The Deaths Are Piling Up

My friend Sailor passed away on Thursday. I had known him since 1994 or 1995. My best early memory of him was at a regional gathering we did in Imperial County around that time. I was committed to creating an alcohol free front gate. My van and my boyfriend's truck were at right angles with a tarp strung between. This was the front gate shade space.

Sailor came over to sit with us and he brought a beer. Now what you have to understand is that the Sailor I know hates drunken energy at front gate, but he had to be a rabble rouser and push my buttons. Since he and my boyfriend had been friends for a long time at that point, we all got into a bit. I don't remember if Sailor got rid of the beer or not. That's the Sailor I knew. Full of contradictions, always wanting to be a contrarian, but his heart was in the right place. Hey Sailor - keep up the good work.

Bob Nanninga was not a friend so much as a fixture in local politics. He was the gay, green, revolutionary voice of opposition in white new age Encinitas. I met him briefly once or twice at meetings in the way it happens when you're talking to someone else and that person says "by the way do you know...". Since Bob's reputation preceded him, I felt on firm ground saying, "I know of you." What's not being said is that he died of pneumonia (code word for AIDS I'm guessing as who else dies of pneumonia in their 40s). Remember to use a condom folks. AIDS isn't going anywhere.

For more insight into what San Diego will be missing, read Logan Jenkins' column or The Coast News' Obituary.

A Season For Dying

The deaths are piling up like used tires. First Cyndi's dad, than the grandfather Grant had been living with for years in Sacramento, keeping an eye on G-Paw as we called him. My friend Sailor is dying as I type this and sending good thoughts to him and Catherine. But today's post is about Jay Hays.

I met Jay in the 1990s at Oh My God Hot Springs in Southern California. East of the San Diego mountains and west of the Salton Sea. Oh My God was a free place to camp, soak, or just be. My first trip out there was for a regional rainbow gathering in the early 90s. Jay is a Vietnam Veteran who used to travel around in a school bus with a couple of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and play drums. He is a drummer's drummer. Jay started college in the early 1960s but then went off to Vietnam and came back broken like so many men I have known. He tried to use alcohol to fix himself for a whole lot of years.

A few years after I met him, when I was seeing one of his best friends, he called me from the VA hospital in San Diego where he had checked himself into the drug and alcohol rehab program. That point really marked the beginning of our friendship. From there he went to the old Veterans Village on PCH and stuck with sobriety.

Over the next 7 or 8 years, he went back to college - community college. Then on to San Diego State University where he majored in Counseling with an emphasis on drug and alcohol addiction. He did a combination BA and MA program despite a few health related setbacks that slowed down his progress. The years of hard living etched in his body.

It was February or March of his last semester of school that his body collapsed and he ended up back at the VA. The doctors wanted to do operations and try to fix him, but Jay wanted to graduate. He wanted his MA in Counseling before he died and so once he was stabilized, he went back and finished up that last semester.

He invited his friends to graduation and being the oldest student in his graduating program, somehow wrangled a lot of tickets. When I showed up I ran into people I vaguely recognized from those days at Oh My God Hot Springs. Once they introduced themselves, I laughed and said, "I didn't recognized you with your clothes on." That was our running joke and was repeated time and again as more old friends show up.

It took Jay forty years to graduate, but he did it and I'm so proud of him. All my attempts at going to grad school are inspired by Jay. I too started going to community college a long time ago (1976 or 1977). I went to college on and off until the year 2000 when I received my BA from UCSD but that doesn't compare to Jay's track record. He was the one who made me realize that it's never too late.

His mission for the last few years of his life was to help as many people as he could.

After Jay graduate a few years ago, he was hired by an Indian Tribe in Rainbow Arizona to run a drug and alcohol rehab clinic. I haven't seen Jay since he moved, but we've talked on the phone, email and written each other. About a year ago, his health problems returned with a vengeance. His liver began shutting down. He was able to get on the list for a liver transplant and died on the operating table on January 28 of this year. Jay knew his days were numbered for years.

Jay we're going to miss you. A mutual friend was with him at the end and Jay was worried that his comrades in this battle against using alcohol to fix brokenness were going to backslide and he didn't want that. So if you're out there, please call a friend, go to a meeting, or plant a tree. It's what Jay would have wanted.

The Dreaded Questions

There are two questions that ruin my day:
1) How are you?
2) How is your mother?

Most days I try to stay focused on the moment and work on my to do list. I think about my goals and hope that if I keep working towards them, someday I will be in a place I feel good about. As long as I stay in this space, I'm OK even happy at times. But then that space is blown by one of the two dreaded questions.

When I get question #1, I have two choices. Just lie and say I'm good (and that doesn't come natural). Or tell people I haven't slept in ten years, had sex in way too long (and that sounds whiny). I have like two friends in the county who I see a couple of times a year and spend the rest of my life in front of a computer or with a woman who can't talk. I never have any privacy but I never have anyone to talk to either. I work 14 hours a day six days a week and 8 on Sundays. I'm fat, out of shape and have a skin problem on part of my left foot that is driving me crazy.

When I get question #2, I feel like it's a slap in the face. When I finally get out of caregiving or computers and spend time with a friend or acquaintance, I don't want to even remember that my mother exists. And how should she be? She's severely disabled but healthy as a horse. When she dies, everyone will know because I will have a life again and friends and maybe even a lover. She can't talk, go to the bathroom or make a phone call. She doesn't know how to roll around in her wheelchair, so she's basically a brain trapped inside a body. This is how she was in the year 2000 and 2005. This is how she is today. Disabilities don't get better, so please stop asking.

Least you think I'm off the deep end, I do recognize that in polite society asking how people they are is the polite thing to do. Yet when others do it to me, I feel that the asker lacks even the most basic understanding what caring for a person with this level of need entails and how their questions make me feel. (Like crying in case you care)