My Kelsey

My husband died on October 8, 2019, 200 days ago.

Outside of his obituary, social media posts, and some things for the organ donation website, I have not written anything about him in all that time. I am a writer. It’s how I cope. So why haven’t I written about the ________________________________________—-

That’s why. That blank space up there, that’s why. I – I can’t. It’s too big. It has no defined borders. If I walked you, blindfolded, up to the largest mountain range in the world, stood you 6 inches away from the base of it, removed the blindfold and asked you to describe it, could you? Tell you what, describe the universe.

I have lost my person. My Person. If you’re lucky enough to have A Person, you know what I’m talking about. When the doctor, the young doctor with the freckles and the bad shave, whose eyes were the same color as his hair, told me that my person would never wake up, I said, I whispered, “that sucks.” I have wondered how I, possessed of a large vocabulary and a decent fund of knowledge, could, when standing at the threshold of a world-swallowing abyss, only manage a triviality usually reserved for a bad haircut or a stumped toe. But even then, especially then, it was just too big. Maybe that’s what shock is.

I sometimes wish I had tried to write when it was all so fresh, so raw. When it was all one open wound. I thought about trying it, but I never did. I think I knew I couldn’t. I don’t want to relive those rawest moments of my life. “Let it scab over,” I thought. And now it has, and I find I still can’t.

I put notes into my phone to remind me of the things I felt would make good topics. “This is the worst thing I have ever faced and the person who helped me face everything is gone.” “So much of me, who I am, who I was, who I would have become, exists only in the context of him.” “I regret every minute I spent out of his company.” “In the picture I have by the bed I can’t see his eyes, and I am comfortable with that.” “With every day that passes, I’m closer to him in time than I will ever be again.” But they are worlds unto themselves. They don’t really need elaboration. Does any of this? Is it pointless digging, or is it a necessary part of the grieving process?

Very early on, I was a little bit obsessed about saving every kind word anybody said about him, especially online. I was screenshotting like a mad bastard, frantic lest any comment escape my notice. I was going to put them all in a little book I had bought to keep cards in, a little scrapbook with “Not all those who wander are lost” on the front. I stopped the day I realized I was gathering these things to show him when he got back.

I struggled with that concept a lot. I still do. I waited for him to return all day, every day. Obviously my conscious mind knew he wasn’t going to come back, but when you’ve been with a person every day for 32 years, you get used to their routine, their rhythms, their patterns. He was out on the porch, was all. He was out running errands. He’d be back. Of course he’d be back; he always came home to me.

The only times I’ve been angry is when I’m faced with something he would have loved. One of my earliest and hardest meltdowns was over these hooded shirts he loved. We never had much money, and with Kelsey being 6”8”, 300 or so lb, it was hard to find clothes that fit and that he liked. He had been out of work so much that he’d started wearing athlesiure gear around the house a lot, and he had found these sleeveless shirts with hoods, in performance material. He loved them. We bought two or three, all we could really spare for clothes, and he washed and wore them continually. He wanted several more, all the colors and a couple of spares, and we looked in the stores whenever we had a few bucks. Once, about a month before he went into the hospital, we found them on clearance for like $3 apiece. He cleared them out in his size. He was absolutely beside himself. He wanted to start getting the matching pants, because it was a running joke based on the truth that Kelsey could never be satisfied. He wore those shirts every day for the rest of his life. When he was in the hospital having his bypass, I came home one day and made sure I washed all of his clothes so all of his shirts would be clean when he got back. On my return home after his death, I saw those shirts in the clean laundry basket and melted all the way down. It’s not fair. He barely had time to enjoy them. He had gotten a new lounge chair for the porch, where he spent 90% of his time. He barely had time to enjoy it. We had lived in our house, for which we had so many plans, for 6 months. He didn’t even get to experience two seasons in it; he never had a fall or a winter here. We got a dog to sit on the porch with him since Lady wouldn’t. We had him for two months before Kelsey went into the hospital. Travis barely knew him. We never got to watch the final season of Game of Thrones because we had been moving. The book he was reading is still open to his place in his chair on the porch. His cigars are still in his humidor. The Patrick Rothfuss series he was after me to read will remain unfinished. He loved musicals but wouldn’t listen to the Hamilton soundtrack, since we heard it was going to be made into a movie. He wanted the whole experience at once. He will never get it. He will never see The Mandalorian or The Witcher, both of which he would have loved, or the upcoming adaptation of his beloved Wheel of Time series. He will never finish his own books; his latest project was a children’s book about unlearning racism. The world will remain deprived of these.

The world will remain deprived of the brilliant light that was Kelsey Bagwell. I didn’t just lose him. We all lost him. He was a deeply good person. His teaching career was devoted to improving students’ lives; giving them skills and knowledge to help pave their path and show them their own deep goodness, their own light to shine in the world. He was an example of wholesome masculinity, even though I’m not sure he ever heard the phrase. He was a helper. He was a light and it went out too soon. He loved deeply and actively. If he had anything to offer, it was yours. If he didn’t have anything to offer, he’d find something. He’d make something. He’d write something. He’d cook something. He’d tell or teach or sing you something. He loved laughter and color and flowers and things that smell nice. He loved me and he changed my life. He made me want to be a better person. I have to still be here because he doesn’t get to be. He fought hard to be here, in ways public and private. I violently wish he still was.

Him

I waited too long to write about this. My thoughts are all jumbled.

One of the first things that tormented me was how he wouldn’t get to enjoy things anymore. We never had much in the way of luxuries – we were always paycheck to paycheck at best with little money left over for nice things. Or even things, nice or not. And Kelsey liked things very much.

The summer before he passed, he had found these shirts he liked. Performance material, sleeveless hoodies (weird, right?) but he loved them. Being autistic, he had a lot of trouble with textures and these were silky and stretchy. He asked to buy two, and we could afford it. He wore them as often as they were clean, and I tried to keep them clean as much as possible, the laundry having fallen to me to do as his health worsened. It was a little thing, but it made him happy. He always looked to see if he could find more of them, knowing we may not be able to afford them even if he could.

Well. Soon after his birthday in July, we found the motherlode. Dozens of the shirts, on CLEARANCE! OMG what a happy Kelsey. He picked out one in every color, and two in his favorites. He had enough for a week. And then, in true Kelsey fashion, he said “now I need to find the matching pants!” He was never satisfied.

Coming home from the hospital alone was Hell. I cried when I pulled into the driveway and saw his Surburban. I sobbed when I looked inside it and saw his cane. I crumpled when I opened the door and saw his keys. And then I went into the spare bedroom and saw a basket of clean laundry with one of his prized shirts on top.

The fundamental unfairness of it struck me hard. He’s gone. He had such a short time to enjoy the simple pleasure of a comfortable shirt. He finally had enough of something he wanted – a rare happening- and he only had a few weeks in which to enjoy it.

This will never be okay.

Widowed

Well, there it is. That word.

It’s been my reality for four months now, and that’s the first time I’ve used it.

I haven’t written. I haven’t done anything except exist. Writing is how I cope with the big stuff, but this…This is the biggest stuff. This is too big to look at. This…

My husband Kelsey died on October 8, 2019. He had suffered a number of heart attacks over the past few years, and two strokes. He had over a dozen stents in his heart and had finally been cleared to undergo a double coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). He came through the surgery fine; they’d only been able to graft one and that was disappointing but okay. He was in CCU and they had him up and moving from bed to chair within hours. He was in pain and grouchy af, but doing everything he needed to do to recover. They moved him out of CCU and into a stepdown room, where he stayed for 12 hours. He crashed the next morning and never regained consciousness. It was a blood clot.

The circumstances surrounding the crash and his subsequent death are surreal and I will write about those later. No danger I’ll forget those days. I harbor no ill will toward his doctors or any of the staff at Willis Knighton. They were extraordinary in their attempts to improve and then save Kelsey’s life. Sometimes it’s just not enough. On October 8, it wasn’t enough.

My husband was the best person I’ve ever known. He was just fundamentally … good. He was kind. He was a helper. He fantasized about enriching others. He would read stories about people giving waiters $1000 tips and say, “man, I wish I could do that.” Not “I wish someone would do that for me,” but “I wish I could do that for someone else.” That’s who he was. He constantly worked on himself.

I will post much more about him in the days to come. I just had to come and break the block. I need to write this out. And I want everyone who stumbles across this to know Kelsey D Bagwell, my person, the best person in the history of the world.

 

Poem

…don’t worry, I haven’t written one. I had to write a journal entry in my English class about my favorite book, short story or poem; an easy assignment because of all the ones I love, I immediately knew which one I wanted to write about.

My favorite poem is The Barrel-Organ by Alfred Noyes. I first came across this poem in an English Lit textbook I bought at a garage sale (I snap up any old literature textbook I come across). It was written in 1958 and it is long – 135 lines. Its length is why I can never convince anybody else to read it. A poem that long requires a certain amount of commitment, even to a poetry lover. The first few lines, though, reveal an irresistible rhythm that pulls you through the rest of it. It’s easily the most musical poem I’ve ever read; it has an unusual rhyme scheme and the tempo changes several times when the focus shifts.

There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet

And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain

That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;

And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again

In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

The poem is set in London and describes the inner lives of people on the street within hearing distance f the organ. It speaks of the influence of music on humans. It illustrates the timelessness and necessity of music – how it shapes our actions and then sings of them after they’re done. It bears witness to all of humanity’s triumphs and follies. It cheers us, comforts us, rocks us to sleep and jolts us awake. The Barrel-Organ is glittering, gritty and beautiful, just like the city in which it is set.

This thing makes me so happy that if I had the brain space to devote to it, I’d spend my life trying to memorize it. I absolutely adore it.

Take the epic-poem challenge. Read the bitch. If you like poetry even a little, you won’t regret it. http://www.bartleby.com/103/117.html

I

…am a lucky bitch.  

That is all 

628

“Here’s to the boys back in 628, where an ear to the wall was a twist of fate.”  These lyrics refer to a pack of vicious gossips, overheard by the narrator while talking a bunch of smack about him.   This tickled me when I first heard the story behind it, because 628 is the telephone exchange of the small town where I grew up and, as the saying goes, a more wretched hive of scum and villainy is scarcely to be found.

Well, okay, so that’s an exaggeration.  But, as I found out when I ventured out to work in surrounding cities, we do have a reputation for being a hardheaded, clannish, unpleasant people, and it’s not entirely unfounded.  I never really wondered about this – I hated that reputation and found it embarrassing, but it was what it was – but  I never thought about it until recently.

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Huey Long, A Biography By T. Harry Williams.  I thought I was going to read a biography of, you know, Huey Long, but first I was treated to a pretty frank and commonsense summing-up of the parish where I was born and raised (we don’t have counties here in Louisiana, we have parishes).  Back when Louisiana was being settled, the area that would become Winn Parish didn’t have much to recommend it, according to T. Harry, whom I assume knows what he’s talking about.  The soil was too poor for farming, really, and there was nothing to trade (this is before the lumber industry took ahold).  The people who settled here were, by necessity, stubborn and possibly delusional. They were a people not much swayed by others’ opinions, and of this select group of settlers, even fewer dug their heels in hard enough to find success.  What success they did find was pitiful by wealthier parishes’ standards, but Winn Parish people likely neither realized that nor would’ve cared much if they had.  When the regional climate turned rebellious in the 1860s, Winn Parish collectively spat on the ground and instructed their delegate to vote against secession.  They weren’t slaveholders, they reasoned; it wasn’t their war.  The delegate shared this view and voted the Winn Parish conscience, and when outvoted, refused to sign off on the decision.  (He did, however, dutifully raise a force to send to fight for the Confederacy.) This was the climate that produced Earl and Huey Long, the former a poster child for Winn Parish jackassery and the latter a perfect storm of intellect, ambition and ruthlessness.

My takeaway from this, filtered through my own experience, is that if you have roots here (my own family has buried our sixth generation at Pleasant Hill cemetery), you likely have a strong streak of stubbornness running through you.  This can be a fine thing if it’s tempered with the thoughtfulness and purpose exhibited by our ancestors.  The “Winnians” of today, though, tend to have this manifest in what can only be described as douchebag behavior; insular, unthinking, a backwoods strain of pigheadedness that’s no credit to anyone.   It’s unfortunate, because we can be so much better than we are. We have the blueprints; we have the inherited ability. It’s a good thing the dead can’t reanimate, as it’s my belief that if our forefathers could see how we’ve squandered their legacy, they would summarily kick the shit out of us.

Something happens

…and I’m head over heels  Any ’80s kid can finish the rest of that with no prompting.

So I said awhile back I owed Tears For Fears an apology and a new blog post.  A couple of posts ago, I referred to them in the context of ‘forgotten music from [my] youth.”  That’s partly true; they were huge in the ’80s and rightfully so, on the back of catchy synth-pop tracks like the above-mentioned one and Shout and Everybody Wants To … (yeah, you finished singing it in your head; don’t lie).  I knew they’d put out a couple of more songs, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found once I went looking.

So most of us know about The Hurting, their first album, which just turned 30 and gave us Pale Shelter and that gift that keeps on giving, Mad World.  1985 brought Songs From The Big Chair, their big bang that produced the tunes they’re most famous for.  In 1989 they gave us Seeds Of Love, providing Woman In Chains and Sowing The Seeds Of Love.

See, what had happened was, here awhile back I got a wild hair to see the Woman In Chains video.  It’s a gorgeous song with a video to match.  It popped into my head at random one evening, so I YouTubed it up.   At the end of it, YouTube helpfully served up some more TFF favorites.  As I watched, enjoyed, and read comments, I found myself disabused of a few notions.  1) The band is not broken up and in fact has never broken up.  Curt Smith (the chiseled, rat-tailed charmer who sang most of their earlier singles) left in 1990, but Tears For Fears carried on under the sole guidance of Roland Orzabal (the curly-haired, sad-eyed cutie) until Curt’s return in/around 2000.   2)  The quality of the music had not suffered.  Like, at all.  Unlike some acts who get boxed in by their Big Hit Sound, Tears For Fears was and is all about variety.  It’s dang near impossible to choose a favorite album or even a favorite song (although I’ve settled on one of each, subject to change, of course).

Imma start with the albums I didn’t know about.  YMMV.

Elemental, 1993:  I kind of knew about this one, in the periphery of my mind.  When I heard Break It Down Again, I immediately recalled it and even my disinterested husband said, “don’t you remember being so excited back then that they were still putting out music?”  Well, no, I don’t; my memory is for beans but that’s another post for another day.  It’s the catchiest damn song and a guaranteed mood lifter.  It has one of my favorite lyrics of all music:  They make no mention of the beauty of decay.    The awesome doesn’t stop there; Cold is kind of hilarious and has an interesting backstory, and Mr. Pessimist is just so …satisfying.   I’m going to run out of superlatives before I even get to the next album, which is just wrong because

Raoul And The Kings of Spain, 1995:  Is my favorite TFF album.  I got this one in the mail before Elemental, so I of course listened to it first because I ain’t got no sense.  I think Elemental suffered a little in its shadow, because Raoul is SEXY.  This album has swagger in spades.  The title track is sumptuous.   Falling Down is clever and fun to sing along with.  Los Reyes Catolicos is exquisite; it and the lovely Sketches of Pain are, for me, the stars of the album.  Every track on Raoul is evocative.  If you’re not emotionally spent at the end of it, yer doin it rong.  The critics hated this album.  I don’t think they got it, I really don’t.  I bought this album on Amazon for less than $5, which embarrasses me somehow.  I feel like I absconded from the temple with a priceless relic under my coat.

Tomcats Screaming Outside, 2001:  Okay.  This is not a TFF album – it’s Roland’s solo album, but since he’d been shouldering the band for so long (and since this is my blog and I do what I want) I’m going to throw it in.  In a word: DAYUM.  In two words: DAYUM, SON.   Tomcats is an acquired taste and not for the faint of heart.   It’s [here’s where I wrote some words and deleted them]  It [more deleted words]  It defies categorization; it just has to be heard.  In the interest of full disclosure, I had a visceral negative reaction to one of the songs and that colored my early opinion of the whole thing.   Funnily, this song – Bullets For Brains – has since become a favorite and I’m able to see the album for the masterpiece it is.  Low Life should have been a smash hit.  Day By Day By Day By Day By Day is quietly, desperately brilliant, and Dandelion is one of the most exuberant songs ever recorded.  Tomcats never stood a chance; it was released in the US on September 11, 2001, when our minds were on other things.

Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, 2004:  You know how when you’re cooking, and you take several tasty things and combine them into a dish? That dish can’t help but taste good while it’s fresh, but once it simmers or marinates it develops flavors that transcend its ingredients and becomes unbelievably delicious. That’s this album. The guys couldn’t have made this album earlier. They had to go through what they went through, produce the music they produced, and live their lives before this was even possible. Thank God they did, because this album is necessary to my personal wellbeing.  The way their voices blend back together after so long apart has magic in it.  This album is so … mellow.  It’s happy.  That’s not to say that all the songs are bouncy and lighthearted; some are, but the themes dealt with here are aging and loss and the passage of time, so there’s more than a hint of darkness – sadness, foreboding and resignation all take the stage.  But there’s an underlying optimism to it that is so, so appealing; it closes the circle begun by The Hurting, and there’s so much maturity and satisfaction in that.   This is Tears For Fears aged to perfection; happy, yes, but hopefully not an ending.  The title track is delightful and infectious, you’ll hear a really nice Beatles influence in both Who Killed Tangerine and Secret World, and Killing With Kindness is, simply put, my jam.

Rumor has it that the boys from Bath are back in the recording studio as of this blog post, and I’m beside myself wondering what they’ll come up with next.  They’ve never made the same album twice, and despite the obtuseness of the critics and the howls of fans who want only to relive the glory days, they keep evolving their sound, staying current and fresh.  If you like solid songwriting, fine musicianship and just all around great tunes, check out not only these albums but also Curt’s solo work – Mayfield and Halfway, Pleased.  Don’t wait – you’re just, just, just wasting time.

Fired

I lost my job last week, and I miss it.  Well, that’s not entirely true; my job was something of a clusterfuck, and the company I worked for was the Walmart of the industry.  I miss my field, though.  I heard someone on a TV show mention an unusual diagnosis, and I got a little pang.  I’m hopeful that I’ll find something else in the field soon.

In the meantime, though, I’ve discovered something shocking; I’m not nearly as lazy as I like to think I am.  This is breaking news to me, because it seemed like I spent at least 50% of my work hours wishing I was taking a nap, fantasizing about all the nothing I could be doing at a given moment, and planning weekends filled with glorious idleness.  Today marks 1 week jobless, and I’m going spare over here.  It seems a body can only stalk Facebook, make lyrics videos, listen to music and nap so much before it loses its charm.  I need to be doing something.

That’s another thing that has come as a bit of a shock.  I’m not nearly as good at sitting around as I thought.  I was sitting around on Facebook and my ass yesterday, and realized I needed to go clean something.  Quelle horreur!  I, voluntarily doing housework?!

Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted to find out I’m not quite as worthless as previously imagined.  They say job loss is a time for self-reevaluation.  I guess I’ll have to cross “full-time hedonist” off my list of ambitions.

Soundtrack

Old vehicle = old stereo.  Old stereo = old music formats.  Old music formats = rediscovering forgotten music from one’s youth.  Ohai, Tears For Fears.

Roland Orzabal.  All I’m gonna say is, any guy capable of writing the lyrics he does deserves all the panties thrown at him.   Intelligent, thoughtful, interested in psychology, kind of a feminist – okay, a little goofy-looking* but y’all know I dig that – pretty eyes and great hair.  Why did I not notice this when I was 16?

Oh yeah; Peter Tork, that’s why.  (Why, hello again, Monkees; we got reacquainted this time last year with Davy’s passing.)  Peter.  Sigh.  That dimple!  The swingy blond hair, mischievous eyes and bright smile.  And that dimple.  It deserved its own show.   He was in his 40s by the time I discovered the show in syndication, but I didn’t care.   I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he’s much smarter than the character he played (see above re:  intelligent and thoughtful) but the sweetness, I believe, is innate to both Peter the character and Peter the man.   Did I mention the dimple?

Ho-oh-ohh-oh-oh-ohhoward Jones.  In a word, eccentric.  Odd-looking, kinda hyper, British.  Just my type.

Mick Hucknall, whose voice still has power over me.

“Our” music shapes us, no matter when we take possession of it.  It encodes itself into our DNA and helps make us who we are.  It’s how we explain ourselves to ourselves and how we try to explain ourselves to others.  But for teenage girls, good music made by cute boys has a little extra mojo.  Hell, the music doesn’t even have to be good if the boy is cute enough.

And with that, I’m off to go “read it in the books, in the crannies and the nooks there are books to read!”  ♪ ♥ ♫

 

*This is a dirty lie, and I don’t know why I told it.  That man is hot as hell.   We didn’t have MTV when I was a kid, and it’s a good thing because if I’d ever seen that video with him in geek glasses reading the paper in bed, I’d have done groundbreaking work in the field of celebrity stalking.

Thanks, Nick

On November 25, 1974, a voice went silent.  Few noticed – it had always been such a quiet voice.

English singer-songwriter Nick Drake was 26 years old when he died from an overdose of antidepressants.  Whether he intended to commit suicide has never been determined; he was a fragile person, suffering from clinical depression and possibly associated disorders.  His use of marijuana is well-documented, and there is speculation that he may have turned to harder drugs as his world darkened.  Whether this is true and to what extent it may have contributed to his death will never be known.

Not much about Nick Drake is knowable, not to his growing legions of fans now, not to his family and friends during his lifetime.  His father once remarked, after getting a report from an obviously perplexed schoolmaster, “All the way through with Nick – no one knew him very much.”

Nick knew Nick, though, and his small body of work reveals insight into his own mental and emotional brokenness that is breathtakingly honest and deceptively simple.  His music is as fragile as his psyche, his voice breathy and ethereal.  His lyrics, accompanied by his exquisite guitar picking, explore themes of loneliness, lost opportunity, the passage of time.  The music stirs listeners to melancholy without pulling them into depression.  Nick’s gift was introspection without indulgence, anguish without angst, honest emotion without a whiff of “emo.”

Nick was beloved by those who knew him; a cherished son and brother and a loyal friend who embodied the descriptor used over and over by those closest to him:  kind.   He felt deeply – perhaps too deeply for this world – and he hated taking the medications that stripped those feelings from him.  He took them anyway, apparently reaching out for help from any available avenue.  A study in contradictions, he sought recognition but shied from publicity.  He sang gently evocative songs but could also wail an authentic blues.  He was a star athlete who turned sickly, a drug enthusiast with a distaste for his prescriptions, a child of privilege who favored shabby, ill-fitting clothes.   On the subject of obtaining his college degree, he told his father that a safety net was “the one thing [he didn’t] want,” yet he was ultimately, tragically unable to survive on his own.

Nick recorded three albums in his short career:  1969’s Five Leaves Left was followed by Bryter Layter in 1970, and in 1972 came Pink Moon, the stark, stripped-bare acoustic album considered by fans and critics alike to be his masterwork.  Those three albums were supplemented posthumously by bootleg recordings and compilations, but even so, the sum total of his life’s work hovers at around 100 songs.

One hundred songs, and each one a jewel.  One hundred little windows into a beautiful, bedeviled soul; one hundred attempts by Nick to connect with something larger than himself, to impart a message to someone, to anyone who might have been listening.  Unfortunately, few were listening in 1974.

Sometime after midnight on November 25, after wandering downstairs to have a snack, Nick took more of his medicine than he was supposed to, collapsed across his narrow bed and never arose.  His death was ruled a suicide, but this ruling has been disputed.  Gabrielle Drake, however, has said that she prefers to think her younger brother committed suicide, “in the sense that I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible….”

However you left us, Nick, thank you for the beauty you left behind, and I hope you’ve found peace.  The prophecy in “Fruit Tree” has come to pass.

Fruit tree, fruit tree, no one knows you but the rain and the air

Don’t you worry, they’ll stand and stare when you’re gone