And Rosemary...For Remembrance

Thanksgiving/Pre-Black Friday Thoughts...

Remembering My Dad, With Love And Smiles...

Maybe THIS is why I have always loved dancing...

My dad, John Arthur Heise, was my first dance partner.

And he taught me how to bowl...he was an excellent bowler.

And without knowing it, he instilled in me that special-albeit-odd sense of Heise humor that comes in handy at the strangest times...and I thank God for that.

My dad, bless his heart, would have turned 88 this week...

Oh, we had our issues. And there was a 14-year time span -- from the day I turned 21 till sometime in my mid 30s -- that we rarely talked on the phone and never saw each other. But we were fortunate in that at the end of his journey here on earth (about a dozen years ago), we had the chance to make amends and hug and tell each other how much we loved each other...

Sadly, my dad never met Daniel or my sister's children, Aaron and Liz...blame it on time, distance, difficult family dynamics, health problems... and yet, in his own way, I know he loved them...

It's all about forgiveness...sometimes hard, but not impossible, to find...

Anyway, thinking of you, Dad. And smiling...

Survivor

Oct. 21, 1969.

It was a Tuesday. A bright, beautiful October morning. And it was three days before my 13th birthday...

I remember sitting in study hall at Sellman Junior High...the school secretary called me out to come to the office.

I had a sick feeling in my stomach...I knew. I was hoping against hope I was wrong...but I just knew.

There, in the school office, stood my very sad looking father and my even sadder looking sister...

"Mom's gone," my dad said.

They called it "a therapeutic misadventure," but the truth is, my mother died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. She had been in the hospital since Monday morning after I found her passed out on the living room floor...

Mom's funeral was Oct. 24...my birthday. My first day of being a full-fledged teenager...

How to describe the past 40 years without my mom? I think author Hope Edelman, in her book, "Motherless Daughters", describes it best.

" I am fooling only myself when I say my mother exists now only in the photograph on my bulletin board or in the outline of my hand or in the armful of memories I still hold tight. She lives on in everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was, and her absence influences who I am. Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide."

After four decades, I can no longer recall the sound of my mother's voice. I can no longer recall the sound of her laugh.

What I do remember is that she had a great sense of humor, and her friends regularly turned to her for advice. My mother was a registered nurse. Her favorite soap opera was As The World Turns. She boycotted lettuce in support of the underpaid lettuce growers in the 60s. She loved reading and acting. My mother never learned to drive. She enjoyed playing bridge and Monopoly. She was a good cook.

I remember she let me stay home from school once when I was in the fourth grade. I wasn't sick, she just let me stay home with her. I think now that I was her safety net that day...

In my mother's absence o'er these many years, I have been blessed with the love of and nurturing by several special "other mothers", including my wonderful mother-in-law... the most wonderful friends... and of course, my guardian-angel-on earth, my ever lovin' sister. So I have much to be thankful for.

Granted, I have struggled with several emotional issues. All motherless daughters do, to one degree or another.

And then, of course, there is the issue of Mother's Day. Until I had Daniel, Mother's Day was THE worst day of the year. Every spring, surrounded by reminders of how special the mother-daughter relationship is, but unable to spend time with my own Mom or give her a gift...

According to Ms. Edelman, however, we motherless daughters have our own "gifts".

We have, she says, the courage to "journey alone." Courage born of necessity, I would add.

Actually, truth be known, I come from a long line of motherless daughters.

My mother lost her mother when she was four years old. My grandfather later married a woman who had lost her mom when she was five.

Even my stepmother (my dad remarried a year or so after my mom died) lost her mom at a young age.

Both my sister and I freaked out a little as we approached the age our mother was when she died -- 47. When we each made it to 48, we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Psychologists say that for motherless daughters, living beyond the age our mothers died is "living dangerously," and we often feel driven to make the most of that time. Hence, many of the most celebrated and driven women of our time are motherless daughters...

Me? Suffice to say, I'm a tish neurotic, but with a creative bent...

And so tonight, in loving memory of my mother, my heart goes out to all those daughters, near and far, who have lost their mothers. Celebrated and driven, or creatively neurotic, we are all survivors!

Love you, Mom! Miss you...

ANGEL ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD

We won!

We won!

We won!

The 2009 Crusaders play every game for Casey, and this game, especially, against the Glidden-Ralston Wildcats, was a triple sweet victory in loving memory of the Mighty Case, #85.

And Daniel got to play for a little bit -- and he caught a pass! Cast and all!

Victory has never felt so GREAT!

42-28!

Awesome, Crusaders! WooHoo!

Triumph Over Tragedy

I still get goosebumps.

9/11/2001

It was a Tuesday.

WHAT!?! A terrorist attack? No! No! This can't be happening! Our country, our world...we were all, suddenly, shocked to our very core...and we have never been the same.

I will never forget John, in Kansas City at seminary, calling home the day after to check on Daniel yet again. How was he doing? How was he handling the tragedy?

"How was your day at school today, Daniel?" John asked.

"Good, Daddy," Daniel replied, in his quiet, little third-grade voice. "No planes fell out of the sky today."

Eight years later, Sept. 11, 2009, I am pinning a red, white and blue ribbon on my CR-B Crusaders sweatshirt, the ribbon a handmade token of patriotic remembrance from one of my office co-workers. I carefully attach the ribbon just above and to the right of Daniel's junior year football pin.

I gently pat the pin. Heavy sigh...

And then I think to myself, "Has it really been only eight years?" Seems like forever that our country's heart has been laden with the painful and complicated aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy. Yet, we, as a country, and all the families of those loved ones lost, have somehow, through heartfelt memoirs, fitting tributes, and special anniversary observances, found some healing and the strength to move forward from that horrific moment in time.

My hand moves slowly from the ribbon and the football pin to touch the pair of silver metal memorial dog tags dangling from a simple necklace chain around my neck. I feel the raised lettering on the tags.

He had dreamed of one day joining the Marines...

"Casey Daniel Stork, 1993-2009"

"Forever In Our Hearts"

I still get goosebumps.

7/8/09

It was a Wednesday.

WHAT?!? A car accident? NO! NO! THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!

We were all suddenly shocked to our collective core. Has it only been two months? Seems like forever that our hearts have been so heavy with sorrow...we are all still dazed by disbelief as we continue to grapple with the stark, heart wrenching reality of it all...

We all miss Casey so very much, and we all are so very thankful that we still have Daniel. Loss and thankfulness, loss and thankfulness...And we live day to day, hour to hour, in the balance.

"How is Daniel doing?" everyone kindly asks.

That is a tough question to answer. It is hard to know, fully, just yet. On the surface, we all seem to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. Who among us doesn't still cringe when we pass the accident site on our way to Carroll? Timber Avenue...it is our own private Ground Zero. It is where the proverbial planes fell out of the sky once more...and we will never be the same.

Accidents, illness, the sudden loss of a loved one...Certainly, the list of personal 9/11s that we all, as human beings, experience over the course of our lives, is varied and endless. How do we overcome these tragedies? How do we, as adults, heal? How do we, in this instance, help our heartbroken, teenage children -- Casey's friends -- heal?

"When I was your age, my best friend died, too," my 25-year-old niece, Liz, wrote to Daniel the other day. "Her name was Rachel. She died of cancer. It was different circumstances than what you've had to face, and I don't pretend to know how you feel. But one thing I do know: when you lose your best friend at age 16, it changes you. It becomes part of who you are. There's no use fighting that.

"My advice" Liz continued, "is to take all the good things about Casey, and all the lessons learned because of this tragedy, and try very hard to use them for good. Keep moving forward and take Casey with you."

Indeed, the upcoming installation of the Casey Stork Memorial football scoreboard at the high school, and the subsequent dedication being planned by his classmates, is a healthy step toward doing just that. It is a triumph, of sorts; a positive, healing event to focus on, not only for Casey's family and many friends, but also for the community at large.

Casey Daniel Stork.

Forever in our hearts.

And now, to be forever remembered at one of the places Casey was happiest...the Coon Rapids- Bayard High School football field.

We love you, #85!

A fitting tribute to Casey.

Time It Was, Oh, What A Time It Was...

It was a time of innocence...a time of confidences...

Thought I'd reprint one of my earliest blog posts -- from three years ago...

The recent fall-ish weather and the constant call of the very noisy crickets always bring back memories of one very special cricket -- Flower -- a forever symbol of the long-ago summers of my youth.

Kim, Tricia, Helen: This blog post -- as it was three years ago -- is for you...

(From The Home Stretch, Sept. 3, 2006)

Today has been one of those days...it's supposed to be a day of rest, but the lawn called to me, "Annie, rev up that lawnmower... NOW!"

So I did.

Then I noticed how the morning glories, though beautiful, have taken over my entire garden, and the creeping jenny, albeit great, green groundcover, is really a weed and it has highjacked most of the yard.

Do I really care? No. But I started yanking weeds anyway and that's when I saw the first one. The first cricket of "cricket season". All sorts of little crickets hopping to and fro...they do that this time of year; that summer's-almost-over-but-fall-ain't-quite-here time of year that brings out not only the crickets but the big, beautiful (and scary looking) garden spiders...

It's the time of year I always think about my friend Kim...if you are reading this, Kim, you know where I am headed.

It was, I think, 1968...Kim and her family had just moved back to our neighborhood, and sixth grade was just getting underway. We were playing outside in the field behind the elementary school where it was crickets galore. And so Kim and I got a box, caught some of the little buggers, and one of them we named Flower...

Ah. The innocence of life back in the sixth grade in Madeira, Ohio.

That following summer -- our sixth-grade summer, as we still to this day reminisce -- was THE best summer of our lives. Kim, Tricia, Helen and I were best buds, and we rode bikes, and slept outside in sleeping bags, and talked about how the four of us were going to get an apartment together some day...

We'd spend our days just hanging out, sometimes lying on the ground, staring up into the cloudless sky for what seemed like hours..."The sky is so blue," I remember one of us remarking once. It was, indeed, a scene right of Wonder Years.

As it turned out, the four of us never did share an apartment. We all went our separate ways after high school. But for the most part, we have always kept in touch.

We tried re-enacting that blue-sky moment years later -- around 1990 -- after I moved back to Cinci from Iowa. We were in our mid-30s, married...way past the age of catching crickets and naming them. But it felt so good to be back together again. So, putting our harried lives on hold for a moment, we all made our way down to the ground in Tricia's backyard one mid-summer afternoon and gazed up into the sky.

"The sky is so blue!" one us said, and we laughed and laughed.

For a brief moment, we were back in sixth grade again...lighthearted, carefree, awash in the sense that like the big, blue endless sky above, our lives stretched out before us, chock full of possibility and opportunity...

But then it was getting late, and there was supper to fix and diapers to change, and...

I don't think we will ever forget our sixth grade summer. Those rare and precious times we are blessed to be together -- usually class reunions (we LOVE class reunions), we almost always bring up the "blue sky" day, and Kim and I to this day fondly remember Flower, the cricket.

From the vantage point of my "omigod I'm almost 50" summer, life at 12 seemed so simple then. (Somebody stop me before I break into a teary rendition of "The Way We Were! Kleenex! I need a Kleenex!)

Funny... to this day, I cannot kill a cricket.

So Kim, Tricia, Helen...if you are reading this...Here's to crickets, blue skies, sixth-grade summers, old friends, and life's innocence lost.

And to the rest of you...what are your favorite memories? What brings back, with a rush and a sigh, a heart-enveloping memory? What are your special anniversaries of the heart?

Celebrate them whenever you can.