Finding Family
Before I Die
The photos illustrate a story about unlikely coincidence, uncanny timing, the fruit of unwavering faith, and how the twin American evils of a broken healthcare system and a relentlessly greedy privileged class we've let govern our government can crush even the most robust and resilient human spirit...
...sometimes.
New Orleans, 1949. My dad, my mom, and me.
Working as a contract technical writer and a building maintenance man (alternately feeding the mind and the body), I was either uninsured or underinsured at any given time and radiation treatments drove me into bankruptcy, forcing me to chose between paying my medical bills or my taxes. I chose to pay some of my medical bills with the result that the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board get on my case.
Blood from a stone comes to mind.
Doctors told me I'd live another year or so after treatment, maybe, before the disease relapsed for a third time...with virulence. Short of a miracle, paying for further treatment was out of the question. Their prognosis was my death sentence.
Unlike radiation treatments years earlier, chemo was no cake walk. But just like radiation, the chemo treatments drove me into bankruptcy again, forcing me to chose again between paying medical bills or taxes. Again, I chose to pay some medical bills with the result that the IRS gets on my case again, this time in concert with the Alabama Department of Revenue.
Rivers of blood from a stone come to mind.
The plot thickens.
Considering the doctors could be right, I decide to mend some bridges before my demise. Foremost among them, reconciling with my mother and finding my daughter. Problem is I don't know either's whereabouts or how to contact them. (Long stories, both.)
After I finish chemo in February 2009, sometime in March 2009, I receive an email from my son in California saying a cousin of his had found him on MySpace, and he provides me with a link to the MySpace message he'd gotten. I figure he's talking about a cousin on his mother's side.
Annoyingly, I have to create a MySpace account to read the message. Before now, I had no truck with social networks, considering them to be a gi-normous waste of time. When I hit the link after creating my account, I realize the cousin is my niece, whom -- along with my sister and my mother -- I hadn't seen or spoken to for almost twenty-five years.
Interestingly, that niece is named Faithe.
Lightening strikes once.
Figuring if I'm in for a penny with social networks I may as well be in for a pound, I create a Facebook page in June.
Pennsylvania, August, 2009. In what is either a cruel cosmic joke, the finger of God moving under the appearance of things, or a simple twist of fate (depending on your point of view), after almost forty years of searching for one another in vain, my daughter, Vanessa, whom I hadn't seen since she was an infant, finds me on Facebook the day after I create my Facebook page...four months after my chemo treatments have ended and fourteen months before the medical experts tell me I'm due to die.
Some of which I spend teaching her a few basic web skills I happen to possess...which teaching she takes off with here, where she tells this tale with a slightly different slant than I have.
Turns out, too, we have a rather unusual theme song for a father and daughter. I think we both like the tune for the indomitable character of spirit it portrays...reflected in her case, perhaps, by her unwavering faith we would eventually be led to one another; and in mine, perhaps, by my unreasonable refusal to lay down and die when all reasonable indications are I'm supposed to. (I've always figured I'd take that final stroll into Life's greatest adventure "...over the Cork and Kerry mountains..." somewhere in my 80's or 90's. Still may.)
Given the nature of my ongoing wrangles with medical bill collectors and tax collectors, the lyrics also have a certain appeal, I must admit; referring, as they do, to historically violent (Irish) resistance to relentlessly oppressive (English) authority.
Besides all that, the tune's got a great beat.
(Click Play on the control to listen.)
Moral of the story?
Shit happens.
It isn't always the devil who is in the details.
Keep the faith.
Adjust.
"Whiskey In The Jar" by Metallica
(Good) photos by Brenda Rumfola