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  • Michael Calderwood

Thoughts From The Back Of The Room

Monthly Archives: January 2023

The Final Telling

26 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by Michael Calderwood in Living Our Values, Perserverence, Words matter

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Final Breaths, Last Hours, legacy, passing on

In the 2003 film “The Last Samurai,” Captain Nathan Algren is asked by the young Japanese Emperor to tell how the titular character, the Samurai Katsumoto, died. Algren responds, “I will tell you how he lived.”

How do we spend our last days and hours, especially when we know they are just that? Do we die as we lived? Are deathbed conversions a spiritual revelation, or the chemicals of the mind and body boiling together in one final fire of life? Do these fading moments reveal our true hearts?

I have seen the last hours of family and friends who knew the show was about to close. The masks dropped away, leaving the bare face that is the soul. In the last light of life, they revealed who they were across all the days they lived.

Mother

My mother’s life was very confusing to me. I can recall moments of tenderness, of humor, of fleeting kindness. But never joy. She suffered from significant physical ailments that ruined her body and her mind. She seems, in retrospect, to have been an always-angry person, bitter from multiple children and the exciting life dreamed but not lived. The diseases that tortured her were mental, physical, and spiritual. She tried to cope with prayer and alcohol, incense and cigarette smoke, and always with rage, her constant accomplice. Her body twisted, and her mind followed along. Things meant to soothe her demons only excited them, letting physical and emotional violence rain down and run amok.

After many false endings, time wrote her final chapter. Facing the unknowable, she was in her last hours as she had been at her worst hours. Raging and loud, angry beyond reason, lashing out with more fierce energy than her rapidly failing body should have been able to muster. Her last breath, drawn just hours before her sixtieth birthday, did not call out to God but rather goddamn you all. So, for all the mercy and understanding, the darkness won.

Sister

My sister followed my mother a few short months later. Anne Marie was a funny, kind, beautiful soul who, at the young age of thirty-two, was stricken with an unusual and cruel illness that appeared suddenly and relentlessly stole her body but never her spirit. Her last weeks were a torture of desperate treatments and experiments intended to heal but instead just delivered more destruction. She fought as she lived, not passively but not with the outward rage shown by our mother. Her concerns were for her family, especially her two young daughters. She knew her passing would be unbearable for them. And for the brothers and sisters that stood by her bedside, fighting to make the right decisions. Though most did not believe in miracles, we wished for one.

Through it all, there were moments of great conflict, terribly unfair decisions asked of those tasked with making them, and pure dread. But from Anne Marie, there was gentle humor and compassion for we who suffered and mourned her passing.

In her last minutes, she lay peaceful, quietly breathing until there were no more breaths. I stood, with our sisters and brother-in-law, holding her hand, and felt her let go. It was devastating and beautiful. There was no darkness, just the light of a gentle soul. Nothing in my life, before or after, changed me more than that moment.

Father

My father, emotionally battered and broken by the loss of his wife and child, somehow managed to find a way forward, though his body, scarred from years of bad health, stuttered and faltered occasionally. He continued being a dad to me and pappy to his grandchildren, finding bits of happiness in the warm sun of his new home in Florida.

When his systems began to fail with greater frequency, he struggled to live in a way that didn’t upset the individual bonds that extended from parent to child. It was difficult, really impossible to do. So, in the end, he chose to fight no more and let the natural process come to him.

He lay sedated in a hospice bed, two of his daughters and I, his oldest son, sharing the watch, each of us urging him different things. I said in our last minutes alone, “You’ve done enough, so you decide when to let go.” His face, still handsome till the end, transformed from the one I had seen throughout my life into my brother’s face, revealing a familial lineage I had not recognized before. It was the only moment, aside from the sadness of the circumstance, that genuinely unnerved me. As he was shutting down, his brain, soul, spirit, whatever one believes, expressed his final protests in muted groans and fleeting grimaces.

I stepped out, realizing I needed to dash to the airport to pick up another sister who had flown down to be with him in his final hour. As I got to my car, my phone rang. He was gone. I drove to the airport, greeted my sister’s flight, and shook my head as she came down the jetway. It was over. Dad died as he lived, trying to make everything okay for everyone. He realized the impossibility and chose what was right for him. Not passive, not angry. Just accepting.

An accurate telling of how he lived can only be found through a kludged kaleidoscope of memories and interpretations. I saw, at the end, the person I always knew.

Friend

My friend and colleague Janice and I were not related, though our parallel Bronx Irish Catholic upbringings and shared values could argue that we were a part of a much larger family. Janice was smart, funny, bossy, and overly loyal to her co-workers. She was also one of the most tenacious people I have ever known, made so by the battles she fought in her unfairly short lifetime. A young widow raising three daughters, a breast cancer survivor left with lingering physical issues from that battle, Janice was ultimately thrown into an unwinnable war with pancreatic cancer. We often spoke as she underwent treatment and a brutal surgery that tortured her body and spirit. Her sadness and fears were not solely focused on her destiny. She was all about her daughters Denise, Susan, and Megan—her girls.

Janice fought on for what seemed like forever, moving from Connecticut to Boston to be with her family. On a cold and grey day, Denise, whose home became the gathering place, let me know the time was near. I drove north through an endless traffic jam and reflected on our unlikely friendship. Denise and her sisters welcomed me, and I joined them and other family members who had come together, as families do, to comfort and support each other in the fading hours. I was able to spend a very few minutes with Janice. We sped through ” I’m so sorry” and “I love you, my friend” and got to Janice’s core—her girls. She was worried for them but also sure that they would be fine after she was gone. She raised them with her spirit and courage and left them with us all after her eyes closed and her pain dissolved into the universe.

At her funeral Mass, I had the opportunity to give a short remembrance. I practiced my piece so I wouldn’t stumble too badly. I did okay until the end, when I looked up and saw her family, her girls, and choked up on my final line, “I will miss my friend.”

Unwritten Endings

In the years since these passings, I have experienced the loss of other friends, some gone quickly, others after great, almost heroic battles against an unbeatable foe. I found myself confused about my responses, often profoundly emotional for friends not seen in years. We shared a time when we couldn’t contemplate any of us dying, wandering through our lives intact until we were not so young. And then they were gone.

At the wakes, the funerals, the memorials, and the reunions, we squint to find traces of our missing friends and families in the faces and voices of the children they begat. Will they need someone to tell them how we lived? Or will they know us by how we passed?

In his last moment, surrounded by the horrors of war, the destruction of his tribe, and the end of the Samurai, Katsumoto attained the peaceful beauty of perfect cherry blossoms. Birth, death, beauty, and violence. He died as he lived.

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RIP, Ordinary Guy

12 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by Michael Calderwood in Art and Artists, Fordham University, Friendship, music, Words matter

≈ 3 Comments

I woke to a sad message today. “Hi Mike. I want to reach out to you personally before we post on FB that Richard Dunne died last night. His heart gave out. Sumus was a joy in his life, as we’re you guys.”


This news was not unexpected, but still a bit tough to absorb. Richard and I go back to our very young days in the Bronx. We were passionate about the same thing – music. Richard was a gifted singer, actor, and guitar player with the look and charisma that made him the center of attention wherever he performed. In our early teens, we joined together with a couple of other local kids to form the band “Sumus,” where we all began our life-long habits/hobbies/professions/passions.

The band’s lineup changed a few times as we went through the joys and aggravations of learning how to make music together, and how to grow up in the changing era of the 1970s. We spent countless hours causing the living room chandelier to sway in drummer Richie Wood’s parent’s house on Loring Place. We enjoyed the good-natured bemusement of Mr. Wood’s New England – accented question, “how much more shit ya got in there?” as we struggled to load and unload band equipment, dragging it up the steep, narrow alleyway next to the house.


We spent a ton of time learning the songs of the day. Each member had a bit of a preference for different styles. Drummer Woody had studied under a jazz teacher, and his style of play showed that influence. Richard was a fan of the popular vocal groups of the time – notably Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. His pure tenor and great musicality gave him the flexibility to tackle even the most complex parts, and his stage training let him hide any vocal shortcomings with theatrical flair. As the band grew and changed, new members added new voices, colors, and musical skills to the collaboration. Singer Frank Roman, guitarist Michael Cunningham, guitarist/bassist Mike Monaco, pianist Jim Phillips, Hammond player Jim Tiernan, percussionist Allen, and maybe a few more that came and went. The band was always supported by the free-spirited and passionate Victor Ferrara, who never met a speaker cabinet he wouldn’t carry or a long drive in awful weather he wouldn’t make.


Some of our best times were summers spent in Fort Salem, New York, doing shows and playing gigs at the funky Fort Salem Summer Theater. So many memories, I think! Rich also included the band members in the productions he was involved in while attending Fordham University, another learning experience for us. He stayed close to many of the young actors he mentored and inspired.


Richard continued his theater career, performing across the region and later spreading to different parts of the country. He enjoyed a stint on the soap “Another World,” earning him the snarky but endearing title of “DDOG – Dick Dunne, Ordinary Guy.” Some of us still used that term over the decades, even though most of us only connected at funerals or reunions.


Over time I worked in a duo with Richard, he on guitar and vocals, and me on bass and bad vocals. We had some fun, made some pocket money, and met some new folks. One of the most consequential outcomes of this collaboration led to a life-changing event for me.

Richard was doing a show at a theater in Millbrook, New York. The theater had an after-show cabaret, featuring a great band led by singer Toni Glover. The group was looking to grow and expand, and Richard mentioned I might be a good fit. We played a few sets, and I auditioned for the band. I guess I passed because I was learning a whole new repertoire a short while later. I was also learning the names and personalities of the band members, which had grown with the addition of two female singers. After a rocky start and a lot of road time, I became close to the singer who, as I write this over forty years later, is upstairs, playing the piano. So, thanks, Rich.


I last saw Richard in person a few years back, playing at the LA dive bar The Oyster House with his group “The Drinks.” Over thirty years and three thousand miles from the dive bars of the Bronx, nothing had changed, at least not atmospherically. I walked into the bar while the band was on stage, dressed in a sport coat and slacks – not the usual attire for this establishment. I got the eye, the one we all probably gave to strangers who came into our local spots, and a very intoxicated and hostile guy asked me if I was “from the studio.” After talking to this odd dude, I decided to wait outside until the band took a break. I must note that I stopped drinking long ago and was out of bar shape. A few minutes later, a group of characters tumbled out the back door and approached me aggressively. Richard was among the mob and did not recognize me until I said, “I see nothing much has changed!” But in truth, a whole lot had changed. Me, older, fatter, balder. Richard older, balder, and minus a leg lost to diabetes.


He spent the last years of his life still singing and playing his heart out. The heart that finally gave out after years of illness and abuse.


Thanks for the music, the memories, and the friendships we share.

When we were young… Me, Richie Wood, Richard Dunne, Mike Monaco

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