(01 November, 2001)
As I write this, Geri Younggren (my ex-wife) is in a hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, dying. They performed emergency surgery on her yesterday, removing a section of her gut and bypassing the remaining artery to her liver, but it wasn't enough. They still have no idea what caused her arteries to clog and harden, nor why the process affected her internal organs (spleen, stomach, liver) rather than heart and brain as it typically does. Clearly, however, it has been going on for some time -- they had to remove her spleen in August.
Geri had a rough life. She was abandoned by her parents when she was a little over four months old, and was brought up by the babysitter she'd been left with, who was apparently a tyrant and a bit of a monster.
When she found information on her biological parents (which took some doing), she discovered that they both died young. She has, in fact, lived longer than either of them. But not, I regret to say, as long as she should have. She and Andy were going to get married on September 15th, and she had asked me to give her away to him at the wedding; but by the time the airline cancelled my ticket because of September 11th, she was already back in the hospital anyway, and they had postponed the wedding indefinitely. In the end, they actually got married in the hospital chapel a few days ago.
I will probably be flying down tomorrow, and unless things change there will be some sort of service on Saturday, because at this point the doctors are talking in terms of hours rather than days.
Geri and I couldn't live together, but we remained quite
close even after we got divorced. Her health had been rocky
for some time, and there was always the chance that
something like this would happen, but it's a terrible shock
anyway. I don't know what else to say, except to commiserate
with poor Andy, who is bearing up as well as he can under
the circumstances...
(22 November, 2001)
Geri had a wonderful penetrating intellect, and many interests. Here's a photo I took (probably around 1992), showing her reading. As you can see, her method for extracting every iota of information from a book was direct and powerful.
(14 November, 2001)
Geri died on the evening of November first, without regaining consciousness; Andy was with her that whole last day. Maggie, her daughter, who had caught the first available plane out of Seattle, missed her by about twenty minutes.
I flew down on the second; the service was on the third. There were wedding pictures there, taken less than a week earlier. All things considered she looks quite good in them, though a lot older than she should, I thought...
As I read this, it sounds terribly dry, but maybe that's better than the obvious alternative, which is sopping wet. Everyone who was close to her is fairly well devastated.
There are so many things I would like to tell her -- that I met her cats and like them, that the catfish at Catfish Haven is just wonderful and that fried pickles are quite nice (hey, don't knock 'em if you haven't tried 'em), that I'm doing really well with several of the glazes I've been working on, that I want for her and Andy to have many happy years together and that it wasn't supposed to be this way, that I miss her... I had best stop, or this will be sopping wet in a minute.
Geri liked e. e. cummings, and there were two of his poems in the bulletin for the service. (I was not familiar with that use of the term "bulletin", but it seems reasonable enough; I'd almost have called it a program, but that somehow seems a bit off.) Alas, the funeral home people had "corrected" the capitalization. Geri would have been either furious, hysterical with laughter, or both, by turns.
I don't know whether she liked this particular piece; but I certainly do, and although it, too is off to one side a bit, I think it's a fitting close --
Last modified: Wed Nov 14 22:07:15 PST 2001
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive
pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death