MURDOCK TACKLES TAOS

I dislike reading manuscript PDFs on my laptop, especially if the manuscript is a good mystery and what I really want is to curl up and enjoy. Still, when writer, teacher and friend, Robert J. Ray, offered his latest Murdock mystery in pre-publication format, I was delighted.

Murdock Tackles Taos is Ray's sixth Murdock mystery. The first was Bloody Murdock, released in 1986. Matt Murdock moved to Seattle and Murdock Cracks Ice appeared in 1992. Ray says he writes slow. I say each new adventure is worth the wait. I've enjoyed every one of the Murdock mysteries and this is no exception. If you enjoy well-written mysteries, watch for Murdock Tackles Taos, scheduled for release by Seattle's own Camel Press next month. Learn more about Robert Ray's work at his blog, co-authored with Jack Remick.

Here's my review: 

Murdock Tackles Taos is an any-time summer read, a murder mystery fueled with action: a missing woman and a corpse, good guys and bad guys, love and sex, all flavored with evil I will not reveal. Also, Murdock Tackles Taos examines privilege and the extremes that mega-wealth can afford. When you can buy anything or anyone you want, what more is there? What games do humans play when the thrill is gone? When human life loses all meaning or value?

Through it all, Murdock makes me smile. He’s not a suave, sophisticated James Bond. He’s not a disheveled, bumbling Colombo either. He’s real. He’s kind. He’s somebody to share a good adventure with. Helene Steinbeck, retired town marshal turned successful author, is Murdock’s new sidekick and lover. She makes me just a tiny bit jealous. 

Robert Ray’s novel tossed me back and forth between the feel of a summer read and a study in human nature – either way Murdock Tackles Taos is a read you won’t want to miss.

Writing Groups

When I received Mindy Halleck's invitation to participate in an interview series for her blog, Literary Liaisons, I was intrigued and challenged. The questions were deceptively simple:

1. What, if any, benefits do you receive from participating in a writers group?

2. How does the Natalie Goldberg/Jack Remick/Robert Ray style of writing practice influence your writing?

I asked myself why I drive across town several times a week to write in the company of others, why I face Seattle's rush hour traffic when I could just as easily sit at home in my comfortable little writing room or walk to a local coffee shop. My answers appear on Mindy's blog, Literary Liaisons. 

Vigil

Thursday, February 21, 2013

I stand at my mother's bedside. I lean forward, kiss her cheek, stroke her hair. "Hello, Mom, Sally," I say. "It's me. Arleen. Your daughter. I love you." Her eyes seem to focus, a flash of something in the pale blue. Recognition? Connection? Love? And then it is gone.

I sit in this tiny room in the dementia care facility to await my mother's passing, desperate for an end to her misery, hoping it doesn't come today on my sister's birthday. I talk nonsense, grade student compositions, write in this notebook. I read aloud first from one book then from another as the hours layer one upon another. My mother no longer eats or drinks or moves. Even her eyes now seem frozen in place. Her small frail body is shutting down. Only her heavy breathing tells me she is still alive.

I am alone with the shadow of the woman who was once my mother, her quiet strength so often misunderstood. For eleven years she has been alone since my father's death. For eleven years she has been lost in the clutches of dementia, the memories of her greatest joys and her most horrific tragedies wiped away with an indiscriminate, cruel stroke of brain malfunction. In these eleven years I have felt closer to my mother than in all the accumulated years prior. An irony. My loss.

Throughout the afternoon my vigil is interrupted only by caregivers shifting my mother's position, teaching me to moisten her lips, offering their words of comfort. And by nurses checking her vitals.

The chair is plastic cold, the room too warm. I sit with my mother, this fragile dying woman who was once the vibrant mother of nine, the love of my father's life. My mother always shopped in the petite department. As a growing adolescent I wanted to be like her, petite and pretty, with blond curls and tiny feet, blue eyes and no glasses. But I continued to grow, tall and gangly, with dark frizz and big feet, green eyes and coke-bottle glasses. I was not my mother's daughter. I did not possess her quiet strength, a trait I came to appreciate only in these final years as dementia took her away from me.

I open the drawer in my mother's bedside table to find the hospice journal. The last entry reads: "Sally continues her dying process." My mother has been dying for eleven years. For the first seven of those years she insisted, demanded, fought to stay in the home she and my father shared on a lonely stretch of Pacific beach where the crash of waves lulled her to sleep after she checked and rechecked the doors and windows, after she raised the thermostat to warm her soul, after her tears dampened her lonely pillow. By 2009 it was obvious to everyone from the home health caregiver to the post mistress and the grocery cashiers that Mom could not continue to live alone, and we moved her into dementia care against her wishes. She adapted and gained weight. She walked the halls humming and smiling. But the disease kept picking away at her brain, stealing bits and pieces, memories and motor skills.

This room where I sit on this plastic chair, softened now with the padded cushion from her idle wheelchair, has been my mother's home for four years. This tiny room and bathroom. A single bed and bedside table. A dresser with a large oval mirror that once belonged to my paternal grandmother. The floor bare for easy mopping, the walls institutional white, the only personal touches are the family photos of faces she's long forgotten. Her husband of fifty years, her nine children and numerous grandchildren, her beloved parents are all strangers.

My mother has not eaten for a week. She is dying as I sit beside her my notebook open to record the close of her life. My pen moves across this page because I can do nothing more. I can only sit and soothe her occasional tremors with a hand on her shoulder and listen to the shallow breathing of a life at its end. I can only offer comfort with touch, word and song. I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck. My father's deep voice fills my head. I struggle to remember the lyrics and sing to my mother in a voice that even I do not want to hear, a voice that is not my father's voice. Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do. I'm half crazy over the love of you...

At dinner time I am served my mother's meal, the meal she no longer eats. Barley soup, pork roast, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables. I do not push the lima beans around my plate as I did in childhood. I eat my mother's dinner at her bedside, her red cloth napkin spread across my knees, the chords of Andres Segovia filling the silence between her breaths.

As evening progresses I must decide whether to stay or go. "How much time is left?" I ask Nurse Erika when she returns for a 9:00 p.m. check. "I don't have a crystal ball," she tells me, her voice a caress. She teaches me about mottling as she massages lotion into my mother's cold feet. "It's only progressed to her calves," she says. "But I don't have that crystal ball." I decide to go home.

Friday, February 22, 2013

I drive north knowing that my brother and his wife are already with our mother. Later a sister and her husband join us. More chairs are pushed into the small room. Mom's breathing is rough. She's now on morphine applied to the inside of her mouth every two hours. The dosage increases as the hours pass. We fill the afternoon with memories and laughter as caregivers change shifts, hospice workers offer comfort, nurses administer medications.

Before my sister and her husband leave, we play with Mom's wheelchair and talk of my spending the night in it. By 8:30 p.m. Mom and I are alone again and I am still undecided. A half hour later Nurse Erika and I talk of Mom's labored breathing. She shows me that the mottling is now up to Mom's thighs. She decides to increase the morphine. When she leaves to get the medication, I notice that we've lost the classical radio station that's been our backdrop for the past two days. I fiddle with the dial and land on 88.5FM, music of the 40s big band era.

"Go dance with Dad," I whisper to my mother. "He's waiting for you. Put on your black velvet top and your taffeta skirt. Go dancing, Mom. I love you."

Her teeth clack two, three, four times. Her harsh open-mouthed breathing stops. "She seems too silent," I say as Nurse Erika returns. She places her hands on Mom's chest, a gentle searching for the movements of breath or heartbeat, the signs of life. I am at her side. I reach forward and place the back of my hand on my mother's cheek. She releases one final breath and leaves this world.

Nurse Erika and I look into each other's eyes, grasp each other's arms. "Is she really gone?" I ask. "She's gone." I look at the wall clock. 9:25 p.m. Nurse Erika's stethoscope confirms my mother's passing. "I'll call hospice," she tells me and leaves the room.

I am alone with my mother's body still expecting another rasping breath. My arm on her chest, I swear I feel movement. The hospice nurse arrives. Another stethoscope check. Another confirmation."I'll call Neptune Society," she tells me and leaves the room.

My sister and brother-in-law return. They've only just gotten home when I call. Another sister who's been in flight, ending a vacation early, arrives to say good-bye to Mom's departing spirit. We sit together. I hear a knock and go to the door. No one is there. Then it is over. Or so we think.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

I awaken to loss and fear. 2/2/02. Dad's death. 2/22/13. Mom's death. Eleven years of care end and I feel like I've just lost them both. Only memory remains and I am terrified that the day will come when my memories leave me just as they abandoned my mother. I know I need to write as I always write, to process and to remember.

I'm still in bed when the phone rings. "Swedish called," my sister says. "They have a kidney." My brother-in-law is admitted, the match is confirmed, and kidney transplant surgery is performed the following day.

Life ends and new life is given. The synchronicity is beyond comprehension. I choose to believe that Mom's gift to me was her final good-bye and her gift to my sister will be her husband's health and longevity. And as I continue to hold my breath, waiting and hoping, I realize that in giving these gifts, my mother has diverted attention from herself in death just as she did in life.

Marcella Adeline Huber Feeney

September 21, 1924 - February 22, 2013

Gabriela and the Widow on Kindle

Not long ago I heard a story on NPR about the effects of e-readers on the world of reading. People are reading more, particularly young people. The commentator suggested the increase could be due to anonymity: when you're on an electronic device, people might not know you're reading. Could be the kid on the bus next to you isn't just listening to rap or playing a game. He might be reading Great Expectations without fear of being labeled a nerd - or whatever it is kids call each other these days.

I was about to buy a copy of Jack Remick's Gabriela and the Widow in paperback because I'm old school, because I don't have an e-reader, because I like the feel of paper in my hands. But NPR made me question my bias against e-books, so I downloaded Kindle on my small Acer laptop, bought my first e-book and began to read.

I didn't like slipping into bed with a cold hard laptop. I couldn't float on the magic and mystery of Remick's lyrical prose. I was dog paddling with arrow buttons, unable to scan ahead or flip back to reread with the ease of turning a page. Still, the power of Remick's words kept me at it, pulled me to a computer screen long after my teaching and writing day was over. That screen became a portal and the story took me to the far side of my own life's mirror, a life I once lived and allowed to slip from memory.

“When you go through your reflection you become who you are.”

The Widow reminds us that we must never forget our past, for it is what makes us who we are and who we become.

“You must speak from inside the tears and you must smell the pain on your skin or you will never be whole again.”

Remick writes the tools of the craft into his story: a list of events and a stack of notecards, each labeled with date, place and object. Gabriela and the Widow use these tools to construct the List of the Widow's life and in doing so Gabriela experiences new ways of being, alternatives to the violent patterns that have marked her young life. Throw nothing of yourself away, the Widow teaches. Save your fingernail clippings, your hair trimmings, your life stories. A lesson on living. A lesson on writing. I see Gabriela with her notecards and her long list as I work the notecards on the storyboard of my current novel.

Gabriela and the Widow is a lyrical treasure that paints a magical mysterious world of two women, so close they inhabit each other's dreams and relive each other's experiences. In doing so the Widow leaves a bit of herself behind when she passes and Gabriela enters womanhood regaining a life tragically interrupted in childhood as an innocent victim of the atrocities of war.

This is a beautiful, horrific, captivating read full of the lights and colors, the smells and music of southern Mexico and central California. The story held me to the screen and that says a lot. I have no doubt some of you will point out that reading off a computer is not the same as using an e-reader. You may even insist that I give Kindle a chance, certain I'll love it once I get used to it. Maybe so, but I'm not ready to make the jump to an e-reader just yet. I still want a signed paperback copy of Jack Remick's Gabriela and the Widow for my library.

Choices and Vi Menn

When I opened the email from Johan Jensen last summer, I was intrigued. Why would a reporter from Norway want to talk with me? Why an article about the Green River murder case now? And why for a Norwegian men's magazine?

I went on line to check out Johan Jensen and the magazine he writes for: Vi Menn. I don't read Norwegian, but I have to admit that I was put off by the photographs of  bare-breasted women. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I asked my Norwegian-American friend about Vi Menn. Kim assured me that men don't read Vi Menn in dark rooms. "In fact there's a women's edition that my relatives send me," she said.

Still, I was faced with another of life's difficult choices. I'd written a book about my sister's death at the hands of the Green River Killer. I could no longer crawl into a hole and pretend it had never happened. Now I realized that writing about the horror and pretending that the act of writing was so cathartic that I could leave the pain behind me was also a lie. I decided that my best option was to continue to talk and write about my sister and the other Green River victims in hopes of building awareness about the multitude of issues surrounding violence against women and sex trafficking.

Decision made, I met Johan Jensen on a beautiful sunny July day at a coffee shop on lower Queen Anne, here in Seattle. It was a comfy and casual conversation about mass murder, police screw-ups, plea bargains and capital punishment. We talked of justice: retribution vs. rehabilitation. And we struggled to define prostitution and sex trafficking as I explained that even today, almost three decades later, I still get that your-sister-was-a-prostitute look when I mention that my sister was a Green River victim.

At one point in the conversation, right about when I was ripping into Dave Reichert and why I thought he was a total ass who capitalized on the case to build a political career even though he wasn't the one who nailed Gary Ridgway, in walked two of Seattle's finest in dark navy, shiny badges, guns at the hip. They chose a table so close we could've held hands. Johan looked at me, a do-you-want-to-continue question in his eyes. I shrugged and kept talking. I don't know what those cops overheard or thought of our conversation, and frankly I don't care.

I can only guess at bits and pieces of what Johan Jensen wrote in his article, on-line translations leaving much to the imagination, but it was a pleasure to meet him, and I thank him for his interest in the lives of the Green River victims. For those of you who are able to read Norwegian, here's a link to Jensen's article: Jakten på skyggejegeren 

A Scrap of Pain

After far too many hours glued to television and computer screens trying to make sense of the insanity of the Newtown, CT shooting that took the lives of twenty innocent children - children attending school, children laughing and playing, children waiting for Santa Claus - my husband handed me a coat and told me that we were going for a walk.

Dark, windy, the air heavy with accumulated moisture threatening to let loose at any moment, we walked to the West Seattle junction. We stopped at our favorite used bookstore. List in hand, I searched for titles appropriate for my adult ESL learners surrounded by parents reading to young children, negotiating purchases, encouraging reading and setting limits at the same time. I thought of the children and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary, the twenty seven dead who will not be reading any more books.

We made our way into the local art and frame shop amidst a cluster of caroling teeny-boppers, herded along by a teacher, girl scout leader, maybe Sunday school volunteer pulling a small amplifier like a piece of luggage. Girls on the brink of adolescence, some shy, others stage-ready, all sang their hearts out. And I saw the twenty children who will not be caroling this year. Or ever.

As we walked towards home in the dark drizzle something caught my eye in the light of a streetlamp. A scrap of paper stuck to the sidewalk. Garbage. I kept walking, two, three, four steps, but it pulled me back. Was it the way the light shined on the soaked paper? Was it the color green? Or was it the word Victims?

I went back and peeled the scrap from the wet pavement careful not to destroy it further. It was nothing more than the right lower corner of a small poster. I read:

 

River                                    

Victims

Memorial

com / GRVM1       

My husband came back and read over my shoulder.

"Can it be?" I asked.

Tom said nothing.

"When? Where? Who organized this?"

We searched the nearby power poles in hopes of finding the rest of the poster, but found nothing. I dropped the scrap into Tom's shopping bag. Another piece of horror. Another reminder. If it was what I thought it was, why didn't I know about it? And did I want to know?

These are the questions one ponders even a quarter of a century after the death of a loved one by a mass murderer. The pain does not go away. We simply learn to live with it. The parents, the siblings, the loved ones of the victims of the Newton massacre will live with this pain for as long as they exist. I cried for their pain and for my own.

"I'll google it," I told Tom. I told myself.

But I didn't. Not when we got home. Instead I made dinner. We watched a movie. I tossed and turned through the night.

The next morning, as Tom packed the van in a rush to reach the West Seattle Farmers' Market to sell Kentucky Bourbon Cakes and holiday cheer, I googled GRVM1. A Facebook link appeared. I clicked on it.

December 8, 2012

Green River Victims Memorial

That's all I read. I scrolled through the long list of comments but read nothing. Whatever it was, wherever it was, whoever had organized it, I had missed it. I turned off my laptop and hurried out to sell holiday cheer. I know I will do more research. I will learn about this event and the organizers behind it. And I will decide if it is something I want to be involved in, for myself and for the memory of my sister. For now I can cope with no more horror.

Accessing Your Voice: an interview

I had the pleasure of seating down for an interview with Norelle Done last month over a beer at the Celtic Swell in West Seattle. Norelle was so charming it felt more like a conversation with an old friend than a literary interview. To read the interview and check out at Norelle's website, please visit Seattle Wrote. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.