A “Love Letter” from Terri’s Dad❤️

The Brains of a Spider (NSFW)

Readers are welcome to join the conversation! If you are moved to respond to Spider’s musings, feel free to write in at spiderweb@shaw.ca. Any responses that Spider replies to will be added to the comments on the blog page.

 Our daughter’s book

This will be an atypical blog entry for me.  Perhaps a book review is a strange choice with which to restart these after the Christmas and New Year’s hiatus, but there you go.  It may help to think of these as flowers from an Avant Garden.

As you’ve probably noticed, my principal purpose in writing these furshlugginer things is to make myself—and if at all possible, you—feel better.  The internet is full of people who will delight in depressing you.  Not my pidgin.

So I will not often offer you a blog entry about death and dying.  Of a loved one.

But some of you may need to read one. Either because one you love is dying or has, or because you are.  Or because you have enough imagination to know that both of those things will occur, someday.  As Phil Dick said, “Everything in life is just for a while.”

How far back do I have to go to set this up for you?

Over forty years, I guess.  I’ll try to make it march.

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When I met Jeanne she was pregnant with our daughter.  Had already named her: all I had to do was show up, grin like mad, and pass out cigars of Nova Scotia homegrown.  She named the kid Luanna, after a woman she’d met hitchhiking around America, who’d impressed her because she wore a Bowie knife openly.  And since we had expected to birth our child on the Annapolis Valley’s great North Mountain, and were hippies, the name on her birth certificate read Luanna Mountainborne Robinson.

(She ended up being born miles from the Mountain, in a hospital.  Stuff happens.  But she had been borne on that mountain for sure—for almost ten months.)

The next decades with Jeanne and Terri are worth a book of their own.  A trilogy.

By 11, Lu had developed a strong suspicion that her name was weird.  Nobody else was named that.  Or knew how to spell it.  You could not buy a charm bracelet that spelled out Luanna, and give it to a boy.  You could not get a sign to tape to your bedroom door saying, “This is Luanna’s room—stay out!” unless Dad printed it out for you, which seemed to defeat the point.

Just then, some dingleberry—me—found her name in a book of baby names, and naively told her what it means, thinking she’d be as thrilled as I was.  It means Graceful Woman Warrior.  Jeanne was overjoyed.

Last straw.  The warrior demanded to rename herself.  Surely a warrior has that right.

Perhaps you see the problem.  If your daughter wants to change her name, and you are called Spider….dude, you haven’t got a leg to stand on, let alone eight of them.  Jeanne and I managed to retain right of first refusal, and successfully rejected Tiffany and a few others, but we accepted Terri….and even agreed to let her spell it with a final i rather than the y God had clearly intended.  But in return we insisted on a signed oath that she would never, ever, dot the i with a heart, or a sun, or a smiley face, or a cat, or any other calligraphic object, just a freakin’ dot….so everybody gave a little and got a little.  Compromise is wonderful.

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Now, unfortunately, you’re going to miss thirty-odd years of Good Parts.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true: somehow, Terri never went through the usual stage we were braced for, when we would suddenly become alien lifeforms to her, and everything about us would be revealed to be vile, and communication would cease for a few years.  Trying to picture what she might come up with to try and shock loonies like us terrified us.  Never happened.  Which shocked us.

For forty straight years, we had it great.  Think of that.  No disasters.  No arrests.  Every year we became noticeably prouder of our kid, and she seemed to keep being proud of us.  Particularly when she attended a marijuana convention in New York City, opened one of the billions of giveaway copies of HIGH TIMES, and found on page 5 a big color photo of both her parents being Celebrity Judges at the 2001 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.  That weekend she was a celebrity too, and loved it.  She also didn’t mind when we took her to Washington with us to meet First Lady Laura Bush.  She took the accompanying photo of us and our hostess in the East Wing, and made me take the other accompanying photo of Jeanne, my beloved sister Mary, and Terri Luanna, all paying tribute to a different First Lady.  Terri also titled it for me: “Four Strong Women.”

But she was just as good at pleasantly surprising us.  She joined the staff of a magazine, and in no time had become two things: its print production coordinator, and—like most of the people who ever worked there, a serious admirer and student of her boss, Martha Stewart. Ms Stewart, she told us, made a point of having lunch with every employee at least once every few months—and though she never took notes, always remembered what they’d talked about the last time, and asked for updates.  The day we spent in that building, observing Ms Stewart from a distance, convinced us: her employees genuinely loved her, and she them.  That can’t be faked.

I’m rambling.  Another day, I’ll tell you about the time Terri co-founded a women’s shelter in Brooklyn called The Red Tent, and the time she dated a stunning Cubano Chippendale’s dancer, and how she got her own degree, and….

No.  Just one more paragraph: one night, with uncanny instinct, she picked a young man out of the New York City herd, and enchanted him. Heron da Silva was recently arrived from Niteroi, Brazil, just across the bridge from Rio.  He had arrived in New York without a dollar, a job offer, a word of English, or the phone number of anyone in America who spoke Portuguese—with nothing, really, except dreams of becoming an electrical engineer and marrying an American girl. Today he speaks impeccable English (his third language: he learned Spanish first), and he designs entire large-scale electrical systems for….let’s just say a corporation whose name you’d recognize.  I could not be prouder of my son-in-law if I had invented him, and I know my imagination is not that good.  Just for a start, he is the best father I’ve ever met, after my own.

Heron and my daughter and their daughter were godsends to both me and Jeanne, almost a decade ago, when Jeanne was diagnosed with a cancer so rare, we never met an oncologist who had ever treated a single case of it.

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Who gets cancer of the common bile duct?  I’ll tell you who: some Vietnamese people, and a very small number of American veterans of the Vietnam War who ate insufficiently cooked freshwater fish while in-country there/then….and my late wife, the best friend I’ve ever had.  Biliary cancer’s one of the ones where, by the time you even suspect you might have it, it’s about fifty years too late.

Upon that diagnosis, Terri and Heron abandoned the lives they had barely begun to build in New York, and moved to the tiny Canadian island we lived on, to help me help Jeanne die.  They rented a house a five-minute walk from ours, with a yard full of wild deer to awe the baby.

I could not have made it without them.  Neither could Jeanne.  It took her a couple of years, and they were not always ecstatically happy years—the first years in our 35-year-marriage that weren’t—but they were a LOT better years than they would have been without the da Silvas….in part because now they had a babe in arms: my granddaughter Marisa Alegria, who owns me in fee simple.  Nine, now.  Under three, then.  She and Jeanne spent many silent hours staring into each others’ eyes (see photo), in telepathic communion that brought them both great serenity, and the first time Marisa ever danced, she had Jeanne’s unique dance style, which I am virtually certain cannot be encoded in DNA.  At that time she had only seen Jeanne dance on one brief YouTube video.

Then, way too soon, Jeanne was gone.

At her memorial service, the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, Tenshin Reb Anderson, formally ordained her a Buddhist priest.  She had been a lay-ordained monk all our lives together, and Reb had given her the informal honorific Wired Buddha—but for her priestly Dharma name he chose Buchi Eihei—Dancing Wisdom, Perfect Peace.  Spot on, Reb.

Heron and Terri had lives to return to, on Pause for two years.  Heron had his degree by now—in record time—and the three of them soon moved to Ohio, so he could take a job there.  About two years after Jeanne had to go, I decided they’d be settled enough now to put up with a short visit from Grampa, and flew out to Ohio to see their first home that wasn’t an apartment. It was terrific—nicer than any home I’ve ever lived in.

I arrived late at night, and after some exhausted conversation fell flat on my face in the guest room, looking forward to waking up.

When I did, I found my daughter weeping on my chest.  She had just been told that she had metastatic breast cancer.  Stage 4.  There is no Stage 5.

One of the first coherent things I recall her saying was that all of sudden, in her late thirties, the name her mother had given her at birth, the Graceful Woman Warrior, was sounding awfully good to her.

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It’s only a few years now since Terri too had to grab a cab.  That’s pretty much all I’m prepared to write about those years, at this point.  I have all those memories, of her last days, and I would fight to keep them.  But right now they are too radioactive for me to take out of the safe, let alone relive.  That’s okay: ironically, memories of a loved one’s death have some of the longest half-lives.

Nevertheless, I feel they contain some insights that surely will be of use to anyone in a similar situation today, either as a care-giver or a care-receiver.  And fortunately, you don’t have to depend on me to tell you about them in detail.  Terri will, with her usual blunt courage.

See, there were MANY things Terri wanted to do with this life, and she managed to find time to achieve an amazing number of them in forty years.

But one goal she had never had time to get around to, like becoming a fulltime social worker, was becoming a writer.

So she got herself a website, on which she blogged about what it’s like to fight for your life with no idea how, pretty sure you’re not going to win but not positive, trying to discharge any remaining responsibilities, struggling to figure out what does and doesn’t belong on the bucket list you don’t even have time to write down.

I read her blog, “Graceful Woman Warrior,” literally as it was posted at www.gracefulwomanwarrior.com; an email alarm always alerted me to each new post, and I responded every time.  Each was medication for me.  One of her purposes in writing it, I knew, was to help me survive her loss, and she did the job.  In the process she was startled to learn how many total strangers needed her words and thoughts just as desperately as I did, found something in her blog that helped them cope—and sent back energy that helped her.

Her blog made it possible for me to get through it all.  At the worst time of her life, she always had spare energy to give me.  She visited me in Canada only weeks before her passing, because it was Thanksgiving and she felt I needed cheering up.

Terri Luanna, bless her, did not ask me to see that her remarkable blog was compiled and published.  She knew how I admired it, and more than that, knew how I’d feel when I could no longer call her up to comment on an interesting insight or ask a question.  With her usual astuteness she chose her Aunt Laurie O’Neil to ask, and Laurie, who has shouldered a lot of the task of helping raise her niece Marisa, characteristically responded magnificently.  GRACEFUL WOMAN WARRIOR, the book she assembled, edited, and caused to be published, is one of the most physically beautiful artifacts I’ve ever seen, with a stunning cover, and exquisite font and layout.  Terri would be so proud!

Editor/designer/aunt Laurie O’Neill, giving dear friends David and Jan Dee Crosby their personal copy of Terri’s book, hot off the presses. Photo by Dori Rubbicco.

Laurie also offered Marisa the opportunity to contribute an Epilogue, if she chose. It is the only part of the book I’ve dared let myself read so far, because I have wondered for years now what is going on in my grandchild’s head.  I will tell you only that what she wrote laid me out.  Literally.  I cried so hard I lost consciousness.  And woke feeling better than I had in many, many months.  Thank you for that, Laurie and Marisa both.  Thank you Heron, for being such a perfect husband to a woman who deserved you, and such a perfect father to a daughter who thinks you hung the moon and wired the sun.

And thank you, Terri Luanna, for being one of my two greatest teachers, and best friends.  I’ve never forgotten the Yuppie couple we all met at a remote mountaintop Buddhist monastery that time, who flatly refused to believe me and Jeanne when we told them that the three of us were parents and child.  They were certain we were lying.  Why?  Because we all related to each other as equals.  That was one of my happiest, proudest days.  Jeanne’s too.

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If you or someone you know might find use for a book on dying by someone so committed they actually did it, and kept learning and thinking and giving to others right to her last minute, visit www.gracefulwomanwarrior.com, or its Facebook page, and Laurie will tell you how to get a copy.  Or just visit amazon.com, where it’s available in paperback and Kindle.  I’m going to have Colin post a link to a separate page full of photos of the incredible book launch Laurie organized and pulled off. Call her the next time you need a country invaded.

My Jeanne was the first person ever to win a Hugo and Nebula for her first published work.  And in almost forty years of writing, I’ve never produced anything as good as our daughter’s first book.

So far.  I’m working on a book about them both right now.

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The excellent Canadian writer/broadcaster Christy Ann Conlin once did half an hour on CBC Radio about the fear of death.  If a half hour on the subject exceeds your present needs, you might still like to hear Christy Ann interviewing Terri between the ninth and the nineteenth minute.  But the whole show is interesting and I recommend it all:

Christy Ann Conlin – Fear Itself (CBC Radio)