death

by

Dealing With Death and Depression


I write this today because a longtime friend of mine died yesterday. I had known him since 1964. My heart is heavy today, but I can find solace in the fact that I knew a kind and gentle person for so many years.

Death is a part of life. It is the earth moving around the sun. It is always in motion and there is nothing we can do to change that. It was here and moving before life even formed on earth and will continue long after all life is extinguished.

My father died when I was just 20. He had heart disease, and his 3rd heart attack ended his life. I cried, I got mad, and I got depressed. In those days I had no idea of how to handle death, or depression for that matter.

The is a single word that we all need to use in dealing with death: “acceptance.” I have heard so many people say that death is not fair, but I always say that, except when death is caused by another human, it is always fair. It is that sort of acceptance that keeps depression away. My friend’s death has given me a heavy heart and with that I can feel the strings of depression tugging but I respond by not allowing such a thing. It is pretty easy actually. A heavy heart is normal and acceptable. When we allow ourselves to have that and to grieve our loss, we can avoid depression. But the grieving process must have a shelf life. If it goes on too long, it becomes self-pity which is always an unacceptable position.

Death will come to each of us and we should all prepare regardless of our age. No one knows the mind of God and therefore, we know nothing of our future or that of anyone else. I am 74 years old and each time I talk to one of my daughters the words, “I love you” are always a part of the conversation because were I to die, even today, they will know of my complete love for them, and for my grandchildren for that matter.

by

Friends, Present and Past


I just noted that my “friend” count on Facebook is 208.  I realize that for some people that is a very low number but for me, it is just about right, give or take a few.  I did a purge a few months ago when I had over 330 friends.  Basically, if I had never met you and had no desire to meet you, I unfriended you.  A lot of those friends were distant relatives both in miles and genealogical terms.  I have never met an “Osgood” who I could not find the connections, where our two family lines come together.  It mostly happens in the 18th and 19th  centuries.  My family first arrived in 1634 at Ipswich Massachusetts, one of three brothers, with the other two arriving in 1638.  From those three brothers literally thousands have descended.  And so, my Facebook travels had me coming accross many other Osgoods whom I have never met, although I would like to meet them.

Here is where I drag myself back to my real friends, as opposed to some on Facebook.  Way back when I was in the 5th grade, a new kid moved into town, and into a new house there.  I liked crawling around construction sites in those days and the men working there never seemed to mind me. Then came the day for the family to move in, the Youngs.  What I found out immediately is that they had a son my age, in the sixth grade, who I immediately took a liking to.  They had moved to North Andover from Saco, Maine.  I think jobs were tough up there, and there was a better market for engineers in this area.  Mr. Young had gotten an engineering job at the Raytheon Company Missle Systems Division in Shawsheen MA.

From that time on, and all the way through high school we were best of friends.  I saw him as my only friend but I did not feel like I need more.  Dave met and exceeded my friendship needs.

After I graduated high school, I started dating this girl from the next town over, Andover.  Her name was Helen Hurley.  Turns out, her family and my family had had a relationship that predated my birth but that also got me in good with her father as he thought very well of my family.  I had been going out with Helen only a few weeks when I suggested to my best friend, Dave, that he should really ask out Helen’s sister Maureen.  He hemmed and hawwed about it for a while before finally giving in.   And that, as the say, is all she wrote. They got married, had three kids, and were the perfect couple, at least as far as I could see.  They were great together.  It always felt good to have played a very small part in all that.

In 1996 the public high school I attended had its 30th reunion, and I went, which was the last one I went to.  I had no idea how ominous that event would be.  They actually combined the classes of 1966 and 1967 together to ensure a good turnout, and there was a fairly good turnout.  There were surprises, a guy we had known as Robert had become Roberta.  The usual stuff.  My brother was there with his girlfriend.  I attended alone.  I was divorced at the time.  But I sat at a table with my best friend David and tried to catch up.  It was a solemn evening because David told me he had an inoperable form of tumorous cancer.  Sitting there that November evening I do not think any of us expected we would be burying him a year and a half later.

But it was only a little over a year later, after the re-union, that my brother died quite unexpectedly, an unfortunate car accident.  He was working on his car in his garage, had the engine running but the damn fool did not have it ventilated.  My brother should have been my best friend, but he wasn’t.  I let him down.  I am the eldest of 3.  I am responsible.

Then on July 3, 1998, I had a heart attack that almost took me out.  The cardiologist told me this in strong terms.  Doctors like to have holidays off like anyone else and no surgery was planned for July 4 that year but my quickly worsening condition forced their had and they had to do emergency heart surgery on me.  The cardiologist informed me that I would not have lived out the weekend has we waited for Monday.  July 4 was a Saturday.

A few years ago I went on a search for a guy named Jim Camp who I had served with in the 25th Infantry Division.  I had lost track of him but we had been very close when we were stationed together.  I finally found someone who knew his story.  It seems he moved back to Florida, he was from there, and on the Thanksgiving Dinner table, Jim fell dead of a heart attack, right there.

I have taught each of my 3 daughters that you really only need one really good friend at any one time in your life, and I truly believe that. Dave and Jim were absolutely wonderful friends.  I can only wonder what sort of friend I was towards them, but I hope they saw it as good.

I don’t know that I have a true best friend these days, although I could really use one.  This is the person you can dump all your crap out in front of and have him respond , “so what’s the big deal?”  A good friend tells me when I am full of crap and warns me when I am screwing up.  That is a best friend.

But I have also had lots and lots of other friends, many of whom I love and adore.  I am not afraid to vocalize my positive feelings to these people but sometimes I get the feeling that such expressions are not always received well.

I am blessed to know so many good, wonderful, amazing people.  I think we should have a national “take your best friend out to dinner week.”  What do you think?

by

Life is Messy


Every now and then someone relates some of their family history and the crazy things that happen within their family. They present the story as a sort of “see how crazy my family is!”  My response is always the same, “all families are crazy, it’s just a matter of degree.”  By extension, that means all normal families are crazy.  It is just a matter of the details peculiar to that family. But in general, they are just simply crazy.

A few years ago a friend of mine was telling me about a part of her life she was not too proud of.  She had spent a week in jail once.  To say I was shocked is an understatement.  You see, she is someone everyone sees as the all American mom sort.  She is happily married, has two young children, and an MBA degree which helps her to a very substantial income.  When I asked her what she went to jail for, she very nonchalantly said it was for larceny over $200.  It turns out it was actually her boyfriend who had done the theft but she was present when it happened.  She pleaded out and got time served plus two years of probation.  If I were to show you a picture of her today with her husband and kids you would probably say, “no way!”

I had another friend who died about six years ago from lung cancer.   It turns out that his cancer was quite curable but a lack of early treatment, doctor’s fault, caused it to move to other organs.  He sued and won, of course.  I remember saying to him that he must really be angry.  The doctor had served a death sentence upon him.  He told me he was at first and then he came to terms with it.  When I asked him how you come to terms with having your life ended prematurely he said, “life is messy.”  I didn’t get it at first but after a lot of reflection I did.  He had arrived at a point where staying angry served no useful purpose and he wanted to enjoy the time he had left.  He enjoyed it, richly.

I thought about that for a long time, years.  I have come to the conclusion that life, external of human manipulation, is always and ultimately fair.  I hear people say how unfair something is.  A person dies in his 40s from cancer and they say how unfair that is.  But it is fair.  It is not like cancer decides to pick on a particular individual while sparing another.  It doesn’t.  It is not different from the flu.  Some get it, some don’t.  These things can be very sad, but they are always fair.

Most people are good.  They follow the rules, are usually polite, and give when they can.  We all, at one time or another, cross paths with someone who is not good.  They cause us grief and pain.  Sometimes it costs us money, other times health, and other times peace of mind.  These people can cause a serious mess in our lives but if we allow it to be anything more than the messiness of life, then we allow it to have more power over us than is right.

You hear people say “shit happens.”  That is way to negative for me.  I prefer “life happens.”  Some of it is not much fun though.  But I have found that by seeing life as a never-ending series of events, many of which are messy, then it is difficult for life to pitch me a curve ball I can’t handle.

by

Are You Sober or Do You Just Think You Are?


During most of my adult life it never occurred to me that maybe I should be in Alcoholics Anonymous, and yet for over 13 years now I have been.  I did not get there via a detox, or an intervention.  I was not court ordered nor did it follow any incident after which I knew for a fact that I needed A.A.

What I had become expert at was denial of the obvious.  I was never a daily drinker.  I did lose one job because of drinking but otherwise I was fully functional.  No one ever suggested that I possibly had a drinking problem.  That was until July 3, 1998.  But I will get to that in a minute.

Until I joined the Army I was not a drinker nor had I ever gotten drunk.  I did love the taste of my father’s port sherry but I never stole any from him. I only took the sip offered and nothing more.  But from a young age when I first tasted it, I adored it.  I was in flight school at Fort Wolters Texas when I got drunk for the first time. I managed to drink myself into a blackout.  From then on, the next 30 years, I would drink for effect and that effect was to change how I was feeling.  I would binge.  And that is what my drinking career looked like.  I would drink for a while and then not drink for a while.  But I always drank as a means of self-medication.

On July 3, 1998 I was on the banks of the Charles River in Boston enjoying the day.  I had been sitting for a while with a friend talking and enjoying the day.  We got up to move on and after we had moved only a few feet I was overcome with the feeling that it was difficult to breathe.  My friend looked at me and told me I was ashen gray in color.  She offered to call an ambulance, suggesting it a very good idea.  I said I knew I could make it the short distance to Massachusetts General Hospital.  I made it but I was very fortunate.  It took every ounce of strength I had.  Once there it took the doctor examining me about 17 seconds to decide I was having a heart attack.  After he told me that he suggested I stop drinking and drugging.  I told him that I did not drink.  The truth was I had started drinking around 11 that day and had done a good deal of that.  I did not use drugs so that was not an issue.  But there it was.  Denial in the first degree.  It was not 24 hours later a cardiac surgeon had to do emergency surgery on me, that was a Saturday and a holiday, July 4.  He said I would not live if it was put off any longer.

Still, it was not until late October of that year that someone suggested I might want to try an A.A. meeting.  I did and the rest, as they say, is history.  My life truly sucked in October 1998 and I was certainly feeling the desperation for a change that I had no idea how to make.  I embraced the 12-step program because all my previous attempts to make things better had failed.  At that time I did not believe A.A. would actually help, nor did I believe I had a problem with alcohol, in spite of the fact that a certified physician had suggested that I did have a problem.

My life today is fabulous, in no small part due to my active participation in A.A. and my complete acceptance of its principles.  I have managed to turn around every thing that I viewed as negative.  I now view whether I had a drinking problem or not as being irrelevant.  I do know there is no down-side to not drinking, nor is there an up-side to taking a drink.  I am not going to mess with success.

The reason I am writing this is to hopefully get someone who reads it to do a self-assessment.  I have seen too many people struggle with the concept of whether or not they are an alcoholic only to die in the process.  Most recently I had a very dear friend die.  She was only 31 years old.  She was very athletically strong.  She was very smart, a Yale graduate.  She was a veteran having served as a Naval intelligence officer.  She came from a wealthy family so she did not want for money.  She had lots and lots of friends.  She also believed she had another drunk in her, but she was mistaken.  To look at her you would say, “no way she was an alcoholic.”  But she was.  Alcohol wanted her alone, and then it wanted her dead.  It got both.  The two pictures below are of her just before she died, January 6, 2012.

My point in bringing up someone who young is that age is irrelevant.  A person’s income, social status, education, and most other things are irrelevant.

People who do not have a drinking problem do not plan their next drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem is unlikely to get a D.U.I.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not lose family, friends, jobs, or anything else because they had a drink, or even a few drinks.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not worry who sees them having a drink, nor do they hide their alcohol at home, nor do they lie about having a drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem frequently has a problem remembering when they had their last drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not see running out of beer or any other alcohol as a problem.

One of the biggest problems in any person’s life is their ability to deny the obvious.  People with alcohol problems are particularly good at it.  People with a drinking problem frequently try to shift blame for their own problems to other people, institutions, or things.  They are seldom interested in taking responsibility for their own actions.  They are someone who, when faced with a problem, decide they “need a drink.”  Whenever I hear someone say that, my ears perk up.  That is because I have the simple belief that no one “needs” a drink, ever, for any reason.  To the contrary, the well-adjusted, together person, wants to plow through the problem fully sober.  A drink only serves to muddle.

You do not have to drink every day to have a problem with alcohol.  You do not have to have been in jail as a result of drinking to have a problem.  You do not have to be homeless to have a problem.  Shortly after I stopped drinking I met a man who had a Harvard MBA, was a high-powered financier, and was getting ready to do some serious jail time which he admitted had been the result of his drinking.  Drinking never seems like a problem until it is.  And when it is denial comes to the rescue that permits the person to continue drinking.  Like any disease, untreated, it always gets worse.

I hope this makes an impression on someone who might be wondering about their drinking.  Feel free to contact me if you want more.  Better yet, go to an A.A. meeting, if only to gather information.  You have absolutely nothing to lose by doing so, and everything to gain.  If you do not know where meeting exist close to you, go to www.aa.org and you will find everything you need.

by

Spirituality and the Spirit World


I am dealing with two separate concepts here, but are they connected?  I think they are and I will explain myself.  But even if you cannot be convinced of the existence of spirits, I think it wise to accept the idea of spirituality.

A number of months ago a woman, who also happens to be a physician, told me she does not believe in spirituality.  More commonly, though, are people who do not know what spirituality means.  I was such a person even though I firmly believed in the concept.  But one day a woman asked me what spirituality meant to me.  I could not give her an answer and so I set out to figure it out.

The example I love to use as a particularly spiritual moment, and the one I suggested to the physician, is that moment when a child is born.  That moment between mother, father, and baby is an instant when you feel strongly drawn to each other, happiness fills you, and you feel a thrill like none other.  That is probably one of the most spiritual moments any human being can experience, in my opinion.  There are, of course, any number of other and different situations that are truly spiritual.  I think any moment when an individual feels at peace and filled with a joy of experiencing something qualifies as a spiritual moment.

I believe everyone experiences many spiritual moments throughout their lives.  Anytime something happens and two people enjoy the exact same feeling, and, know without saying a word to each other that they feel exactly the same exemplifies this.  But I take that one step further.  I believe there is a particular type of energy shared by those two people.  That energy flows evenly between them.  That leaves the question, is there truly real energy that flows between these people?  I believe the answer to be an emphatic yes.  That being true means that something real, if not tangible, travels from one person to another, energy.

Back in the early 20th Century Albert Einstein offered that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.  This is 0ne of the basic facts of physics and physicists have proven this to be fact in a million different ways.  There is no debate on that subject whatsoever.  Because of that simple fact a noted physicist, whose name I do not remember, remarked when asked about the possibility of spirits commented that it is certainly well within the realm of possibility.  It is not uncommon to hear about a person’s life-force.  Is that force a real thing, a type of energy?  Again, I think that it is in no small part because of one very simple principle.  We are the only animal on the planet that knows it is going to die.  This particular sort of consciousness, I believe, may well be our life-force.

About 20 years ago, or so, I read a series of books by the author Mary Summer Rain.  She wrote a number of books known as the “No-eyes Series.”  They were then, and are now, considered “New Age” books, whatever that means.  Mary Summer Rain is a full blood Shoshone who was brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition in Colorado.  Her books are written in the first person as they are an autobiographical account of her years when she was learning the ways of the shaman.  One book in particular, “Spirits Aloft,” recounts her encounters with the spirit world.  I chose then, and choose now, to believe her accounts.  There is nothing in any of her books that leads me to believe that she is concocting anything she has written.

I wrote a while back of my questioning the existence of God.  This concept, however, I believe exists independently of God.  I do believe, however, that spirits have a leg or two up on us in grasping God conceptually, and may well get such an answer immediately upon death.  But what I do not believe in are the reports by people who have experienced “near death” and their seeing a white light and other sensations.  I think all such experiences are fully explainable within the physical world where we live.

Physicists are presently discussing the possibility of as many as 11 dimensions, the three we live in plus another 8.  I think it highly likely that when our existence in our life dimensions ends we can well enter into one or more of the other 8 dimensions.