litch

found my parents death certificates (and my college transcript)

Jerry Litchfield DoD 1/6/96 DoB 11/10/30 Memphis, TN
CardioPulmonary Arrest due to Severe hypoxic ischemic brain injury due prior cardiac arrest

James Edwin Litchfield DoD 12/26/3 DoB 3/30/28 Lucerne, MO
ESCHF (which appears to stand for End Stage Congestive Heart Failure) due to Coronary Artery Disease other factors include NIDDM (Non-Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Mellitus), HTN (Hypetrtension), COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), smoker, CVA (Cerebral Vascular Accident).

I've been going through my filing trying to sort things out. Some of it ancient (like stuff from my elementary school days), some of it just old (like credit card recipts from back when I worked as an aircraft mechanic in the early 90's), and some of it much more recent.

Always tough trying to decide whether to file things categorically or chronologically.

But I wanted to make some notes about where and when I have lived & what I was doing at the time.

Found a reciept for a room I rented when I lived in Boulder, 1648 9th St. From May 15 1992 until August 28 1992. I had graduated college & worked for a while as a contract tape jocked for EDS until they canned me and I had been living there looking for work in Boulder until I ran out of money and got my parents to buy me a bus ticket home and put me up until I got work as an aircraft mechanic.

I'm 6' and weigh 350 pounds, wear size 56 pants and I'm tired of it. I've decided I'm going to lose weight by dieting and exercise. When I lost my appetite for few days after my kidney issue it help set the tone and so I've been trying to moderate my food intake since my birthday. It's harder than I thought, I've been trying to be aware of my emotional & physical sensations when I eat and noticed how often I eat out of boredom and lonliness. I've known that but I thought I had gotten passed that, guess not.

I need to get a scale and start recording what I eat and the exercise I do but I am uncomfortable with the thought of doing that here. I am afraid of losing people's intrest, no, I am afriad of failing and having to confront that. That's a subset of my larger fear, I've tried losing weight before & (as is painfully obvious) never suceeded in keeping it off.

I had given up on trying some time before I married Nancy, the evidence against yo-yoing was pretty clear and I was doing too much "once I lose weight I'll..." & never doing anything. I changed my goals to just trying to eat nutriously and stay active. This was actually a pretty viable strategy for me, my weight settled at 333 and stayed there no matter what I ate & did. Then in the last year of our marriage I ballooned up to 360ish and bounced around within 5-10 pounds of that ever since.

Now I am going to get back on the weight loss horse and I'm terrified of failing again. Not about failing to lose weight so much as failing to be able to manifest my will. I believe that if I can't keep the weight off this time it will be my last attempt.

Well my yard looks a few hours of work better. Edged everything in the front yard (didn't get the side yard), found my lopers and took out a few upstarts. Cleared the grass out away from the base of the pecan and the sage, I've decided I am going to cut that sucker short. Raked up all the crap I'd clipped and pulled back. Filled the hole tipareth had dug under the fence gate. Whacked the flowerbed. Tried to fix the spigot and wound up just giving up and letting it leak, it's got an anti siphonin dowhidget that's gotten befucked. Threw away the broken sprinkler and found a working one and now I am watching the birds play in the fountain.

Relationships are still scary.

My first relationship was with my mother, that primacy shaped so much of who I am. She was 37 when she had me, she had had 4 other kids and was starting to have grandkids when I happened accidently. I think she felt she had a chance to do it over again right with me, a second chance at motherhood. The problem with that was she became even more over protective than she had been with my sibs. She'd also try to be very encouraging but I think in part because she was a frustrated girl geek from the segregated south she had a tendancy to do it in way that carried a lot of expectation. The two aspects together meant I got told a lot as a kid "you're fantastic" but never allowed any oppurtunity to be fantastic, and anytime I started to fuck up she'd swoop in to rescue me. It doesn't take very many times of that happening before you begins to doubt yourself, to wonder "if I'm all that fantastic how come she never lets me get myself out of trouble?".

Also tied into that frustrated girl geek thing was a serious depression she never did anything about. My dad was away so much while I was growing up that she depended on me for a lot of emotional support. I was the thing in her life which gave her the most pleasure & satisfaction. So with the depression feeding that fundamental lack of satisfaction in her life I couldn't always make her happy. She started seeming needier and needier and that got exacerbated with I started going into puberty while she was hitting menopause full steam.

We had a lot of fights, both of our endocrine systems were spiraling out of control and she was depressed and I was depressed and we were each others primary source of emotional nourishment and it just got ugly. Every time I would fight with her it would rake me that I was hurting the person who ment most to me and who needed me so much, which would make me even more viscious.

Eventually I left and went away to school. Not emotionally equipped for that I didn't do well. I bounced, did the renfair circuit and began to find myself when I was out away from her. Went back to school and started retreating from our relationship, but couldn't completely because she was paying the bills. Spent a lot of time doing the ugly dance of her trying to not antagonize me but constantly undermining herself with her need, trying not to control me but being in a situation where she did control me through finance and her shadow would creep out.

The night before I graduated, I told her I was pagan, bi, and did drugs. She was a republican stalwart who pined for nixon. We had a nasty fight. I was broke and had nothing to do, I moved to Austin to be near ce_luna who I'd fallen in love with and who'd dumped me the year before.I worked a job as a night kennel boy and overflow euthanizer at the dog pound (on the theory that the first job out of college should be the worst job you can imagine so things have to go up from there). Once I was convinced she wasn't going to change her mind I moved to the mountains, stayed with my sister, then some friends from school and finally a room in a house lost a couple jobs and all my money. When my car died I used the last of what I had to get home to my mom and dad's place in Arizona.

I hated depending on them. Her depression was out of control so she was constantly fighting with either my dad or me or just retreating and not interacting. I couldn't find work and just spiraled down into my misery. My nephew finally got me a job fixing airplanes with him. I used the money from that to buy my truck and tools and went out on the road fixing planes for a while. Spent more time reviewing the person I had discovered myself to me.

I took a vision quest and set about carying out that vision of moving to Austin and marrying Nancy. That seemed to be a turning point in my relationship with my mother. I could begin to forgive her and allow a sort of rapproachment. I have in my files somewhere email from my mother from that era. They are the most miserable, unhappy blandishments you can imagine. Nancy would get mad because I would sink into depressions for days after one of her messages. I was able to provide her some succor, I sent her CD's I found I knew she would like, I would write her about the happiness I was discovering, commsierate with her over the things her other children did or seemed to do to her. But by then her depression had eaten so much of her I don't know if that really mattered, between the distance, and the boundaries I had begun to learn to build, and the obvious focus I had on my own life I doubt she noticed it much.

I was in the shower at the house on Evans when I heard the phone ring late one night, we usually didn't get night calls unless it was someone making a death threat or something (this was back when I was active in CMA). I heard a tone in Nancy's voice that sounded serious so I got out of the shower and she told me my mother had collapsed and they'd take her to the hospital but it took a long time to get the ambulance there and she wasn't responding.

I flew to AZ and when I finally got to go to her side she was on a respirator, her eyes were fized and she was unresponsive to physical stimulation. I still can feel the horror as I would hear the sound and watch he chest rise unnaturally as the machine breathed for her. I kissed her cheek, said that this wasn't my mother, she wasn't here any more and calmly walked out of the CCU to a bathroom where I proceeded to destroy a stall and some other bathroom equipment.

I wish she could have seen my house after we bought it.