Month: June 2023

Tamara

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I want to take a moment and thank someone. Someone who, after all she’d been through, passed one more lesson on to someone needing a class.

Tamara (Lukowicz) O’Hara had every reason to be me. Every reason to be angry, pessimistic, defensive, and assuming, a person who only saw what was wrong with the world and never what was good. A victim. The war I saw my late wife Lisa wage against cancer scarred me eternally as sure as it took her life. I have guilt that will never be assuaged. It can never be mitigated despite logic and reason, regardless of the assurances from my children that my guilt is misplaced. I have bottled rage with no pressure relief valve. There is no one to complain to or in charge with whom to debate my points.

And I found myself bitter. Angry with the unfairness, inconsolable in my rage.

As a child, Tamara had childhood cancer. She battled it and beat it. She was Lisa’s cousin. I only met Tamara as a young adult after I began dating Lisa in the late 1980s. It was either a Thanksgiving at Lisa’s parent’s house or a Christmas Eve party at Lisa’s mom’s cousin’s apartment. I found her bubbly, engaging, and happy when I first met her. She greeted everyone, me included, with a smile and a story. Her parents and her sister were all there. The whole family was approachable and energetic. I took to them all fast. At the time, I think she was the only person I’d ever met who had survived cancer. Not that I ever asked. At that time, cancer was as foreign to me as hieroglyphics and certainly not a polite topic of dinner conversation.

Every time I saw Tamara, she was the same. I never once heard her complain about anything. Not the dinner, the people, the conversation, work, life, nothing. Ever. Over time, as I matured into marriage and had twins, her perpetual bubbliness I relegated to goofiness! She was goofy! Happy beyond all reason, charismatic seemingly without cause. And that’s when I first missed the opportunity to learn from her. She wasn’t goofy. She was alive in every way.

As we age, relationships fade, faltering, not through animosity, but as our lives are dominated by the mundane. Work consumes our days as we seek to purchase the bread our families eat at night. The kids’ kindergarten work morphs into helping them build a trebuchet for high school. And soon, or so it seems, after decades of this march, we see extended family members at weddings and funerals. We see ourselves taking another step up in the generational parade.

A corollary consequence of this separation is the paralysis of others in time. A different cousin of Lisa’s had a daughter who recently graduated from Columbia. I missed it! Without the periodic injection of news (touching base with that faction of the family), she was forever a student there. It is the mirror image of how we miss the small changes in those in our household. Those that have not seen them (or us) for a while notice the slow changes we miss.

And so it was with Tamara. She was somewhere out there, bubbly and happy. Except that was not how she was. She married in 2015, and I saw her in 2021 at Lisa’s mom’s funeral. She became ill again last November and endured procedures and pain I hope never to experience. She died Thursday at 53 years of age. Far too young for her shining light to be extinguished, leaving those who knew her to continue in a darker world.

I will see her family at the funeral. I will see again the familiar anguish, incomprehensible sense of loss, and appreciation that her struggle and pain are over. Her widower has lost a soulmate. Her parents have lost a child. Her sister has lost a part of herself. Cancer has again stolen one of the best of us. I have lost a belated teacher. A teacher I failed to learn from in life, but one whose message I hope to employ in the future.

Apoplettico

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My sister-in-law is celebrating a milestone birthday this year. To celebrate, she said she wanted to do something huge. “A trip,” she said. My wife and I asked where.

She’s a planner, like me. If I travel somewhere new, I have Excel spreadsheets of sites (complete with links, times, and reviews) and handmade travel brochures for my family. If I’m going somewhere new, especially a bucket-list location, I’m wringing as much out of the experience as possible. One never knows if one will ever return to this place, and there are so many other places I want to visit before my time on this mortal coil is up. It’s the same reason I don’t reread books.

“Let’s each make a list of places, and then we’ll compare notes,” she said. I feverishly retrieved the mental list of places I’d like to see and started jotting down the names of places. It didn’t take long for us to realize we all had similar places listed. England, Italy, and Ireland. “Maybe a cruise,” she said. So, with that framework, we set about finding cruise lines and itineraries that would meet our goal. Ultimately, we landed on a cruise from Rome to Pisa and Florence, then Sicily, Malta, Naples, Santorini, Mykonos, Olympia, and Athens. Unfortunately, once we started adding plane fare and tours, the price escalated well beyond our initial budget, and that didn’t include eating some of the world’s best food or shopping. We canceled the trip.

Dejected, my wife secretly began cobbling together an alternative plan. Rather than a cruise, why don’t we pick one country and go there? She built an entire trip through Italy before showing it to me. I was ecstatic! Count me in! And so, Birthday Celebration Trip version 2.0 was created. Four days in Rome, four days in Florence, and two days in Venice. The trip of a lifetime all starts on Saturday, June 24th. Bucket-list checkmarks are all over the map! We booked everything. That was early February.

Having recently moved, my sister-in-law needed to update her passport. We joked that she better get it back before the trip or else! We talked about the trip incessantly. My spreadsheet blossomed (I had a tab just for the Vatican Museums). Tours were selected based on length, location, and sites, and shoehorned into our burgeoning schedule. A good family friend was kind enough to list his favorite restaurants based on his travels to Italy.

As we entered May, we began to joke that the passport people must have been jealous, and that’s why we hadn’t received it yet. Although, as the month progressed, the jokes were soon tinged with anticipation and growing anxiety.

By the time June rolled around, anxiety had given way to panic and dread. Calls to the passport agency were met with the customer service levels you expect from the cable company. “We can’t give you any update.” “We’re swamped; call back later.” “Your call is very important to us, but blah, blah, blah….” The 90-minute wait times (if you’re lucky enough not to be told they’re too busy to accept your call) ruined a bit of my enjoyment of Mozart’s “Romanze” serenade from Eine kleine Nachtmusik! And my sister-in-law had paid for expedited passport processing! As we got within 14 days of travel, we were told we could call again and get into the expedited-expedited pile! Woohoo! Progress! We also contacted our US Senator to see if his office had any staff with connections in the passport department. Sure enough, they very kindly worked with us to tell us that since we were within 14 days of travel, we were moved to the expedited-expedited pile. We were also reassured that within five days of travel, we could call the passport agency to schedule a meeting to issue an emergency passport.

Panic, anger, depression, and anxiety ratcheted up every day as the mailman again delivered everything but a passport. We also learned that if we waited to reschedule or cancel the trip after Tuesday, June 20th, we would incur an astronomical penalty, significantly more than the cost of my first car!

So, Tuesday was the day, do or die. We’d call for the appointment! Then the knife in the heart. We called and were told there were no appointments in the nearest Passport office (Boston) and no appointments available ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES. Game over. We had to cancel or reschedule the trip.

They say man plans, and God laughs. Today is Friday, June 23rd, 2023. We were scheduled to leave tomorrow afternoon on a flight to Rome. Instead, the closest we’ll get is DiGiorno pizza and a beer to cry into.

Guess what arrived in the mail today?