Bobsledding the Staircase Dateline: Caregiver City, Planet Aphasia

It snowed last night. Oh, goodie! That means we'll get company later today. Last time it snowed the little girls next door came over and we made a deal. They'll shovel our front side walk and I'll pay them. But negotiating the price was a bit hairy. Some where during our corporate meeting, Girl Number One said, "We don't care what you pay us. We just want to help old people."

I was brought up believing that you can't slap little kids silly, so I plastered a pleasant look on my face and said, "Oh, isn't the sweet." But in my head I was holding back my Pit-Bull Mama persona who wanted to lunge at the girl, take her down to the ground and make her take the word "old" out of her sentence. Where in the name of the seventh sun did that come from? For crying out loud, I haven't even gotten my first social security check yet!

We have this deck that wraps two sides of the house and I was embarrassed to ask Girl Number One and Girl Number Two to include shoveling it into their bid for my business. No one in Michigan shovels their decks but me. I keep ours cleared because we have three doors that open out to it and you never know when you might have to escape from an axe murderer in the middle of the night. In situations like that, who's got the time to put on your boots before going outside? I also have a fear of seeing a newspaper highline that reads: "Wheelchair Bound Man Trapped in House Fire - Wife Didn't Shovel the Deck." So, I huff and I puff and make the snow disappear each time Old Man Winter poops on our deck.

Another fear I have involves being on an upper floor of a building with only one elevator. I developed this fear after a surprise fire drill during one of my husband's speech classes. Like good little sheep, we people pushing wheelchairs did what we were told and parked our mates on the landing of the staircase, waiting for the fireman to remember that we were part of the drill. In theory, they're supposed to carry the needy and injured down the three flights of stairs. Ya, sure. Worry wart that I am I'm absolutely sure that the firemen who'd show up in a real fire would have fears of getting hernias and they'd pass on by with an excuse that they have to axe out some windows. I have trust issues with axe wielding men.

Of course, we all know that staying on the upper level of a burning building with our wheelchair bound mates is a choice. And I hope I'll never have the following conversation with Don, my husband:

"Stay!" He'd bark out as the flames got closer.

"You mean go?!" People with the language disorder, aphasia, often say the exact opposite from what they mean to say.

He'd give me a long, confused look before enlightenment dawned. "Go!" he'd correct himself.

"No," I'd refuse while looking longingly down the staircase, "Not without you."

"Stay!" he'd plead more urgently. "No---go!"

Me, I'm always looking for alternate options so I'd probably consider taking off my pants and making a make-shift sling that another spouse and I could use to carry our mates down the staircase. If that didn't work, we could always stand at the top of the stairs, close our eyes and on the count of three, two of us at a time could push the wheelchairs off the edge, and hope for the best---holy mackerel, we have winner! George made it all the way down to the bottom. But the most do-able idea would probably be to abandon the wheelchairs, roll our spouses flat on their backs and tell them to stiffen up and pretend they are bobsleds. One by one each spouse could push-start their mate-turned-bobsled, jump on and ride them down the staircase. That would give new meaning to the term "two man bobsled team."

After that fire drill, I never viewed the principle of having a single elevator in the building in quite the same way. What if it broke while we're upstairs and it happens on a day when my cell phone's battery goes on strike and the weekend is coming and the maintenance people have all gone home early? It makes me goosepimply just thinking about. Just in case that happens, before going upstairs to one of Don's speech classes I now check my purse: Left-over fortunate cookies from Sunday in case we get hungry. Check. Suck-able candy in case Don's sugar drops. Check. Fingernail file in case I get bored. Check. Tiny tins of preserves from Cracker Barrel in case we find a piece of bread in the trash. Check. Kleenex in case we run out of toilet paper in the bathroom. Check. After my mental inventory, I deem us ready to take the elevator upstairs.

The door bell rang a few minutes ago and I expected to see Girl Number One and Girl Number Two come to shovel our snow. Instead, two other kids came to collect can goods for the poor. I gave them corn and spaghetti and wished I hadn't forced myself to eat lima beans last night.

"Life is good," I told my husband as I closed the front door behind the do-gooder kids, "They came to collect for the poor instead of deliver." ©

by Jean Riva

 This article was first published by Yahoo Contributors, in their humor section, but they are going out of business and the publishing rights have reverted back to me. So if it seems out of order to the rest of the content here, that's the reason. It was written before my husband passed away.

 

The Shower Stall Mystery Dateline: Caregiver City, Planet Aphasia

 This article was first published at Yahoo Contributors but they are going out of business and the rights have reverted back to me. So if it seems out of order to the rest of the content in this blog, that's the reason.

I wonder if there are any statistics on how many female caregivers stop shaving their legs when we have to start shaving our husband's faces. Time constraints are as good as any other excuse for our apathy about not shaving what can be hidden with slacks or for not applying makeup and perfume. I can't remember the last time I took a leisurely bath where I had the time to lather up my lower limbs and run a razor up in smooth, slow strokes like a model in a Gillette commercial. While helping my husband, Don, in the shower today these were the thoughts that ran through my head as I looked down at my legs expecting to see the natural, European look. I was shocked to see they are bald as a proverbial billiard ball. Oh, ya, I forgot that menopause takes the hair away and it doesn't come back.

I've been shaving Don's face since he went on the blood thinner, Coumadin, even though his occupational therapist wants him to do all his own grooming. But he's so clumpy shaving left-handed and it's really hard to make time for extra trips to ER. Besides, we have a new wheelchair accessible bathroom and the color of blood would clash with the décor and if I let Don do it all on his own, our water bills would be around five hundred dollars.

Our shower routine: I help Don transfer into the shower, shave his face, scrub his back, and pull the curtain closed so that he can do the rest of his shower alone. Then it starts---those sound effects, the kind like Meg Ryan made in her famous movie scene where she's faking an orgasm in the restaurant. The first time I heard Don moaning and groaning I thought, "Oh, God, he's having a private moment and I'd rather not know about." This went on with every shower for a couple of weeks before a voyeuristic moment made me slowly draw the shower curtain back to peek inside. There sat Don, eyes closed, doing his moaning and groaning routine only he wasn't---well, you know what he wasn't doing. He was shampooing his hair! I can be so slow on the draw. It hadn't dawned on me that all Don was doing was an imitation of the shampoo commercial that is imitating Meg Ryan's orgasm scene.

Time to dry off---Don does it all but his tush. But I'm on the creams and ointments committee, so I have to be there. I start with his feet, and work my way up. I apply the Naftlin gel for the toe nail fungus he picked up at the hospital and that his diabetes doesn't want to give back. Next comes the Nystatin for jock rash. That was fun the first time I had to have Don's doctor look at that---all three of us with our noses practically down in Don's crotch. The doctor tells me it's common for wheelchair bound guys to have a perpetual case and it won't go away without air. I've tried to get my husband to sleep commando, but he picks this stage of his life to get modest. Men! Go figure.

Next I apply a coat of Betadine antibiotic to the bruises and scratches on his paralyzed arm that are caused by our lap sitting dog and the Coumadin. Someday I'll probably get investigated by Social Services and I'll have to prove that the bruises are not caregiver abuse---hey, maybe I should knit the dog a set of booties. At this point in Don's routine I think, "Did I miss anything?" No, Don is applying his Stetson antiperspirant to his left arm pit. You should have seen him the time I brought home another brand and his aphasiac brain couldn't tell me in any other way but to throw it across the room day after day until I figured it out. His vocabulary is around twenty-five words and "don't buy this crap anymore" isn't one of his working phrases.

Following the left arm pit, comes his right arm pit royal ritual. No antiperspirant here or the fungus will start back in again. No air gets to the pit when you can't move an arm. So, it's ten powder puffs full of Johnson's Baby Powder. Not nine. Not eleven. I tried explaining the danger to our lungs of inhaling that white cloud in the room but for some reason, Don's aphasiac brain counts everything in tens. Now I just hold my breath and hope that he doesn't pick bath time to start learning to count to a higher number. And people wonder why we take two hours to shower.

After our showers today, we got distracted by a fat cat with long brown hair and four white feet who was stalking the neighbor's bird feeder and all three of us---the dog, Don and me---stopped what we were doing to watch until the cat got bored and lumbered across our back yard. The three of us followed his path, going from window to window until the cat caught Cooper's eye and they tried to stare each other down. The cat won.

Being Saturday, we headed into town to go to our favorite restaurant for omelets. I parked in the last handicapped space, transferred Don to his chair and when we got to the door a waitress barred the way and told us they were doing some painting over the weekend and were closing early.

"If you had just gotten here five minutes ago," she said, "We could have served you."

On the way back to the car I was cursing the cat in the yard and promising Don I'd shoot the darn thing the next time I see it. Damned cat cheated us out of our omelets! Don, he started yodeling at the top of his lungs. The man can't talk but he still finds ways to made fun of me when I get into one of my titters.

We drove to our next favorite restaurant and as I lowered the wheelchair with its Bruno lift, it got hung up on the trailer hitch. While I was trying to decide if there was a beefy guy near-by to help, Don was sitting inside the Blazer joyfully teaching himself the four letter words I had used to describe the cat. I was pleased when he came up with one of his own.

Inside the restaurant Don smiled across the table and I saw the want-to-cowboy he used to be and I thought about how lucky I am that I didn't have to purée his egg rolls and thicken his tea. He's come a long ways since the stroke. I looked down at my plate and saw a couple of tiny cubes that looked like clear gelatin and I wondered what they were. I ate one. Tasteless. I ate another, and then it dawned on me. They were eatable computer chips that program people to drive to their restaurant every time a UPS truck comes down the street.

Back in the Blazer after lunch, Don had to pee. We drove around to the back of the grocery store, before going in, and I pulled up to our regular spot where he could use his urinal. I felt like a male dog that needed to remark his territory as I poured the pee at the base of the 'No Parking, Fire Lane' sign. I laughed, thinking, "If only the people who believe I always live by the rules could see me now." It may not have been a bra-burning march or a stop-the-war demonstration from my youth, but I can still pull off a little civil disobedience.

Jean Riva © 2006

The Ambassador from the Planet Aphasia

 This article was first published by at Yahoo Contributors but they are going out of business and the rights have reverted back to me. So if it seems out of order to the rest of the content here, that is the reason.

Today was get-out-of-the-house day. We've been snow bound. Oh, not really but it makes a better story than saying we had no place to go since Friday. Today was different. We had a mission. We had to get haircuts and lunch and visit the bookstore before they were tempted to take us off their speed dialer.

After our haircuts, we were in Cracker Barrel waiting for our chicken fried chicken and biscuits when over the sound system came a guy vocalizing, "I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle as I go ridin' merrily along and they sing, oh, aren't you glad you're single and that song ain't so very far from wrong."

"Don," I asked my husband, "Is that Bill Wills singing?"

"Late, late night. Girl, girl, boy," he answered.

"Okay," I thought, "what does that mean on the Planet Aphasia?" Will someone tell me why it takes fifteen minutes to translate something like that? But it did finally come to me. Don's enigmatic reply was telling me that the cowboy singing was Tex Ritter. It's really quite cleaver how he can find ways to communicate with so few words at his disposal. 3's Company comes on TV late at night and John Ritter (plus two girls) starred in the show, and John was the son of Tex Ritter. This is what it's like living with my husband's language disorders, aphasia and apraxia; he speaks in aphasic tongue and I translate it into earth English. It's daily, mental gymnastics.

After we got our coats on to leave the Cracker Barrel, Don did one of his famous 'roll ups' to our restaurant mate's table. "Handicapped. Six---no. Five---no. Four! Vegetable," he said as an introduction.

I quickly translated: "My husband had a stroke four and a half years ago and we were told that he'd be nothing more than a vegetable."

"You sure fooled them," the woman beamed and Don beamed right back at her.

"GM. Snowplow," Don replied and I translated: "My husband worked at GM and had a commercial parking lot maintenance business on the side. He was a workaholic."

"Oops!" Don chimed in while using a hand gesture that punctuated my sentence. Then he drew his shoulders down, making himself look like a little boy getting balled out by his mother and said

"Oops," again. That time in a comical tone. Everyone laughed.

"Don," I nudged him along, "we've got to get going now." He didn't want to leave but we said our good-byes. They said their "good lucks" and "you're doing greats." The strangers didn't know it but they had just met the Ambassador from the Planet Aphasia.

Out in the parking lot, I got ready to load Don up and move him out. I peered across the street, judging the distance to our next stop to be less than a city block. I saw the bungee cords in the back of the Blazer and not for the first time I speculated that I could hook them up to Don's wheelchair (with him still inside) and just pull him along behind the car. This would save me a lot of work if I could do without a few chair-to-car and car-to-chair transfers. But it's January and the wind chill was a serious factor so I decided to put that experiment off to warmer weather.

On the way across the street Don was getting sleepy and I thought, "Oh, boy, I get a vacation!" So, I booked a suite at Linens & Things and left my man in the car while I went inside to shop. I was having a good time, too, pushing a cart and doing my best imitation of a Stepford Wife. I wasn't wearing the classic sun dress, luminous lipstick or spiked heels but I did have an imaginary book on my head so my posture was perfect. As I lusted over a stainless steel toilet brush holder a song from long ago came over the sound system. It could have been Dianna Ross and the Supremes crooning, "Baby, baby, where did our love go wrong? Baby, baby, don't leave me alone." That's when I remembered poor Don out in the car.

"Oh my God!," I thought, "I've been in here so long that the floor boards on our three year old Blazer have probably rusted through and he's gotten over come by exhaust fumes!"

I rushed to the cashier and wrote her a check. The date I put down was two days behind and I wondered how many days I'd have to forget before I'd cross over from 'flaky' to 'senile.' She asked for my driver's license. I mistakenly handed her Don's picture ID. The girl looked at me then down at the card, studying it carefully. Quickly I pulled the right card out of my wallet before she could tell me that I looked better with the mustache.

The bookstore was our next stop and by the time we were ready to go home from there, I was so tired that thoughts of bungee cords and thrill-riding Don all the way home seemed pretty darned do-able.

Universal Design: Building a Wheelchair Accessible Home

This article was first published by at Yahoo Contributors but they are going out of business and the rights have reverted back to me. So if it seems out of order to the rest of the content here, that is the reason.

For most of our adult lives my husband and I had wanted to build a house. It took his stroke for us to finally take the plunge. We really had no choice. The two houses that we owned were not good candidates to retrofit for Don's newly acquired needs and there were virtually no wheelchair accessible houses on the market.

Finding a builder who was knowledgeable about Universal Design in a town of 600,000 should have been easy---after all, the concept has been around since the 1980s---but it wasn't. The Home Builder's Association only listed one builder who specialized in that market niche and although his houses were beautiful, customized homes his starting price was twice what we had wanted to spend. But he was passionate about building for the disabled and even though he knew we couldn't afford his services he was generous with his time and he gave us the confidence we needed to go forward with our project.

All totaled, we called twelve well-known builders. Some had never heard of the term Universal Design. We were shocked! Other builders never returned our calls which, we believe, was a form of prejudge against the disabled. The building company we finally went with had built three wheelchair accessible houses, so they said, but we quickly found out that we had to bring our own research in to the design stage of the project. They were willing and able, but we were the experts when it came to Don's special needs.

Universal Design is not rocket science, but there is a wide variety of choices and decisions to be made. Just as every disability is different, every house for the disabled will be different based on the options taken and the budget you have to work within. The core, essential features of Universal

Design homes are:

* at least one no-step entry way
* one floor living (or a budget for an elevator or chair lift)
* 36" exterior and interior doorways
* thresholds on the doorways that are flush with the floor
* a roll-under sink in the bathroom
* reinforced bathroom walls around the toilet and tub for the grab bars
* four foot wide hallways
* a five foot open radius in the centers of the bathroom and kitchen
* a roll-in shower stall or transfer tub that fits the special needs of your disability

In additions to above requirements, there are many optional features that can be incorporated into home to make it easier for someone with a disability. A few optional features of Universal Design that we included through out our house were: 1) lever-style door handles; 2) lower windowsills than the norm, so that Don gets a better view from a seated position; 3) single lever faucet handles; and 4) the carpeted rooms have a very short looped carpet with a dense commercial grade padding underneath that is glued on both sides. (The wrong choice of carpeting and padding can make it difficult-to-impossible for wheelchair and walker users.)

In the kitchen, a side-by-side refrigerate is a must-have for people in wheelchairs. We also included two microwaves---one low for Don, one high for me. The cupboard below our kitchen sink opens up fully from the counter-top to the floor so that Don can get his wheelchair up under the sink. A section of our counter-top is also open underneath and lower so that Don has a work station in the kitchen. There are many Universal Design options available for a kitchen including hydrolytic cabinets that go up and down and oven doors that open from side to side but this is an area of planning that will quickly drive up the cost of your home. The few options that we did include in the kitchen fit our life style perfectly with a minimal impact on our budget. Through out the house all our light fixtures are the type that requires no ladder to change a light bulb. That can be done with a long handled bulb changing tool.

Our garage takes advantage of several common Universal Design features. The overhead doors are eight foot high, instead of the standard seven so that a pop-up van will fit. The garage is also large enough to unload a wheelchair from the side or the back of a van. We also have a parking space for an electric wheel chair with an outlet for the charger and a grab bar for transfers. Our electrical service box is in the garage instead of the standard basement placement. Another feature that is a favorite of Don's is that the entire garage floor is a gently slope.This eliminates the need for a wooden ramp. To push himself around in his manual chair, Don only has the use of one arm and one leg and with a conventional ramp he would not have been able to roam freely from the house to the garage without my help. Our front sidewalk uses the same gentle sloping principle, so there is no visible ramp advertising that a disabled person lives within.

Anyone who is thinking of building a Universal Design house will find building component for the disabled all over the internet. A few books and magazines of plans are also available. Your local rehab hospital may also put out a pamphlet; ours did, as did the local Home Builder's Association. Most helpful was our local Advocates for the Disabled office; they had a specialist in Universal Design, disabilities and local building codes who reviewed our plans free of charge and made suggestions.

He also gave us a scale model wheelchair to run around the blueprint to look for ways to fine tune things like the swing of the doors, furniture and outlet placements, turn spaces for the wheelchair, etc. This was a very useful little tool. We also had my husband's occupational therapist go over the master bath plans so that we got it just right for his needs. (For resale purposes, we set up the master bath for a right-side disability and our spare bath is set up for a left-side disability but we've been told that most Universal Design houses sell by word of mouth---before they hit the open market---so resale value is not really an issue with these houses.)

If you decide to build a Universal Design house, my advice would be to start your research early and take your time doing it. Don't just build for what your disability is today, think down the road ten or fifteen years. Don't sign off on your blueprint until you are satisfied with your choice of options and the price. The Universal Design features that we included added just under $4,000 above the cost of building a conventional house and it was tax deductible.

A house built for a disabled person does not need to look any different from its neighboring houses. If you didn't see the grab bars in our bathrooms, no one would ever guess that our home is Universal Design. I honestly don't understand why able-bodied baby boomers who are building don't have the foresight to incorporate Universal Design into their plans. Even now that the house is almost a year old, we still can't believe that this beautiful, well-thought out and functional perfect house is really ours. Our only regret is that it took a stroke to get it built. ©

Published by Jean Riva

Jean's main passion in the writing world centers around educating the general population about stroke related language disorders, caregiver issues, widowhood and growing older---often using humor to do so.

How My Husband's Stroke Changed my Life

How My Husband's Stroke Changed my life: Redefining Our Relationship was written back in 2007 for a contest on a site that is now pulling all its content off the web and giving the rights back to the authors of the articles. I won the contest and wanted to preserve my article, so I've moved it here.

----- ----- ---- ----

My husband had a massive stroke that left him right side paralyzed and with no verbal or written ability to communicate. An event we thought could never happen to us did happen. It destroyed our previously comfortable and often complacent lives in much the same way that a forest fire destroys acres upon acres of land after a lightning strike ignites a single tree. The fire engulfed us and when it burned itself out, it forced us to rebuild and redefine our lives. It was hardest thing we've ever had to do.

It started with a bad headache. No big deal. We all get headaches. Don took a couple of aspirins and went about his day. By noon the next day the headache was worse and he was walking funny, dragging his right foot. It was time to go to the hospital---wrong. We should have gone the day before. One thing a stroke does is make you play the "what if" game for months to come. What if we had gone to the ER when the headache started? What if he had quit smoking earlier in his life or, better yet, never started. What if I had known the symptoms of a stroke? The what if's eat you up alive in the early stages of accepting a permanent disability and the changes that come with it.

Within days after the stroke, two neurologists declared that Don would be "a vegetable for the rest of his life." He was too unstable, at the time, to be moved to a nursing home but that was the recommendation, the only choice given.

"He is too young for that!" my heart cried. I didn't know that strokes happen to people of all ages including to babies in the womb. I didn't know that a thirty-nine year old woman could have a stroke while getting a face lift or that a twenty-four year old guy just back from Iraq could get in a car accident and have a stroke. I didn't know that an athletic guy of thirty-something could have a tiny hole in his heart causing a stroke or that an eighteen year old girl who smoked while on birth control could have a stroke. I know these things now. I've met these people.

Don spent the next one-hundred-and-one days in the medical system. A month in the hospital to get stabilized, a month in a nursing home gaining his strength, and finally a third neurologist gave him a chance at rehab and he was moved again. After the in-patient rehab ended, Don was in out-patient therapies four days a week for five months. I was at his side every single day of those eight months and he was anything but a vegetable to those of us who knew him before the stroke. His body was broken and he couldn't talk but he was still "in there."

When he left the in-patient rehab program Don couldn't go back to his house or to my house---we weren't married at the time. Neither house was a good candidate to remodel to make them accessible for his wheelchair. So I brought him "home" to a one bedroom apartment and I moved in with him. He couldn't care for himself.

Those first eight months were terrible and when we weren't going to therapies I was dealing with selling off his equipment: three front-end loaders, assorted pick up trucks, a street sweeper and nine snow plows. Fortunately, a month before the stroke Don had named me his medical and legal power of attorney in a worst case scenario. It couldn't get much worse. Having our legal T's crossed and the I's dotted ahead of time made it easier, but it didn't help with the cash flow problems, dealing with the insurance companies and SSDI, having two houses sit empty, and losing our sources of income. My stress level was like a bottle rocket waiting for a match.

In the second year out from the stroke I dealt having two auctions, getting the houses up for sale and taking Don to speech classes two times a week. Oh, and some where in there we got married. To this day I can't remember our anniversary date without looking it up. Everything was just a blur of activity back then.

The third and fourth years out I designed a wheelchair accessible house, we found a lot, had the house of our dreams built and we moved again. In that same time frame I also became a mentor on a large on-line stroke support site, moved up to middle management and eventually accepted a seat on the board of directors.

On the anniversary of the fifth year out from the stroke we had a 'Thank God, I'm Alive' party to celebrate Don beating the "vegetable for life" prognosis. It was a turning point in my life as well. The bad stuff was behind us and rebuilding our lives was bringing many good things back into our every day existence. I was able to start doing some gardening for the first time in my life and I got seriously addicted to blogging as a way to share some of the funnier situations that were occurring in my life as a caregiver to a guy with severe aphasia. Looking for humor is situations is a great coping technique for me to defuse the inherent stress that comes with the territory.

At this point in time my still-wheelchair-bound husband is almost seven years out from the stroke that nearly destroyed both of our lives. He is a happy, intelligence guy with a great personality and a positive attitude. We appreciate life to best of our abilities and not a day goes by that I am not grateful for that.

His unprompted vocabulary is around twenty-five words a day---and this from a guy who before the stroke was a gifted storyteller who rarely quit talking. I no longer mourn the loss of in-depth conversations late at night or the political debates we used to have. I no longer ache to have him repeat stories I'd heard a hundred times in the past. I stopped mourning my old way of life a long time ago. But it wasn't an easy transition.

How has my husband's stroke changed my life? There isn't an area of my life that hasn't changed. Aside from the obvious things written about up above, I've learned the true meaning of the words: failure is not an option. I've discovered that in the face of adversity we humans are stronger than we think we are. I've come to appreciate that love can move mountains. My belief in the goodness of mankind as been reaffirmed; for every blatantly indifferent person we've met since the stroke we find a dozen others who go out of their way to show kindness to me and my disabled husband.

A stroke in a family is like a lightening strike igniting a tree in a forest. Its effects are far-reaching and our story is not unusual. Approximately 700,000 new or recurring strokes per year happen in the United States with 163,000 of those strokes ending with a fatality. But I was able to bring Don and me through our own personal fire storm and go on to forge a new life that includes joy and happiness once again. Now, that's something to write about! ©

Updating

It's been just over two years since Don passed away and he is still very much missed. Since then, I've been at my other blog---The Misadventures of Widowhood---over HERE.

A Good Man Dies

Eleven years, eight months after Don's stroke he passed away after a brief hospitalization for pneumonia with respiratory failure. It was a tribute to the kind of man he was both before and after that stroke that his service was packed with many people to help give him one, final goodbye. It was a very upbeat service with many busts of laughter as several friends and family members stepped up front to share memories of Don. My contribution was the eulogy I wrote which is posted below. Don loved the Old West so I tried to put a western twist to his service. With that in mind the reverend used the Lone Ranger Creed in place of reading scriptures and used stories I had told him to illustrate how Don tried to live up to the creed. At the end we played the Randy Travis version of 'Happy Trails to You.'

Jean

****** ******* *****

The Eulogy

The purpose of a eulogy is to share a person’s life in one single speech. How do you do that for a man like Don ******* who in many ways lived an unconventional life? We could say that he was born April **** 1941 and that he grew up on a farm just outside of **********. We could share dry facts that many of you already know like he had three brothers, graduated from ****** High, and was in the Army Reserves. We could tell you that Don worked nights as a die maker at General Motors and he had his own parking lot maintenance business. Or we could talk about the fact that when ever anyone tried to get him to explain why he didn’t get married after dating and working with Jean for several decades he’d say, “Why, we hardly know each other!”

There are three themes that ran throughout Don’s adult life: collecting, snowplowing, and hunting. You didn’t have to know him well to know that these were his main passions. Before his stroke, eleven and a half years ago, he could tell endless stories about being an American Picker long before there was a TV show by that name. Also in his storyteller’s trove were tales of plowing the Big Blizzard of 1978. And when the topic of hunting came up, Don often told the story about the time his friend shot his brand new truck and then put a Band-Aid over the hole to cover it up. In all the years Don owned that truck he never got the bullet hole repaired because he delighted in telling people about how he got that hole in the hood. He loved to tell long-winded stories. So much so that friends used to tease him, saying they had all his stories numbered and memorized and all he really had to do was shout out a number and it would save everyone a lot of time.

That all ended the day Don had a massive stroke that not only took his mobility away but it also took his speech. Even then he still found ways to be a storyteller. One way was to put Jean in a position where she had no choice but to explain what was on Don’s mind. Like the day he parked his wheelchair right in front of the door to a store selling cigarettes and he wouldn’t let anyone in or out. In a militant way only an x-smoker on a mission could do, he held up three fingers while repeating the word “three!” over and over again. This forced Jean to tell Don’s story to the gathering crowd about how he used to smoke three to six packs of cigarettes a day and he blamed the habit for earning him heart by-pass and a stroke. 

There are other labels besides stroke survivor, storyteller, collector, hunter and snowplower we could apply to Don that helps define who he was as a man: brother, uncle, neighbor, co-worker, friend, boss, and landlord to name a few. 

He was also loyal to his friends, honest to a fault, and he was especially kind to old ladies which might explain why he finally married Jean when she was nearly old enough to collect Social Security.

Don was also courageous for the way he faced the challenges brought on by the stroke. His special shorthand story for all he’d gone through was to hold up two fingers and say the word “two!” This was Jean’s queue to explain that two neurologists had told the family he’d be a vegetable for the rest of his life. Most people, upon hearing this, would respond the same way: “You sure fooled them!” And it was true. To friends and family who spent time with Don after the stroke, it was clear that despite his disabilities he was still the same, intelligent and caring person he’d always been.

Over the years Don and Jean had talked about the kinds of funerals they wanted, usually after going to one they didn’t like. He even worked in this very funeral home when he was in high school. And through the experience he came to appreciate the value of a good send off. One thing Don wanted at his service is a western twist. So with that in mind we’re going to end this eulogy by reading the Lone Ranger’s Creed. The Lone Ranger, many of you will remember, was the original good guy of the Old West dating back to the days when kids listened to his serialized stories on the radio. Don was a good guy, too, who not only had a copy of this creed in his collection of western memorabilia but he also tried to live up to it his whole life.

The Creed

"I believe that to have a friend,
a man must be one.

That all men are created equal
and that everyone has within himself
the power to make this a better world.

That God put the firewood there
but that every man
must gather and light it himself.

[I believe….]

In being prepared
physically, mentally, and morally
to fight when necessary
for that which is right.

That a man should make the most
of what equipment he has.

That “This government,
of the people, by the people
and for the people”
shall live always.

That men should live by
the rule of what is best
for the greatest number.

That sooner or later...
somewhere...somehow...
we must settle with the world
and make payment for what we have taken.

That all things change but truth,

and that truth alone, lives on forever.

[I believe…]

In my Creator, my country, my fellow man."

******************

I am closing this blog now as this 'caregiver' chapter of my life is now in the past. I'm starting a new blog titled 'The Misadventures of Widowhood.' Long time followers of this blog know that writing about Don's stroke was my way of coping with the challenges it brought into our lives. I blogged often in the early years and as one challenge after another was overcome my posting became less and less frequent. I'm hoping the new blog will be the same kind of useful tool as the next chapter of my life unfolds. Stop by sometime and say, "Hi" over here.

Goodbye to all my readers here and goodbye to Don, my own special Ke-mo-sah-bee.


To get back to The Misadventures of Widowhood click here. 

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