The Year of Loss

Stacy Kimmel in her princess crown. When she was too ill to take her place in the 2020 Rose Parade, her community in Pasadena held a special parade 9 days later just for her. (Outlook Pasadena photo)

I’ve heard it said that our sense of loss is directly related to how much we value those who are gone. Two weeks ago, I knew for certain that this year will be one I’ll remember for its feelings of loss.

The night began with a text from my friend Fran. It bleeped just as Jacques and I were settling in for our regular “what-was-the-name-of-that-show-and-which-streaming-service-was-it-on-anyway” effort.

The text contained sad news. Our former work colleague and friend Stacy, the talented and effervescent graphic artist and designer, had passed away earlier in the day.

Despite multiple years of recurring cancers, our friends were convinced Stacy would outlive us all. She survived round after round of treatments for the wily scourge that kept finding new places to show up in her remarkable self. After every treatment or surgery, she would emerge with the same warm smile and her great sense of fun and energetic personality.

Stacy joined us for a few Jewish holidays in Pasadena, when her daughter was a mere 8 or 9 years old. Guinevere was a precociously talented child who easily engaged with the adults around her. As Stacy said at the time, her goal was to stay around until Guinevere turned 18 – and that talented young woman is now 19 and nearly done with college.

As Fran said, when Stacy had a goal, she crushed it. Definitely a loss, yet her life was a valiant miracle.

A few hours later, my brother called. When my brother calls after 8:00 pm, it’s rarely good news, but it’s usually something that can wait for a response. It was then 11 pm, and we were ready to call it a night.

I thought, “I’ll just listen to the message and return the call tomorrow,” and logged on to the voicemail.

“Hey Mary, it’s your brother. Your niece Megan is deceased...” And that’s when the world tilted.

I immediately called back and learned that my brother and sister-in-law had each returned from work and, thinking it strange that Megan hadn’t come out of her room to greet them as usual, they knocked on her door. When there was no response, they broke in to find her dead body in her room.

Although the circumstances remain mysterious, what’s not mysterious is that 29-year-old vivacious nieces aren’t supposed to die. Certainly not before their relatives who are too old to die young.

Megan was a smart, gregarious young woman, a spunky striver who always had a new idea or plan to further her progress on a path to success. She was talented and loving with her family and friends, and was in the midst of a late 20s pivot as she was deciding where she wanted to live next, after an interlude with her parents in Texas.

She is the youngest of our siblings’ children and now will always be 29 in our memory. And no, I still can’t process the impact of Megan’s death.

This was already a year of loss as two of our dwindling number of Aunts passed in the first few months. Neither of those were wholly unexpected.

My Aunt Marge passed at the age of 103. She had what we call a long and vibrant health-span – a life lived well and fully engaged until she simply didn’t wake up one morning.

I got to know Aunt Marge better while we lived in Southern California and learned how much she loved Sees Chocolates. She was fiercely independent, and lived alone in her own apartment for nearly a decade after my Uncle Paul passed. When she was 100 years old, she chose to move to an assisted living unit. It was too hard to get out of the bathtub, she said.

Aunt Marge on the lawn with her mother-in-law, my grandmother - in the early 1950s.

She grew up in my hometown, married my father’s brother, Uncle Paul, and they set off to California where Uncle Paul plied his knowledge of farming and cows to the benefit of Carnation Milk.

They raised their boys to enjoy surfing and California life, and when she left, there were five grandchildren, and at least four great-grandchildren still on the west coast.

Losing Aunt Marge was definitely a loss, but not a shock.

It also wasn’t a shock when our 107-year-old Aunt Mimi passed in April.

Aunt Mimi in 2007 before she left New York.

Mimi was known outside of our family as the secretary to Oskar Schindler who typed the now famous list of those who were saved from extermination by working in Schindler’s factories during World War II.

Mimi grew up outside of Vienna, Austria and when war broke out, was living in Poland with her husband and infant son. When her husband was killed early in the war, she hid her son with another family before she was taken to a Nazi labor camp near Krakow. Her impeccable German and a course in shorthand saved her life when Schindler chose her for an office job.

Mimi was a beautiful woman who experienced the worst humankind can throw at a life. She lost her first husband and the father to her son to violent hatred, and outlived her second husband and a daughter. Yet she was always kind and interested in the lives of all around her. She moved to Israel to be near her son Sasha when she was 92, and became the bridge champion of her condo building until the end. Another remarkable health-span until she was gone.

Again – the sad loss of a life lived well, in spite of the horrors she experienced.

Each of these women were remarkable either for lives lived long and well, for valiant efforts to retain joy despite illness, or for being spunky individualists. Each taught me important lessons in life, and if I hadn’t valued them so much, it wouldn’t feel so bad.

Yet it’s Megan that feels like the biggest loss – the loss of potential, the loss of reaching for the dreams she was beginning to articulate, the loss that feels so personal and close and unnecessary. This one is leaving a painful hole that will be difficult to move beyond.

Waking Up from The Big Fatigue

Time to Wake Up, Focus, Get to Work - and Be Kind!

 This year so far has been characterized by periods of professional chaos, random disruptive household issues, and the ongoing theme of bone-level deep exhaustion.

It’s that exhaustion I call The Big Fatigue that comes up all the time and is most worrisome. I understand it with my peers – we’re old, so that might be the cause. But it also is a topic with the 20-somethings I’m working with now. So, what’s this about?

It’s not that we’re behind on sleep. In fact, in this house, we’re doing a darn good job of getting at least eight hours.  

It’s that we wake up, seemingly well refreshed. Make the coffee and then are ready for a post-coffee nap. This isn’t normal.

But then, we left normal a few years ago

I’ve spent about three months trying to find something to blame. As the national pastime of this nation, it’s what we do. It could be COVID’s fault – lots to point to there.

Maybe it’s the war in Ukraine – real-time war on social media is horrifying.

Could be the economy that’s on a speeding race to enrich the top 1% and harm everyone else – causing flip-flops in supply-chain driven market chaos in the gambling casinos of Wall Street.

Or it could be watching top leaders from the past President’s cabinet testify to the events that took place between November 2020 and January 2021. That has been a lesson in honor and courage. Men and women I may disagree with on a whole slew of social issues stood up to increasingly erratic behaviors, fueled by lies and a deep need to retain power at all costs.

Unfortunately, there’s no time to kick back and relax and let this fatigue just pass on by.

It turns out that our generation broke America. Right, left, center – one thing we all agree on is that this country is broken. We may disagree on the fault lines and what needs to be fixed, but we do agree that there is fixing to do.

And this week, the Supreme Court actually issued the decision we knew was coming regarding the concept of privacy rights protected by our Constitution. Today it is Roe v. Wade and the concept that a woman is protected in her right to make decisions for herself and her family. But Justice Thomas made it clear where he hopes to act next in his comments.

Yes – there is no time for The Big Fatigue in this broken America of ours. We Boomers have work to do, and it’s time to get on it and fix what we’ve broken.

Seeking Energy

Energy in hand…

A young friend of mine – which is becoming a larger and larger population at this point – was baffled at her lack of energy over the past few weeks. She was generally struggling to find her “oomph”.

 Of course, my peers chalk it all up to our age – we’re no longer spring chickens, or even summer chickens for that matter.

But for this young woman, it was baffling. She turned to the internet to seek out knowledge and stumbled on sites that discussed seasonal changes and their effect on energy.  In other years or eras, I would just accept that and say yes – shifts from winter to summer through that stage called Spring does elicit energy shifts.

In this era, however, we’re learning about the properties of energy in a variety of ways – and of how we as humans experience energy.

Since early in 2020, we’ve all experienced the energy suck of living with fear, anxiety, and uncertainty brought on by an emerging viral pandemic. A low constant hum of awareness that is still with us.

And by mid 2020, we had experienced the systemic shock of the impact racism has on our nation. The range of emotions were an added drain on our energy stores.

Today I wake up every morning to check if World War III has actually begun – watching a megalomaniac attack a sovereign neighbor just because he can. A palpable daily energy zap.

If I were a physicist, I’d be focusing on the various forms or properties of energy. Energy is simply the ability of an object to do work. And I know that 2020 did a number on my ability to do work – despite the demands of the work I was called to do that year. It was truly a challenge to dig deep enough to find what was left.

Energy exists in a variety of forms – potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear – there is light energy, mechanical energy, sound energy, and gravitational energy.  

Then there’s our human energy – mental, physical, emotional – all being depleted by the stresses of the 2020s so far.  

How do we replenish our minds and souls? Most of my friends and family have survived COVID. We are relatively comfortable. And none are living on a border with Russia right now. So where is the energy? Where do we find it? Ideas?

When Words Matter

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky standing his ground in Kyiv.

Like all of you, I have been watching a live-streamed war slowly evolve in a part of the world that seemed to believe this wouldn’t happen again. And yet it is.

It’s surreal. It’s horrifying. It seems truly unbelievable.

And it, like so much of recent history, is fueled by straight up lies based on the deep belief that Americans and Western democracies are too stupid or too distracted to pay attention to blatant acquisitive aggression.

I don’t believe that’s true.

When Putin seeks to overthrow – what he calls – a neo-Nazi regime, he’s assuming no one will ask how that could be true. How could the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors embrace the dictatorial rule based on intense nationalism and mass narcissism that professed all non-Germanic peoples as “less than”. A Slavic Jew? How does that fit any sort of truth?

So that’s a lie. Ukraine’s government is not a neo-Nazi regime after all.

He also says the Ukrainian people want Russian rule.

Doesn’t look like it, does it? Watching old men kneel in front of tanks. Hearing the “F^#& you” of martyred Ukraine border defenders. Reading the story of the soldier who blew up a bridge and himself to stop the progress of tanks. All playing out on the global networks of media produced by citizens and people – not professional newsrooms or editors.

Here in the US, we also see former leaders praising the brilliance of Putin. Partisan hacks saying this is all good for the freedom of Ukraine’s people – that Putin is “anti-woke” and that culture issues are more important than “abstract ideas”.

Our entire country is based on abstract ideas – ideas and concepts and principles that we now see Ukrainians willing to die for – to lie down in the streets for, and to fight for. 

Abstract concepts like freedom, liberty, and democracy within the framework of a legal document called the U.S. Constitution that guides our progress.

Those abstract ideas are precisely what supports the right of hacks on the far left or far right to pronounce as they will, to demonstrate in the streets, and to protest rigorously without fear of imprisonment – which is now happening in Putin’s homeland, on Putin’s orders.

We’re watching bravery in action in the form of Ukrainian President Zelensky. We’re seeing what patriotism truly looks like. Watch closely so we can all learn that abstract ideas fueled by truth can be as powerful as weapons – which is what Putin is truly afraid of.

Holidays For All of Us

It hasn’t happened for a few years, but this year, one of my children asked me if I missed celebrating Christmas. The short answer to the question is, no, I don’t. But, naturally, there’s more to that answer.

In the span of my life, I spent my early formative years in the nursery of the First Presbyterian Church in Mansfield, Ohio. I sang in the church choir because my best friend’s father was the choir director. And I loved the music.

Then I fell in love with a Jewish man whose father lost many of his siblings – and parents – in the Nazi extermination camps. And I began an exploration of his religion and practices. Before we married, I studied and learned how many of the underpinnings of the rituals of our Judeo-Christian heritage grow from the same core belief in an omnipotent being we humans have named God.

I easily and readily embraced the practices that have now informed the past forty years of my life – Friday night meals with blessings and candles. Holidays that mark the seasons of the calendar, and an amazing matzo ball soup taught to me by my mother-in-law.  

My father understood the pursuit. We had long conversations about what it meant to become a Jew. He worried about how our future children may be treated in a world that, overall, doesn’t welcome differences or diversity. But his overall religious philosophy was centered on how people behave rather than what people say they believe. Rather than a rejection of my childhood, he recognized my conversion as an embrace of a meaningful pursuit of building a family intent on repairing the world, or tikkun olam.

“Mary Margaret,” he always called me. “There are good people and bad people in this world of ours. What’s important is how we treat each other because that’s where the meaning of life lies – in the spaces between us and the acts we perform.”

In that pursuit of treating others well, there are many traditions of this season I hold to. I still pull out my childhood cookbook with my 12-year-old handwritten cookie recipes from Mrs. McConnell. And I still send texts to Janny and Julie to let them know I’m making one or another of them as a treat for neighbors. In this long night/short day part of the country, sharing a batch of sweetness is always a good plan.

I still love Christmas music – playing on most of our radio stations throughout the house. Of course, many of my favorites – Silver Bells, White Christmas, Let it Snow, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year – all were written by Jewish composers.

So, do I miss all of the hustle and bustle of the heavily decorated, well-tinseled expectations that fuel so much exhaustion for so many at this time of year? Not at all.

Instead, I relish this period of time when this country slows down, emails stop, and there’s a collective exhale. We celebrated the weekend with takeout Chinese and many movies.

And I respect the true joy so many of my friends and family will find in the meaningful activities surrounding the birth of a Jewish infant who became the inspirational leader for one of our globe’s major religions.

Achieving 66

Although this is not an image of me and friends, it is an image of how I plan to age - with lots of color!

Like most of you, I’ve spent my life merely becoming a year older after each full rotation of the earth around our sun. Until this year.

This year feels more like an achievement.

Achieving a year older rather than merely becoming a year older is a recognition that not all of my friends, family, or peers will get to experience their 66th year on this rotating planet of ours.

Over the past few years of stressful change, we’ve lost a few dear friends. Not to COVID. Those friends recovered. These lost their lives too soon to cancer – that damned disease that is stealthy, irrational, and just evil.

So, I planned to spend a week celebrating the gift of aging - and in the midst of all that, our sewer pipe collapsed.

We discovered the problem during our annual sewer line clean out by the company called Ron the Sewer Rat. No joke. These guys are always amazing. Always on time. And have been our preferred providers for 30 years. They found what appeared to be a partial collapse, and told us to quickly get on the calendar by one of the repair companies that specialize in these repairs.

Calls to the city Water and Sewer Department provided helpful and timely assistance and we got on the schedule for some time in January. As part of that process, we needed three bids with one of those companies requiring a video of the length of our sewer line to the street.

Two weeks after discovering the partial collapse, Ron the Sewer Rat returned to videotape our sewer line. If you haven’t seen a video of the 90 or so feet of a sewer line, it’s a combination of fascinating mystery and disgusting recognition that fortunately doesn’t last too long.

And that’s when we got the bad news. The partially collapsed pipe had given way and had moved into an emergency situation. This wasn’t just a small collapse that granted time to plan for future repairs. No. This was a full-on collapse that unknowingly threatened an equally full-on sewage back up into the basement we’re renovating as an exercise room for our aging selves.  

The calls to the city took on added urgency and were met with rapid help. We spent 48 hours in that difficult space of using little to no water that would wash down our pipes. No showers. No laundry or dishes washed. And very, very few flushes.

And then the trucks and the plumbers showed up with backhoes and jackhammers, and within 6 hours of breaking open the street, the flow returned to our pipes.

I’m finishing the week of achieving 66 with a greater sense of gratitude and recognition that although we may encounter sewage in our lives, there are always people out there who can provide help when called on.

And I’m grateful to still be here to need their help.

Gratitude for Memories

A Thanksgiving at Grandpa’s Farm with Aunt Ruth, my mom, Cousin Dick, Grandpa, Cousins Bill, Susie, Bruce, my brother Tom, and me - Dad taking the photo as usual. (Don’t you love my mom’s glasses?)

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving weekend. The ingathering of family and friends, the prescribed menu, the tryptophan-induced naps, watching the parade with the kids checking out flyers for Black Friday sales… all of it.

And this year, I’ve been reflecting on all of the changes I’ve experienced with the holiday over my ever-lengthening life – everything about it comforting.

We never actually experienced the Norman Rockwell image of the Thanksgiving meal, with all the dishes arrayed perfectly on the table and well-dressed people sitting still for the group photo. There was always a “Wait! I forgot the brussels sprouts!”, or a “Weren’t you going to bring the green bean casserole?”

My earliest memories were Thanksgiving at Grandpa’s farm with all of the Alleshouses. Too much food made it onto the table, the women did the dishes while the men went to the living room before rousing singing at the piano, with mom insisting on just one round of the Halleluiah chorus.

The middle years were with my mom’s family, usually at the Pcioneks. Those were louder and less musically so. Yet equally chaotic – still with the warm feeling, however.

There were a few lonely Thanksgivings where I felt too busy or had to pick which time to come home to my family. One was in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and one was at college in North Carolina. Those are the only two where I remember feeling sorry for myself and resolving to never, ever miss an opportunity to be with family over that long weekend.

Once I became the mom, I did everything I could to ensure my family could make it here for the long weekend, and that friends had a seat at the table. It turns out, the only critically important ingredient for a good Thanksgiving weekend is that – family and friends.

I used to think it wasn’t the holiday without turkey, stuffing, and the rest. It’s not that at all. I’ve done dozens of turkeys with stuffing in the bird and out. Mashed more potatoes than I care to count. We’ve had gourmet versions of recipes best followed from a soup can. And we’ve even ventured into other cuisines like Italian.

It doesn’t matter what the menu is, as long as it invites people to the table to gather. And this year, I’ll gather up memories of Thanksgivings past. Drop notes, even texts to family in other parts of the country. May even do a Zoom with a few.

And we will gather – with a few on Thanksgiving Day, more on Friday, then a few more on Saturday evening for the rare event of Hanukkah beginning the next day – an opportune celebration of “Thanksgivukkah”.

Whether it’s turkey and pies or latkes and dreidels, I wish all of you a warm, comforting weekend of making memories with family and friends.

Our Ghost, Kitty

A story for Halloween, 2021 - Photo by David Dibert on Unsplash

This summer, while sitting on our porch, I heard crunching twigs behind me and noticed my daughter’s eyes widen as she loudly whispered, “Mom. There are two men walking across the lawn.”

I stood up, turned around, and saw that, indeed, there were two men walking with focus and intent toward us. So, I did what any Minnesotan would do, and asked, “Hi. Can I help you?”

 “Do you mind me asking – how long have you lived here?” said the elder of the two.

An unexpected question, perhaps, but he seemed friendly enough.

“Well – we’ve been in this house for 30 years now,” I replied.

“Oh – wow,” he said. “Well, my name is Tim Dunn and…”

Before he could get out another word, Jacques and I both said, “Ah – you’re one of the Dunn boys.”

When we first moved into the neighborhood, we had heard stories of families current and past and all of the houses up and down the block were referred to by the most notable families who had lived in them. Even today, we still do that. There’s the old Eckley house, the old Cooney house, and the old Phillippe place evoking memories of times past. And we had bought the old Dunn house.

The man on the lawn smiled and nodded, saying, “Ah so you’ve heard of us, then.”

Indeed, we had. In fact, there had been two generations of Dunn boys in the house – both the father and uncles of the man on our lawn, and then he and his brothers took up residence sometime later. And now, here he was with his son visiting town to show him where he had spent his early years.

“This is probably going to sound crazy, but my father died this past year and since he passed, I’ve been thinking a lot about his ice skates. You didn’t by any chance find any skates when you moved in,” he asked. “I just remember an old wooden box in the attic where my father and his brothers kept their skates. And me and my brothers would stuff them with socks so we could skate over at the park.”

Well – 30 years is a long time. We had done a lot of living and made a lot of changes to the house in that period, but there was a vague memory of the dark reaches of the attic eaves that could, perhaps, have hidden treasures.

Jacques took this as an interesting challenge and we learned the Dunns were traveling on west of town, but would be back through Minneapolis by the weekend. So, we exchanged numbers and said we would text if we found anything.

Within a couple hours of their departure, Jacques had scrounged in the attic, found the old wooden box, bravely reached in to the dark expanse, and found the Dunn brothers’ skates – all three pair.

That, my friends, isn’t the best part of the story. It was what we learned when Tim and his wife returned to gather up the skates a few days later that makes this a good Halloween tale.

After sharing memories of his early childhood, of his grandfather who had originally owned the house before selling it to his father, Tim then told us of the grandmother he never knew, Catherine Dunn, or Kitty, as she was known.

To be fair, we had heard stories of this ill-fated Mrs. Dunn since we bought the house. In fact, at the closing in 1991, as we lay down our pens, the prior owner spoke up and said, “Well, now that you own the place, I should probably tell you about the ghost.”

She informed us that there was a woman who appeared while they were doing renovations on the place. One night, as her partner went to get a drink of water, he had seen a woman standing in front of the cabinetry waiting to be affixed in the kitchen. The glowing woman dressed all in white stood and faced him with a quizzical tip to her head.

He simply answered the implied question by telling her that the cabinets would upgrade the kitchen, and that they were hoping to have the place renovated for a family to buy within the next year. At that, the glowing woman nodded, smiled, and walked out through the wall of the house.

I’m sure our faces showed our surprise, as the prior owner said, “Oh. Don’t worry. We are sure she’s friendly. In fact, we think she’s the original Mrs. Dunn, who died while shoveling when she slipped and hit her head. She just stayed around to watch over the place.”

And now, here was the grandson of the original Mrs. Dunn telling us her story. Apparently, Catherine was an energetic spitfire that everyone called Kitty. She easily kept up with her active sons and husband, and when she died, her heartbroken husband married an older relative named Madonna who had a tough time managing the busy household.

After several years, Madonna convinced her husband to let the then young adult sons take over the house while they moved to a smaller, quieter home in St. Paul. That’s when Kitty, the ghost, was most active overseeing – and protecting – her sons.

Ultimately, it was Tim’s father who got married and remained in the house after his brothers moved on. And they stayed there, raising their three children until Tim turned 10 and they moved to Florida.

“Did you ever encounter Kitty’s ghost?” asked Tim, after he reiterated his family history. “Because my mom is convinced Kitty saved my sister’s life.”

Here’s the story. Tim’s younger sister always sat in her high chair in the corner of the kitchen, which, at the time, featured a drop ceiling covering up pipes from above. It was a spot that was out of the way of the active family swirling about the kitchen.

Then one day, as Tim’s mother was stirring a pot on the stove, she felt an urgent need to move her baby daughter in the chair to the other side of the kitchen. It was unexplainable – and also incontestable – it just had to be done. So, she picked up the chair with daughter inside and set her down on the other side of the kitchen.

Instantly, the ceiling caved in right over the spot where her daughter had been moments before. Tim’s sister was saved, and Tim’s mother – to this day – thanks the mother-in-law she never knew for that.

As we hand out candy this weekend, we will be thinking of the kind overseer of this house named Kitty. And wonder whether some day in the future this will become the Old Koppel House.