Chapter 2015

Throughout my entire life, I have thought that I had a pretty decent handle on the meaning of love in all its facets. I knew ridiculous love growing up. I have known love in a marriage, love for my children, love for my brothers and their additions. As with most lessons you don’t see coming, I began this year as a newborn in my understanding of love’s purpose and strength. And now, I realize I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Here I am, liking to think that I am just a 1/3 of the way through my life, but it could be 1/2, or 99%-another truth made all too real again this year, and I’m only beginning to figure out the most important thing in this life is the love we give one another.

During the last week of September, shortly after emerging from the ether in the CCU, my dad, weak and uncomfortable, quickly realized that normal communication was prohibited by a breathing tube. Clearly irritated, and ever the problem solver, he asked for a pen and paper with a hand signal.  After recounting his journey to him at this point, his response in shaky capital letters, “BULLSHIT.” After his anger at being kept alive subsided, as my mom was stroking his head, he looked at her meaningfully and deeply, and wrote most clearly among all the other failed attempts at communicating, “I Love YOU.” My brother, Dustin and I met eyes and welled up.

As of this point in my life, I will not have 30-some years of marriage with someone. There is a very real chance that I will not have that other half stroking my hair, soothing my discomfort at my end of time here. I chose that. I do however, have a strong family full of forgiveness and love and a new understanding of what I can bring to this life good, bad and very ugly. And it’s all necessary-loss, gain, mess and learning.

Here are my 2015 lessons in no particular order…

1. No one person can love me enough for myself.
2. Stripped down, simplified living-less stuff, more life-is the most beautiful gift we can give ourselves and our kids.
3. Grief is like a snowflake; completely individual and in abundance or a dusting, it comes in seasons.
4. Ending my marriage was not a mistake, getting married was not a mistake, however, how I ultimately left my marriage caused more pain than any one of us should have to endure.ever.
5. One song can bring anyone back temporarily.
6. There are legitimate finds on Tinder.
7. The opposite of love is indifference.
8. You can’t feel healing happening.
9. Shame you need is what you feel when a community knows what you did. Shame from what a community thinks you did is not real and should be crushed quietly with a head held high and a forgiving smile.
10. Cramming for the Series 7 is impossible.
11. Strength cannot be measured without force.
12. I take my lungs and legs for granted everyday. (I’m trying to honor them more everyday.)
13. Over 9 years, I traded every ounce of energy and love in my marriage for being a mom, and it was no longer sustainable, for any of us, especially my children.
14. Death is beautiful.
15. Grief occurs at every loss, regardless of cause, reason, or fault.
16. Self-criticism and deprecation are not humility.
17. Grown men crumbling under intense emotion are the strongest, bravest, and most manly I’ve met.
18. Love is…

• flying 2000 miles for just four hours to hold your oldest friend as she buries her father.
• hearing your best friend’s dad has passed and jumping on the next flight to Wisconsin.
• trusting someone to know when they are ready to leave this life and allowing their love to get us through the rest of our own lives.
• a resident doctor never leaving the hospital for dedication to saving a man she had never met, and grieving with us when his body had surrendered.
• setting aside all transgressions and jumping in a car to support a daughter-in-law, estranged friend, and sinner.
• not allowing your dad/husband to be alone for more than a couple hours for over 41 days in the CCU.
• allowing your soon-to-be-ex-wife to relocate to La Crosse for weeks and taking care of the kids without question or hesitation, and helping them through the loss of their Papa Bear.
• traveling for hours multiple times to visit your brother when he couldn’t talk and hardly recognized you.
• allowing your husband to spend a couple weeks with his dad and being a single mom to 3 kids without complaint, not once.
• nursing a man for only a couple days-on his very best day in critical care, then nursing him through his absolute worst day. And when assigned to an entirely different floor, coming back the following day during your break to check on him. And when knowledge of his imminent passing hits, hugging the patient’s family and crying silently with us.
• singing to your dying mom the songs she sung to you to give comfort as she passes.
• seeing terror/worry in your sibling’s eyes as togetherness brings pending loss to reality.
• flying 2000 miles 1 day after burying your husband to be with your dad and sister to hold your mom as she passes.
• through tears, doing a last procedure on your long-time friend, colleague, brother, knowing it is only to give him comfort in his last hours.
• knowing how to mouth “I love you” even when completely non-communicative for days.
• completely working around the sometimes over-present family all with the loved one’s comfort and support in mind and still giving the utmost in quality medical care.
• sending food, prayers, and time to a family in deep grieving and pain.
• researching special music so a dying man’s request for a beautiful funeral can come to fruition.
• encircling a hospital bed and saying goodbye for the last time.
• breathing in your husband’s last breath and crying out when you realize it was the last one.
• holding your wife for 64 years and wishing every day to be with her again.
• staying on this journey with us even when things start to get better or worse.

There are so many more. And just this year, so many of these definitions are relative to death and finality, but the sentiments are constant. We cannot begin to express to everyone individually how so very grateful we are for your friendship and love. We are only able to stand here because your hands are reaching to hold us everywhere we turn.

Peace to you and us all in 2016.

The New Christmas

It’s 34 degrees and no snow here in La Crosse. I ran to Oak Grove Cemetery yesterday. Funny running toward a cemetery. Like time matters to them. There were no presents this year, purposefully. In honor of two of the most generous people we knew, instead mom, all my brothers, my sister-in-law and I paid it forward. We exchanged our own gifts for something much greater, or perhaps maybe something not that significant to anyone else, but it left us a little less hollow this Christmas. Not one of us took a picture, a real picture. It will take time to replace the archivist.

What makes holidays so difficult when those who played an integral part are now gone? Maybe it’s because unlike some other parts of life, holidays are rooted in tradition. Comfort and joy are found in the memories of past years, linked and prodded by common rituals. In a life of inevitable change, Christmas is constant in so many ways for so many of us. That constant could be joy or anger or loneliness or a little bit of it all. A person or persons. A favorite game, cocktail, meal, dessert. A song. Laughter. Stories. In any event, deep emotions are invoked with this time, usually ripening the mind for creating memories for a lifetime.

Dad loved Christmas. He had a knack for choosing the gift that would touch us in a way that possibly he couldn’t outwardly do in the daily life events that year. In 2009, when my girls were 2 and 6 months old, we upended tradition, hosting Christmas in Rice Lake in our new house. Clearly Christmas giving had migrated joyfully to the kids, and surrounded by Fisher Price boxes, bits of wrapping and squeals of glee, there was one box left. He always left his gifts for last. Partially for dramatic effect, partially because they weren’t usually wrapped, but mostly because he was a gentleman and he likely thought the significance of his gift less than.

As I unwrapped my gift and the value of the contents materialized, huge tears of joy ran down my face. My Canon Rebel XSi, nothing overtly fancy in the world of camera equipment, but this was something I would have never treated myself to, possibly ever. It was a tool to capture the beauty of my babies, my family, this life. And deep down I knew it would become a catalyst for further strategy and lessons from my dad, my favorite artist.

As I laid on the ground next to my dad, the cold seeping up through my bones. I tried to remember his voice, in particular his attempt at his infamous “Ho, Ho, Ho.” He was no closer to perfecting it last year, but his efforts usually resulted in a fit of laughter. Through the warm tears, I thanked him for the memory and ran home to the gifts awaiting me there-his family, new rituals, love.

 

Eulogy for Larry James Fundell

Good Morning. How are you?

He would be concerned about that.

I am about to use the word vanity and reference my father in the same sentence which feels sacrilegious, but here we go. In his younger days of practice in California, my dad had a vanity plate. ICNCYDU.

I see inside you.

As kids, we indubitably believed in his superpower, X-Ray vision. What we learned as adults was that his superpower was real, and he executed it every day for good. As we surrounded him for his final breaths last Tuesday, a former colleague said that our father always knew more about the condition of the person he was talking to than he let on. You see, a healer has a rare ability to see the positive qualities that lie beneath the surface. He embraced that calling with passion, healing the whole, not just the parts you can see.

Dad’s great thirst for knowledge never allowed for stagnancy in thinking, only growing in understanding. Undoubtedly accomplished in everything he attempted to do, he would consider his greatest accomplishment (if he considered them at all) the genuine love for all people he projected through every endeavor, almost all interactions. An exquisitely elite mind, yet simple in his love. And what an epic love story, in every facet of his life, fraternal, paternal, filial, passionate.

Dad had a very real love/hate relationship with the natural authority associated with his brilliance. He dedicated his entire life to honing his ability to deliver his wisdom through humility and grace at only the most appropriate times, never with any semblance of arrogance and always with compassion.

My dad and I shared a deep natural affinity for words and the creative potential for language. That was a large part of our fun-wordplay, puns, obscure definitions, irony – the deeper wrought in subtlety, the more authentic the accolades. He was my editor-in-chief, a walking dictionary, thesaurus, and historical anecdote specialist in one, a profound mentor for me, my brothers and countless other individuals he opened his door to everyday. Those who were fortunate enough to pass through, walked away holding a little bit more than they had.

An obsessive problem solver, Dad selectively bequeathed his solutions, creating space and time for other’s epiphanies, but never sacrificing the value of the critical thinking process. His unusual creative thinking was always fodder for holiday table entertainment and was usually, several courses later, eventually proven to be abstractedly grounded by some thread of truth he held.

I heard mention multiple times from a variety of sources last night of his infamous tape worm weight loss plan. We cannot begin to tell you how much that “worms” our hearts that he subjected more than just his family to his inspirations, and that he will be the original host for further explorations.

Dad could converse and would converse with anyone on any topic. If he didn’t know it, he listened. If he did know it, he listened and then contributed. There was always a question of his true expertise on the subject, or if there was a vein of BS involved. He wouldn’t let you get too far without letting you in on the joke with a wink or a grin, and again he usually knew much more than he let on.

Music was a magnificent influence in dad’s life. Diverse and eclectic, his liberal taste in music brought seemingly opposite worlds together. He would meet us in any emotional realm through music, and generously gave our tastes an indirect ear when we asked. He would often tell my mom, “Dawn you listen to music for the lyrics, I listen for the music.”

I can speak to the love between my mom and dad only as a witness to one of the greatest heartbreaks that have occurred in this world. I could audibly hear the fissure as my mom’s exhalation of disbelief mixed with her soul’s final breath. Their love was won every day by a mutual battle in its favor. They communicated years of glee, pain, triumph, and peace with a touch and reached for it daily. Sometimes one would have to move a little closer for the other’s hand, but the goal was mutually shared. He was known to have said, “Even on my worst day of worst face, Dawn still found the way to love.”

Dad’s particular lens of humanity and the infinite intricacies of nature captured forever in his art are reveled as some of the most beautiful gifts he could leave us with. Within his craft, he gives us his view of this life. And though we will not have any further acquisitions from his view here, he left us with the clarity and guidance to seek beauty in every encounter we have. He would view today with sorrow in his heart, but he would also want to capture some of the most arresting showcases of the human soul that occur in this life-grief, sorrow, love. I’d like to think that he would have found our celebration and grieving as one of the most beautiful shoots of his life.

Dad always said that great character attracts and begets great character. I do not believe that testament has ever rang as true as it does today. What a legacy of admirable characters he has attracted over the years. He is here in us all. Every exchange he sought was intentional and genuine, and without intending to leave a trace of himself, he consistently did, exponentially paying it forward.