their consent (the age was still 21 for me in Indiana) this was how it would be. After the civil ceremony, a most unsatisfying affair, we had an overnight stay at a hotel in town that was our honeymoon. Not sure who paid for that. I wasn't working. Officially, I was a student. In reality, I was a student who didn't go to class and would flunk out, again, in May when the next grades came out. So we had our first night of legal sex and Sunday went back to our apartment, and Monday she went to work (I think she was a sales clerk at the time) while I went off to campus to play bridge and pinball while not going to class.

One may ask why we had this child? Abortion was not legal in Indiana as far as I  know, and we were sort of good Catholics. I know we never discussed it. Nor was putting it up for adoption something we had discussed. She had told me that she was actually a cradle adoption by her parents when it turned out they could not have children of their own. So I knew that she would not do that willingly. Not that her mother couldn't have pressured her into it. Her (adoptive) mother was a real bitch. It is hard to be associated with a mother-in-law you come to hate. As for birth control, that was also a very new thing in the world and very hard to come by in Indiana. And again the Catholic teachings got in the way saying that contraception was a mortal sin (along with a host of other mortal sins that leaves one reeling after awhile).

So I did the honorable thing, which also got each of us out of home situations that we thoroughly disliked. We saw it as a win, and as long as you don't mind living poor, which I always had but which my wife had not, you can make do.

I flunked out in May and shortly thereafter Selective Service informed me that I was reclassified 1A for the draft. That meant that I would be drafted into the Army and probably sent to Vietnam in about a year. Now this was not all bad. Not only would I get a paycheck, pitiful though it was (less than $100/month?) but my wife and child would have healthcare, prenatal care, well baby care, and a housing allowance all from the government. During my first three years in the military, my wife was paid more from Uncle Sam than I was when you factored in that allowance.

The only problem was that trip to Vietnam that I was not relishing. I was not a brave lad back in 1969, and I don't think I got much braver over the years. Attend me, oh wise ones, and learn from my sad tale.

I did not get drafted, because I enlisted to avoid the draft and being sent to Vietnam. (Oh the folly of youth to think you can escape your fate.) I knew that if I was drafted it was only a two year commitment, but one of those years was likely, almost surely, to be in Vietnam. But if I would take an extra year's commitment, I could join the Navy, but that would mean probable separation from my new wife (and sex!) and baby for probably at least half of that time and little of it contiguous calendar time.

Now the Air Force required a four year commitment. Four years! But, I knew that with my eyesight, I wouldn't be a pilot (I knew nothing about all the flying jobs that were not filled by pilots; I knew nothing really. Research? Well THAT would have been a nice idea, I'm sure, but we're talking about a kid who couldn't be bothered to show up in classes to avoid losing his 2S student deferment which one could parlay into other draft-deferred activities until one aged out of the Selective Service (quite a few did) or the damned never ending war would end.

So I chose the Air Force, and I chose communications, which included such glamorous work as commercial radio and television, telephone, and a curious thing called radio telephony. Turns out that's a fancy word for Ground Radio Operator. This is the guy in the movies with the radio on his back instead of (or in addition to) his pack. Said radio has a whip antenna which can extend several feet in the air and literally tells any enemy soldier within visual range that at the base of that antenna is a person who if you can kill him you mess up communications in the first crucial minutes of a firefight. In the movies the radio operator generally gets killed with the first shot, which often takes out the radio, and the heroes of the movie have to win the battle the hard way, that is with no air support. (No one even drinks a beer to the memory of the radio guy who got it with the first blast.)

Fortunately, there are other ground radio jobs, and I got one of those.

After a couple of years at a deployable unit in Oklahoma (honestly, I don't think I wore Air Force blue or even 1505 khakis in my first enlistment at all; I might as well have been in the Army), I was sent to Vietnam where I was assigned to a small Army operations center in the Delta about 17 km from the Cambodia border. This unit supported Army air operations in southwestern Cambodia resulting from Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970? 71? (well somewhere around then).

Then I came home in late 1972. By January 1973, Nixon and Kissinger had declared victory, gotten the POWs released, and by the end of March the USA was totally out of Vietnam.

I had managed to pass a math test, which got me into the new field of computer programming. I stayed in the Air Force (now I was finally in the blue Air Force) until September, 1977 when the whole family, we had a second child in 1971 not long before I left for Nam, moved to Columbus, Ohio where I got a computer job that paid A LOT MORE than SSGT (E5) pay at the time.

Still, that wasn't enough to keep up with my wife's spending habits, which I could not seem to curb and which she would not curb herself. It because a struggle to pay the bills, starting when I came back from Nam. We got credit cards. We maxed them out. We did debt consolidation. That was only a temporary solution. So I left the Air Force and took a job that paid, even with benefit changes and cost of living in the civilian economy more than double my military pay. Within a year, I could see that it wasn't enough.

And she didn't seem to care. Not really.

Naturally, this affected our whole life otherwise. We didn't argue. I hated yelling and she didn't know another way, so we each shut up about the things that were bugging us. It took me about a year and a half to decided that I needed to make changes even if she didn't feel that way. I was drinking heavily.

It's useful to know at this point that my father was an alcoholic. For the first 10-15 years of my life, he was a dry drunk. He brought every paycheck home, as far as I can remember, but he sure beat the hell out of me and two of my brothers in those years in what I'm sure now (but had no clue then) was his frustration that he couldn't get a drink. (Example: sometimes mom would find a 6-pack of Blatz or some other cheap beer on sale during her Friday shopping; if she could afford the $2 or maybe $1.50 out of the food budget, she would buy it. Usually before he went to bed Friday night, Dad had finished that six pack. It never lasted long into Saturday when he didn't finish it Friday.)

I tell this because I was seeing myself become the frustrated drunk my father had been for all of my life to that point, and I DID NOT WANT TO DO THAT. I did not know of another way out, so once it seemed to me that even the love my wife felt for me had fled our marriage, I saw no reason to stay except the kids. It took me months of agonizing to accept that I could do my children more good if I was not my father to them but was more of a calm, rational being who didn't spank the children to work off his own frustrations. (Today the bruises I got would be considered prima facia evidence of child abuse, back then, not so much. Dad told me more than once that he took pride in the fact that he never his his children or his wife with a closed fist.)

So, I left. It still hurts that the price was losing my children. She and her mother seemed to do everything they could to undermine the children having any relationship with me. She would tell them one thing and me another. She conveniently forgot to tell me about activities the kids were involved in but be sure to tell them that she had told me and that I couldn't be bothered. I saw the pattern, but I was powerless to stop it because I made one firm rule. While she lived, I never said a bad thing about her in their presence. I bit my tongue so many times, I'm surprised I still have one.

While I regret that my children, even after their mother's untimely death, want nothing to do with me, I do not regret for one minute getting out of that marriage. At a minimum, I would have died already. And I might not have gone alone. Every action has consequences. I dithered because I didn't want to pay the price until the price of inaction began to exceed the price of action. Perhaps I missed options that would have served everyone better. Perhaps not. But the past 39 years married to my current wife have been ample compensation for me, and aside for their dislike for their father, my biological children seem to have turned out all right. Who can ask more for their children?

Learning to Forgive

I was laying in bed around four this morning thinking about who knows what or why when I suddenly realize I have been rehearsing arguments against a men's organization I used to belong to. For most of my life I have argued, in my own mind, against this wrong or that injustice or even just to justify some action I took or wanted to take. These arguments were always in my mind and consisted of me making my case, often insisting that someone else correct an injustice to me that had wounded me gravely.

The longest running argument was with my father. It went on for decades, and I don't think he ever knew about any of them. Mostly that was because no man has ever intimidated me quite like he did. I suppose that's generally true of sons whose fathers are less than the cultural ideal of a loving, caring father. The arguments went on for another reason: I knew of no man more unfair and smugly proud of it that my father. He refused to admit a mistake or any kind when I was younger. When I was older, and he was in AA, he began to try making amends for some of his more egregious mistakes. It was hard for me to take him seriously because he never admitted how wrong he was for so long. He was making amends for things he did, not for things he said, not for lying and cheating and browbeating and dominating a boy as young as three (I can't remember farther back than that). And he did it in such as way that I was always afraid of him until I got old enough and big enough that he realized he had to take his act elsewhere. (Or was it that I stopped coming around and he had to find new targets.)

So you can see that I have a lot of work to do around forgiveness, for I have not forgiven the son of a bitch even as I have come to understand more and more what made him the way he was. There's a little boy inside me that I never adequately protected, and that little boy and I still want to kill our father.

I did try to make peace with my father before he died, and I think I did at least reach a truce, but I realize now that I never truly forgave him. And in realizing that, I realize that I have a whole lot of people I need to forgive. I'm not sure I know how.

Oh, I know how to SAY, "I forgive you," but I don't know how to actually forgive someone else. Heck, I don't know how to forgive myself. I seem to recall a story about some young girl who was having visions of the BVM. Somehow she gets into the Presence of the Pope who questions her closely, thinking that this is another love-starved poor girl with a fantastic story that gets her attention. So he asks the girl if she can talk to Jesus right now. The girl says she can. The pope tells her to ask Jesus what sins he confessed at his most recent confession. The girl is silent for a few minutes, eyes closed, hands folded in prayer. They she opens her eyes and says, "Jesus says he can't remember."

The lesson of this story is that once you are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean. Jesus/God does not remember those past sins for which you have asked forgiveness. Great story. Great moral lesson.

Only I don't forget. I may say, "I forgive you," but if I can't forget what you did, have I really forgiven? If I can't forget, I can't trust, because I remember how you abused my trust in the past. I remember how I did forgive, and you abused my trust again and again until I could no longer be in your presence because all you did was pick at the sores you had created.

So this is my journey now. How to I forgive, truly, absolutely, and completely forgive? How does that work? Can a mere mortal do this, or is it a power reserved to the gods? If anyone reading this has any ideas or can point me to any resources I can study, I appreciate your help.

Why I Chemo Against a Hopeless Situation

It isn't often that I sit down to write here when I don't have a topic at the top of my mind. But this morning I don't seem to have a driving thought. Tomorrow starts chemo: half a day at the infusion center and two more days (until roughly noon Wednesday) with the pump. I hate the pump. Not only is it damned inconvenient to lug around for two days, it also helps insure that I don't start recovering from the drugs for an extra few days. I've really gone well into this off-week before feeling more nearly like a functional human being. (Yeah, chemo sucks)

It would make a difference is we were trying to effect a remission of the cancer, but there is no Get Out of Jail card on this cancer. There is only delaying the inevitable. So, while the oncologist tries to delay with drugs, I have to come up with personal reasons to continue fighting against the tide. And I do.

One big reason is that my wife needs someone to care for her. We are working on getting people in to help her with a lot of the things I do now: run errands for her, do the dishes, sometimes do her laundry, clean the house (I am at best an indifferent housekeeper), and bring in the mail and the paper. I'm sure I do help her, and I realize that doing these little things helps me a lot; they give me a sense of purpose I might otherwise lack.

I also have a big goal of going back to my friend Dan's sweat lodge on October 6, 2019. That's a year after the one we just did, and we all agreed that if I came, they would come, and we would again have a powerful spiritual circle of prayer and rejoicing, love and hope. I have sat in sweat lodges poured by other people. I few I have felt powerful spiritual forces moving. Others were just hot and void of anything spiritual (for me; I can't speak to how others felt). So I'm not one to shop for sweat lodges just to sweat; there's a sauna at an athletic club up the street where I go when I want to sweat. But Dan pours a powerful sweat, but you would have to experience it. I can't describe it other than to say that I've never sat in lodge with him and heard or felt anything that was not sincere and heartfelt. So I'm always up to doing that one more time.

Then if I really want to get ambitious, I set the goal of voting in the 2020 general election. That goal is well outside the survival window set by my doctors of 18 months max. (which would be February 2020). If I can make it into October 2020, I can absentee vote, and once it's in I believe it will count whatever happens to me, although I would like to see how that election plays out.

So at least I can say I'm still engaged in the world and the people who are important to me and to whom I am important. (Yes, there are people who are important to me but who no longer wish to have anything to do with me. Accepting that is hard in a couple of cases, but I'm sitting with acceptance that what needs to be will be.)

I think having a sense of purpose is important to everyone. Purpose is what drives our lives. This is not a cancer thing or a chemo thing. And right now it is serving me powerfully and well.

Patriotically Going Into The Military

Now to write what I came here to write.

I'm listening to an Audible Original presentation called "Strong Ending: From Combat to Comedy." It's really very good. Not sure how someone who is not an Audible customer can get at it, but it is both entertaining and informative.

It's like a documentary. It focuses on vets of the Afghan and Iraq wars and how they deal with their PTSD or other issues by learning how to do stand up comedy.

Part of the introduction of each vet in the piece is hearing them say that they joined up because they were patriotic and saw serving as what a patriot would do.

And I listen to that part of their stories, and I think, "Wow! That never occurred to me."

I enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted. It was June of 1969, and I had just lost my student deferment. (Turns out you had to go to class to stay in college. Who knew?) I was also pretty newly married with a child on the way. Because I was now 1-A for the draft, which meant Next Up, so I couldn't get any sort of job. No one wanted to hire someone they would have to offer a job two in two or three years when he got out. That was how it worked.

So, I picked the Air Force in order to avoid being drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. That didn't work, but I won't talk about that here. (It might actually be in one of the older posts in this blog I you're interested.) Patriotism did not factor into my decision at all. If I go into the service, my wife has medical care for her pregnancy and baby's birth. I had to go anyway, might as well help my incipient family while I did it.

Of course, in 1969 there wasn't a lot of patriotism going around. Most of the flag wavers I knew at the time I viewed with suspicion. Perhaps I was more of a skeptical patriot than an anti-patriot, but I did not believe in the saying "My country right or wrong." Sorry Mom. I know you did. And in terms of dealing with most civilians, we who wore the uniform were viewed with fear and suspicion. It was not uncommon for higher command to suggest to us that we NOT wear our uniforms off base or while traveling. (I was never treated rudely, but I was accosted more than once. Some people felt empowered to make me account for my actions and the actions of the entire Department of Defense. (People! I'm so low on the totem pole, I have to crawl up to see dirt.))

Actually being in the military made me more patriotic. Going through the rituals of Reveille and Retreat daily, standing formations, seeing others get awarded medals for their work, gave me reasons for being somewhat patriotic. I was one of those people who ended up serving for my buddies (I guess they're called battle buddies today). I never served for God, Country, or Flag. I did, and do, take my oath of enlistment seriously ("...to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from all Enemies, foreign and domestic..."). All the rest of this stuff is just bullshit to me. Sorry if that offends you. (No, no I'm not sorry. Deal with it.)

But back to why I went. It was more controversial where I grew up to NOT go than to go. We didn't really know at that time that the government was lying to us. Yes, the anti-war protestors said they were lying, but they provided no credible evidence. The Pentagon Papers were not released until 1971, and like a lot of charges and counter charges the truth got mixed up with the noise (kinda sounds like today, eh?). The few people who knew the truth either died without talking or, like Robert McNamara talked only decades later at the end of their lives.

None of this has made me feel more patriotic. I get misty-eyed when I think of the good men I served under and with who died or who were so messed up by their experiences that death might have seemed preferable to the destinies they faced. That's not for me to say. What is for me to say is that we who served were people good and true who fought with each and for each other, and those who did not die in the fighting would have died in place of any of those who did.

I don't think that's what y'all mean by patriotism, but that's the best I've got for any of you.

Treatment Update

Once again it has been awhile since I posted. Not as long as the last gap but long enough. I'm not really here to write about my cancer, but I'll start with a quick update. (I write this as if I think somebody is reading it, but I don't think anyone is. So I can be completely honest.)

Finally started chemo in late August, doing 7 hours of chemo for two weeks with one week off after. So two on one off. Did this for three cycles, then they did a Contrast CT scan to see if it was working (working in this case meaning slowing the liver cancer that will kill me before the 2020 election if the doctors are right). It was not working. Didn't slow the metastatic liver cancer at all apparently.

Doctor had said this was the best set of drugs to treat me. Now they were stopping it, because it wasn't working. That sucked all by itself. Seemed to mean to me that the max 18 month window was shrinking, though when I asked my oncologist she said no, she had a new combination of drugs (which I still call 2nd best) to try. After she convinced me that it was worth it to try (I still wonder), I agreed.

These drugs--there are 3 this time--are administered slightly differently. The first two are done in the infusion center. Takes about 5 hours. Then they hang a pump on me, and I get the 3rd drug (called, I am not joking, 5-FU) over 48 hours. So I take my chemo home on Monday afternoon and go back Wednesday afternoon to have the empty pump removed.

So from Monday afternoon through now (Saturday morning) I feel various stages of not good. This past week, I've slept a lot. And I have felt more nauseous this week than in the whole of the previous months of chemo.

On the positive side, Doctor says preliminary blood tests after the first set of two treatments show positive results. We'll see how the next scan goes. I'm a little unclear about when that scan will occur. This chemo is one week of drugs and one week off, no doubt to recover from the first week. Two of those one on one off constitute a set. Are we gonna go three months (which I thought she said last time we talked about it) before the next scan, which puts us into February, or will they scan after three sets, which I think puts the next scan in January? I dunno. We'll see.

So that's the update. Maybe by next weekend I'll be feeling human again. In the meantime, I have set a goal of making it to October 6, 2019.