The Day After

I know they weren't seeking to annoy me, or anyone.

But I've got to tell you, there is something that gets under my skin about the internet advertisement for this place:

It is a convalescent, rehabilitation hospital located a few blocks from Santa Monica Beach. One of the other pictures on the brochure is of the beach.  I think the residents probably care pretty little about this lovely feature and something in me cringed at the sales pitch when I heard that my uncle would be going there from the Veteran's Hospital. He never got to the beach, that's for sure, in his four days there.

He died yesterday. He was the last of seven children, the youngest, following the eldest sibling by only three months past death's door.

My aunt had been at his bedside until about two in the afternoon.  Angie, his daughter, spoke to him on the telephone at about that same time. I wandered in about three, after having gone to the bank, and grabbed a quick sandwich after Mass, and a parfait I sometimes picked up for my Uncle, which he always seemed to enjoy, a little, though not much healthier that the candy the cancer craved.

I stopped at the reception desk, just to make sure he was in the same room as the one I had seen him in on Friday. The woman looked down and then looked up, a little panic stricken. "Are you a relative?"  "Yes," I said, not at that moment expecting the expected.  "I'm his niece."

"He passed away a little while ago."  As best as I could tell, "a little while ago" was about 2:30.

A sheet was over his face. Just like in the movies. I have now been present at or just after four deaths. This was the first where this had been done. Maybe it was because, though there were curtains around each of the beds, there was one occupant in the room. And it wouldn't be good, I suppose, to mistake my uncle for someone alive--he looked like he was sleeping as he did, with his mouth open.

The reception woman, who had been very kind when she saw my reaction, sudden tears having roiled for a moment asked me, as I brushed his cheek, "Is he still warm?"  There was a residual of warmth, but it was turning to cool.  I did notice how soft his face was. I remember as I write that uncharacteristic of my own father, perhaps of him as well, though I don't know when I think about it, he had held my hand and arm when I visited on Friday. He had noted that they were soft. I was feeling relatively self congratulatory I had a hard time understanding him when I was there, but was pleased he ate the remaining portion of an apple pie and drank some water.

There wasn't much to do. I prayed.  "Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him, may he rest in peace."   And an Our Father. If he were alive, he might have objected to these prayers, I don't know, as he was a Jehovah's Witness. And unlike my Christian separated brethren, I believe that Steve could hear me, that he has pierced the Cloud of Unknowing and is not merely in some suspended sleep. I felt a strong affection for him because although as a Witness, he was not permitted or his faith did not permit him to step into a Catholic Church for my father's funeral, he had come with me to the funeral home to say goodbye and to the reception after the service.  I think that was a big compromise for him. And that was love.

He and his family were good to me, particularly when I first came to California--I only got to know them when I got here. They let me stay on their couch while I found a job and saved enough for a deposit for the apartment across the street that came up to rent. Many times he did repairs for me.  And painting. So much. So often.

He was like all the members of that brood, complicated, a Greek-Italian first generation son of a difficult man whose shadow loomed over them all for their lifetimes, although he died in 1948. 

It is the day after. I shall never, I think, return to the convalescent hospital by the beach that my uncle did not get to enjoy during his stay.  I shall think of my uncle often, as I think of my father, and Aunt Georgia, and my aunts and uncles who went before them. 

I am sad. That much I know. Too much change I am thinking requires many prayers for the Graces of Strength and Stability.

The Inexorable Before Us All

As I was driving home tonight along a side street toward Fountain Avenue, I saw a girl of about five, sitting in front  of a well manicured, tree lined house.  The sight was a contrast to a large part of the day--with my aunt and cousin visiting husband and father, respectively at the Veteran's Hospital.

The little girl was life and its possibilities on earth. My uncle is the edge of the end of life. He follows, so closely, his eldest sister who only just recently died at the good age of 100. As I watched him in the hospital, trying to make his wishes known to a staff that is overwhelmed and compassion fatigued, I could see Georgia, his sister, and Constantine, my dad, in his face. I even have a picture of my father, in that very kitchen, I think, as the one above. What was, when they were young and healthy and not thinking of their end of days particularly, or only sporadically, and then at the end of that breath that is our lives.

The two sided contradictions of existence.

As I write, I find that I am not feeling anything.  And yet the drama of the contrasts in one day ought to evoke a strong reaction. 

My uncle is so thin. So worn. And fighting still. He has been sick a very long time, but the spark remains in his eye, and the force of his personality that says, "I am in control" even when he clearly is not any longer. He tried to show the staff his muscles, this man of once great strength who could build or fix anything, even just a few years ago. He wants to go home.  They always want to go home. My father. Monsignor. My uncle. Me too if my time comes, if I live long enough.  The genetic raging against the dying of the light.

Even with a faith, as my uncle has, as I have, it is the only light we have known, on this earth, and while we believe in the afterward, from here it is ambiguous and harder to embrace. 

The child, if Providence provides, need not think about any of this for many years. My uncle cannot avoid it, and yet he says, "I think I'm dying" in a way that begs to be countered with, "Of course you're not."  He/we would like it to be that it isn't what it seems. My father tried to escape from the hospital. He had to be partially tied down (they can't tie a patient totally) so that he would not run from cure, or death. Cure was less likely than death at that point. I suddenly am reminded of that Twilight Zone with Gladys Cooper and Robert Redford--handsome death beckoning the frightened recluse lady--barring her door.

There is no running The choices are dying slow or dying quick. Neither is particularly enticing.

All the cliché's occur to me, about living in the moment, grabbing the gusto, interrelating, leaving small hurts behind, thinking about higher things and trusting in that Providence whose guidance of our lives sometimes seems imponderable.  They are hard to get hold of when you are with someone you care about facing what you will face yourself--each of us alone, but yet brothers and sisters in our aloneness at the end of life.

What Could Have Been and What Is

I had the sudden need to look through old files in my cabinet.

A very thin one, labeled, "St. John's" referred to three pieces of paper. Every time I pull this one out, first saved in 2006, I still get a twinge of. . .not anger exactly, but something most intense.

Perhaps it is the realization that my future was often in the hands of strangers, as is true of all of us. And strangers, sometimes, with a rather cavalier attitude about the outcome they are potentially orchestrating from their ivory towers.  In this case, the conductors were the professorial management of the place I attended law school. 

I graduated from Fordham magna cum laude, in curse honorum, (I did an undergraduate thesis). That means I had either an A or B+ in my classes. But when I got to St. John's of the 1970's, the grading system was unlike any of the corresponding schools, a curve that meant, upon graduation, we had one person cum laude with a B+ and the rest were Bs and C+s and Cs.  To be a C+ was to be in the top one third of the class.  I was in the top one third. Great, right? 

Not so fast. I couldn't get in the door of any significant law office once I passed the Bar. I was lucky to get an internship with an OTB (Off Track Betting) character on the Grand Concourse in an apartment building that probably wasn't zoned for law offices. One guy's office was in the living room. The other, my guy, was in the bedroom. 

My first job wasn't even a legal one. It was with a city public relations agency that had little or no work. I wasn't looking a gift horse in the mouth. Then a lawyer I met in the agency helped me get a job in the appeals section of the City.  I lost that job due to internecine battles over which I had no control, but they had the decency to say, officially, that it was because I wasn't "civil service".  Then I managed, through an aunt and the son of the man who used to own our local hardware store, to get a job with a man whose closet like office was in Manhattan (that was good), but whose practice and personality was my first exposure to the reality of the practice of law--reality never proposed or even acknowledged in the halls of the law school.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I found jobs first as a secretary, then after passing the Bar in California, I finally was able to find a niche at the State Bar, for a pretty good run of twenty-five years.  I had put the irritation I felt about St. John's grading policy that had nearly crippled my chances at making a career behind me, except the small rebellion of never contributing to the coffers.

I had been out of law school for fifteen years when I received the alumni magazine and found this note from one of my former professors. St. John's had relented and finally changed its grading system to be one commensurate with the other law schools in the area, including, and I found their comparison amusing, Harvard. Harvard in those days at least was a first tier school; when I went to St. John's it was a second or third tier one--perhaps undeservedly I always felt, because the education itself was certainly as meaningful, better even because the Bar pass rate was high.

 

 

It was good, indeed, that the school had come to its senses, but the issue I took with the message was two fold, the smug assumption that what St. John's had done, in contrast say to that first tier school Harvard, was far superior and that the change was a reluctant but not ultimately significant to any living beings.ni

I put the message away for over 12 years until in 2006, when I received one of those routine fundraising letters but from the alumni association. I had by then worked my way through the ranks of the prosecutorial staff of the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel. I was managing teams of lawyer and support staff. I had done this, in my view, in spite of, not because of St. John's, and I finally had to unburden my feelings.

Here is what I wrote:

Re:  Your request for donations

Gentlemen:

I have long put off writing this letter, pending a time when I was no longer angry or resentful.  I suppose this is the time, in the waning years of my career as an Assistant Chief Trial Counsel for the State Bar of California's disciplinary and regulation arm. . .At this stage, the letter is merely an overdue explanation for the fact that St. John's has never received a donation from me.

In 1994, the Law School Alumni magazine published a "Message on Grading Policy" by one of my former professors Robert Parella.  He explained the changes in a long standing grading policy which, despite the trends in other law school, including more prestigious ones than St. John's. . .had persisted to the disadvantage of St. John's graduates in the job market.  This was done in the purported interest of the integrity of its own system. I was one of those students whose top one third C plus average, denominated a "quite good average" by Professor Parella, assured that any advancement I made was solely on my own steam.

The one interview I received at a large firm, through the intercession of a family friend, was at the hands of a partner who assured me that "they" found that individuals with my grade point average were not of their caliber.  My top one third status was irrelevant.  My 3.8 undergraduate honors graduation. . .was even more so. No one wanted to hear about the integrity, accuracy and reasonable consistency of the St. John system.  There was also the burden of the idiocy of true/false examinations in the area of law which by its nature is ambiguous--allowing arguments on both sides always.

I managed.  I worked for the City of New York briefly in an appeal unit.  I worked for a single practitioner in the city and was introduced to the reality of practice that neither St. John's nor any other law school, cloaking itself primarily in philosophic and Socratic safety, acknowledged.  I moved to California and worked as a secretary/law clerk for another disciplinary respondent waiting to happen. . .until I passed its bar in 1983.  Then, in 1986, I found my life's work. . .I proved myself as a litigator.  I have been a teacher of the first disciplinary "Ethics School" in the country since 1993.  I now run the school in addition to my heading one of three trial units and being part of the management team of the office. I speak at Bar functions and at law schools, for example, Pepperdine. It is my hope to be a professor of ethics law in one of the local universities when I retire. 

However, the universities do ask for transcripts and mine will be difficult to overcome, notwithstanding my otherwise overwhelming credentials.  I may have to give them Professor Parella's message from 1994 in the hope that it will dispel the impression that I was a inadequate student, when the opposite was the case.

I do not tell you these things to brag or to whine.  I did well enough.  I do, however wonder what would have happened for me, and for many others, had the grading system. . .been like those of the other schools in 1979 when I graduated.  I also note, with some amusement, the last line in Professor Parella's message. . .when he said that the school had not yet, but still intended to convert to a 4.0 or "some such" GPA.  "We will then be in line with all the other law schools in the area, and most of this message will be of historical and transitional significance only."

I suggest that his message had no transitional significance to me or to other of my fellow graduates nor to St. John's to which we have not contributed one dime, not merely because of the grading policy, but because of the arrogance it bespoke and the damage it did to talented individuals who deserved better from those who molded us.


So much has happened since I left law school, since the Bar, and now perhaps indeed it has no meaning, or the struggle to get "somewhere" was ultimately nothing more than making enough money to survive to now, my 60th year and beyond if that time is given to me by God.

I have decided to tear up the original documents and leave only this blog piece to memorialize what was once so very, very important and even hurtful to me. 

On the good side, it has caused me to think of the impact I have on others, with passing word and with pronouncements, if it comes to that.  I have a story about what might have been a failure in that regard, one of many probably. Maybe I will tell it as I let go of more and more in these pages.

Yesterday: Thoughts of a Kind of Outlier Baby Boomer about the Beatles

I am watching it right now, I mean, the 50th anniversary tribute to the Beatles on CBS, the very same station on which they made their American debut in 1964. Paul is talking with Dave Letterman about "Yesterday" the song.  I am writing about "yesterday" the reality of my life, our lives.

I didn't see it when it happened, when the "boys" came across the Atlantic and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.  I don't know that my parents forbade it in any formal sense, but ours was a home of Cha Cha, Rumba's, classical music and WPAT, the elevator music station of New York. What the crowd was doing was none of our business.  The Beatles, quite simply, had never come up. I think they were hoping I wouldn't notice what created outright hysteria in the youngsters around me. I remember hearing a song as I rode in our school van and being a little uppity in going against the times, although I had no idea that's what I was doing.

Hmmm, Imagine Dragon is doing a version of "Revolution" that sounds more country than the counterculture I remember. But these kids weren't even a gleam in anyone's eye when we lived in the middle of radicalism and free love and early rock and roll.

I was talking to my aunt today, as I visited with her and my ailing uncle, my dad's brother, the last of the siblings still alive. I asked her if she were going to be watching this show tonight. She waxed moralistically about how they were a kind of threshold (not her words but the sense of her dissertation) to the drugs that followed and to a form of spiritism and indulgence in the demonic.  Let's put it this way, she is of the view that they, like Elvis just before them, ushered in the beginning of the decline of civilization. Long hair, rebellion against any idea of rules, hedonism of the most debauched kind, God is dead, the whole down the drain picture.

There is a very big part of me that completely agrees.

But today, listening to the panoply of their tunes, even some of the ones from the psychedelic love in, drop out phase, I hate that I missed their American debut, if you really want to know.

WWJT?  This is my variation of WWJD, that is, "What Would Jesus Do?"  Would Jesus have liked the Beatles, if He were of our time?  Did the wreckage of our society have to happen and is loving Beatles music a gateway to contributing to the wreckage?  I mean, "Yesterday", "Fool on the Hill",  "Here Comes the Sun", "Hey Jude", "Eleanor Rigby", "Let It Be", name many of their songs, are these not deep, even moral, at some, even all levels?  Is it their music that was the problem or something deeper within our society of which surely they were a part?  Was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" an entrée into free sex? 

I don't know. Sometimes maybe, as Dr. Freud said, "a cigar is just a cigar", and even if it isn't, I have been so tied up in knots morally my whole life, that just shaking my body and soul in my car, to "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" just seems a reasonable , nay may I say, innocent release. Yesterday, my girlfriends and I from Mount Saint Ursula were on a boat on the way to Bear Mountain upstate New York, singing "Hello, Goodbye" loudly on the deck. What could be more innocent than that?  What do I know? 

My friend Andrew says he has the DVD of the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan. Maybe I'll even buy it myself.

It won't be this that corrupts my moral fiber, methinks.  

"There will be an answer. Let it Be."

Too Late for Official Introductions

I heard during the week that another long time parishioner at St. Victor's Catholic Church, my parish, had died. I kept being asked "Did you know Mr. Hayes?"  I probably did, although not by name.

I suppose that one of the failures of our time, within and without our churches is that we see people week in and week out, sometimes day in and day out by their faces, but we never have introduced ourselves to one another. 

I knew Mr. Hayes to see him. I suppose in terms of seeing him, I knew him well. He came to the 12:15 Sunday Mass, at which I regularly serve, for years and years. He sat in one of the same two pews, depending on who might have gotten there ahead of him, on the right side (from my view in the sanctuary) of the Church, right in the front, and right at the end.

There were only two things I knew about him certainly all those years. He had a kind face. He had a deep and penetrating voice when he sang the hymns.

Then he died, on January 27, 2014 after, said the terse obituary, a short illness. There was a burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City on Wednesday this past week, and today, a memorial Mass attended only by his immediate family.

The only reason I can connect the face to the man is that I was asked again to serve at the funeral, along with a couple of others. Just before the service I was asked by our celebrant, Fr. Lopez, to see if the family had written up a little biography for him to refer to--as he had only met the late Mr. Hayes to give him last rites the day before he died and he makes sure to include the personal along with the spiritual in his homilies. They had a few items, one in hand, one a list of movies and television Mr. Hayes had done, and what had likely been a part of a playbill for some part he had done on stage. I took the opportunity to ask if they had a photograph. I did it to see if in fact I HAD known him, but it turned out to be fortuitous as it was a framed shot. I asked if they wanted it to be put on a small table in the sanctuary. That made the affair more personal. We all connected the man to the prayers.

This is probably the fourth funeral and/or memorial at which I have assisted the priest. Each one, despite the same liturgy, is different in its feel. This was a particularly intimate, quiet one that makes me proud to be Catholic aside from the other virtues which I believe it to have despite its humanly based imperfections. The family was either not Catholic or non-practicing. That is not uncommon at these services.  But what was lovely today was that the priest went to each person in the pew and blessed him or her individually.

And then it was over.  I returned the framed photograph to the family. I replaced the table in its customary place. The candles were snuffed. The lights were shut down.

And once again, we say, rest in peace. This time to a gentle actor named James Michael Hayes.