GRIEF IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT!

Mikel Chane Crook 1974-2014
 BELOVED SON & FATHER

It seems that some of my family and friends aren't  pleased with the way that I've been grieving the loss of my 39 year old son. Several of them  have made comments to others about why haven't I had a public breakdown. I've even been accused of trying to wipe Chane’s memory away or of being glad that he’s gone. It hurts that my so-called loved ones seem to be actively waiting for the pity party so they can critique my heartache.

People, GRIEF IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT! I  have never been one to show my feelings in public. I didn't have a public come-a-part when I lost either of my deceased husbands nor at the deaths of both of my parents. I prefer to lose it in private.

No one but my dog is around when I cry while watching funny movies. I don't share the fact that I find myself wondering what Chane wants for dinner before I remember that he’s not coming home ever again or how in the grocery store I pick up something that he loves and I hate before it hits me that I'm buying groceries for one now.

So don't judge me or others on how we behave in public. Everyone isn't a Drama Queen who wants to be the center of attention. A few of us hold our feeling close and choose to deal with life’s disasters in our own way, on our own terms. Just because we don't broadcast our sorrow doesn’t make it less real, and finding that our support system is waiting for us to fall makes the hurt doubly deep.

THE MILL

This is the place I've spent most of my waking moments for the last 34 years, the paper mill in Courtland, Alabama.

 I've been in  the boiler house all that time and it's where I learned to operate heavy machinery, produce electricity with steam driven turbine generators, trouble shoot pumps & motors, boss men around (like I needed lessons doing that!), control things from a DCS I/A system and multiple other skills that will be useless to me soon.

You see the mill is closing down. Not due to anything wrong with it or because the crew are incompetent; but because someone in a corporate office in another state who has never been in an actual paper mill decided that there was too much paper in the market and we were the biggest (and highest producing) mill around and it was easier to shut down 1 mill instead of several others.

Not only will this devastate the lives of  myself and my crew members but it's having a terrible impact on all the surrounding counties.

This is the only major industry in my home county. The schools have always had paper donated from IP for use across the system. That donation saved the schools $40,000 each year. Plus, there is no way to know how many students might be lost if parents move to seek other jobs. International Paper’s financial input to my county now is approximately $400,000 to the county’s general fund, $147,174 to road repair, $588,696 in school taxes and $235,478 in hospital tax.There's no way to recover from the loss that the mill will have county wide.

I'm 58 so I'll can suck it up and try to get by on my pension  until 62 rolls around and I can get Social Security but the younger folks are having to leave to find jobs elsewhere. Homes and cars are going up for sale all over the place but who has the money to buy them now that a large majority of people are facing unemployment?

Sometimes it's hard to look for the silver lining when all you see are storm clouds. They say "this too shall pass" but that doesn't make it any easier nor the future look any brighter. Thank goodness I have my health and a loving family.

WTF!!!!!!!!!!

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks ....... a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

Like we don't have enough trouble here, now we got to go stir up bigotry somewhere else!

HONEY, I'M HOME

It’s been one of those weeks, and not in a good way. My allergies have been kicking my ass from all the pollen in the air (yellow dust all over the place, I had to run the wipers to clear my windshield before leaving the house). I’ve got bloodshot eyes and I’ve blew my poor nose so many times that I’ve suffered nose bleeds a couple of times, plus the constant tissue contact has made me look like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer! Scarlet laced eyes, crimson nose, not a good look for an old woman; plus they don’t go well with the double chin and chipmunk cheeks.

Now that the rain has hit maybe my ruby colored snout will get better. I went grocery shopping in the sunshine and just as I walked out the exit the heavens opened and a solid sheet of rain poured down. I looked like a drowned rat by the time I got to the car and was dripping wet after getting everything in the trunk. The pollen was making golden ripples on top of the water running across the parking lot; I’m hoping that the air has been washed clean as well. I’m home now; the thunder is rolling, the rain is pounding on the roof and the TV is ranting about hail and possible tornadoes. Ah, life in the glorious South.

Tuesday I went to the funeral home for 2 different neighbors. They lived right across the road from each other and died on the same day (who would have thunk it). One had been sick for a long time and the other guy broke his ankle and died from a blood clot. I grew up with their kids and renewed several friendships at the funeral home, not the best place to run up on old friends but what can you do?

I need to go do some housework now, gotta go back to work tomorrow night and when I’m working all I do is work and sleep. I usually cook a lot on my off days and load the fridge so I can grab and go and not eat a lot of takeout. Hope y’all are all well and I’ll try to do better at the blog posting thingy.

AND I QUOTE:

I've never been one to fear my own death. Not that I want to die, of course. I've just always seen death as a lights-out proposition. You're gone. Either it's the end of you ... or it's a beginning. Either way, I don't imagine there's much looking back. I've never bought the whole fire-and-brimstone thing, the concept of reward or punishment at death. The idea that a tally has been kept of our good or evil or mediocre deeds, and that the soul is filed away accordingly for all eternity, just doesn't ring true. Humans judge that way. I tend to think that God probably doesn't. He or she just keeps doling out the lessons with endless patience until you finally "get it" in this life or the next.
"Sliver of Truth" by Lisa Unger

Petition For Brest Cancer

From a nurse:

I'll never forget the look in my patients' eyes when I had to tell them they had to go home with the drains, new exercises and no breast. I remember begging the Doctors to keep these women in the hospital longer, only to hear that they would, but their hands were tied by the insurance companies. So there I sat with my patients, giving them the instructions they needed to take care of themselves, knowing full well they didn't grasp half of what I was saying, because the glazed, hopeless, frightened look spoke louder than the quiet 'Thank You' they muttered. A mastectomy is when a woman's breast is removed in order to remove cancerous breast cells/tissue. If you know anyone who has had a Mastectomy, you may know that there is a lot of discomfort and pain afterwards. Insurance companies are trying to make mastectomies an outpatient procedure.

Let's give women the chance to recover properly in the hospital for 2 days after surgery. It takes 2 seconds to do this and is very important. Please take the time and do it! If there was ever a time when our voices and choices should be heard, this is one of those times.

There's a bill called the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act which will require insurance companies to cover a minimum 48-hour hospital stay for patients undergoing a mastectomy. It's about eliminating the 'drive-through' Mastectomy where women are forced to go home just a few hours after surgery, against the wishes of their doctor, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached.

Lifetime Television has put this bill on their Web page with a petition drive to show support. Last year over half the House signed on. PLEASE!! Sign the petition by clicking on the web site below. You need not give more than your name, state, and zip code.

http://www.mylifetime.com/community/my-lifetime-commitment/breast-cancer/petition/breast-cancer-petition

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TWISTER

I guess y’all heard about the tornados wrecking parts of the South. What y’all didn’t hear was that they came within a nat’s ass of hitting my house. I got lucky, only a few shingles gone and a few limbs down in the yard, but lots of my neighbors weren’t so fortunate. I went to school with one of the people who got killed, the elderly woman who just died lived a few miles down the road and dozens of people within rock throwing distance of my yard are now homeless.

The Governor toured yesterday and gave a speech our local church, plus the President was supposed to come today. Speeches are all well and fine but what we need are more weather sirens; the nearest one to my house is in Hillsboro, 20 miles away, and there’s no way I could have heard it. My power went out before the storm hit, so there was no way for me to have any warning; the family storm shelter is at the home place and all my sisters plus their families were in it but I had to ride out the tornado in my living room. By the time I heard that freight train sound it was too late to go anywhere.

The twister made a half circle around my place leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake. All I have to do is open my door to hear the chainsaws going, clearing trees off of my neighbors’ homes. Donna and I went out that morning and were both shocked by all the destruction of the houses that we grew up around. What hit me most were the pets. You would expect people to be wandering around in shock but the poor dogs were standing in yards and pastures looking at what used to be their homes or hunting for their owners who had too much on their minds to wonder were Fido and Bowser were.

I didn’t have power for a long time and the cable (which means both the TV and the internet) are still going in and out so I had to come to work to post. All my loved ones are OK, we’re really proud of Donna’s son the fireman who worked all night and most of the day helping the survivors dig out, and our prayers go out to everyone who was hit by the first tornado of the year.

Go click on the Fatal Winds tab for a slide show of some of the damage.

THINK PINK

October is National Breast Cancer Month. I'm sure we all know someone who is suffering from or has survived this terrible disease. As you can see on the image on the left, breast cancer affects men as well as women so we're all at risk.

"Breast cancer may be one of the oldest known forms of cancer tumors in humans. The oldest description of cancer ....... discovered in Egypt and dates back to approximately 1600 BC." ....... In the United States, breast cancer is the third most common cause of cancer death (after lung cancer and colon cancer). In 2007, breast cancer is expected to cause 40,910 deaths (7% of cancer deaths; almost 2% of all deaths) in the U.S.{from "breast cancer" in Wikipedia}.

So go to a rally, enter a race or fundraiser,put a pink ribbon on your car or person and for goodness sakes check your boobs for lumps and bumps and such {if you need instructions for a self-check, here they are).

Even more fun, get someone else to massage your titties for you! At the least it could lead to a little lovin' and at the worse you might catch the "Big C" before it gets too far along to correct.

NOT YET

Elliott Funeral Home
Peace-of-mind from knowing “it’s all been taken care of.”
15215 Court Street*Moulton, AL 35650

Dear Junebugg,
You’d be surprised. Funeral pre-planning (yes, funeral pre-planning) actually can be interesting and quite pleasant. Within a friendly and comfortable setting, you’ll discover the one memorial style most right for you-the one memorial style most right for celebration your life.

WTF! At the admittedly advanced age of 51 I realize that I’m no spring chicken, any delusions of youth I still harbored in my pea sized brain were squashed after the first dozen or so mailings from AAARP and then I find this invitation to plan my own going away party in the mailbox. I do not, and let me repeat this loud and clear so there can be no misunderstanding, DO NOT have any intention of starring at my own funeral any time soon.

How can anyone possibly think planning for your own demise would in any way possibly be “quite pleasant”? Myself, I prefer to pretend that I’ll live forever because I subscribe to the philosophy that “Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "...holy shit..., what a ride!” I’ll celebrate my life while I’m still living, thank you very much. Maybe I’m wrong but I think I’d enjoy the party much more if I’m still breathing while it’s going on.

Besides, I’ll be deceased, departed, gone. Why would I care if my casket is pine or mahogany, bronze or brass? Heck, stick me in a cardboard box for all I’ll mind because I’ll be dead, people. Sing any hymens you want, talk bad about me, tell any embarrassing stories that you can think of and maybe even make up a few extra because, not to repeat myself but, I’ll be dead.

I’d rather spend my money on new shoes, a day at the spa, a few hang gliding lessons and a 6 month cruise around the world. I’ve spent my whole life taking care of other people; the least they can do is plan my funeral for me when I’m gone.