Oh Captain, My Captain

To be published August 20, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     She came into the market Monday looking troubled.  A tough-looking woman whose appearance is meant to assure you she could kick your ass with one hand tied behind her back was on the verge of tears.  “Robin Williams died today around noon. Suicide.  He’d been depressed...” she said as she picked up her bag of groceries and wheeled to go through the door before she broke down.  


     “Not Robin Williams,” I heard myself say.  “My Robin Williams?”  Then a silent “Oh, no.”  Then my heart wailed “Couldn’t somebody have just held his hand or something until he got through it?” as my own tears began to build.


     As the facts trickled in over the next few days, and the commentators worked to define his life, explain his death, I worked to understand why this loss is so painful to me.  The heroism of his characters in three specific movies kept rising to the surface:  Good Morning Viet Nam, What Dreams May Come, and Dead Poets Society, the one I know best.  In each one, he’s in an impossible situation but throws himself into bringing light, joy, truth, beauty into some very dark spaces.  In each one he contributes these to the lives of his fellow human beings for awhile - and changes a few - before the darkness takes back its throne. But even as the light withdraws, we see the darkness for what it is.


     His loss is painful because he’s one of the humans I have identified with.  His characters have befriended me on my own journey.  I have quoted one segment of his lines in Dead Poets Society many times, not the “Carpe Diem” segment that took on a life of its own for years, but one just before or after that scene.  After noting that engineering, law, medicine are all very noble careers and worthy of investment, he says “But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.”  And I believe Robin Williams knew that in his core, not just his character.  I believe depression was robbing him of his access to those things.


     Depression can do that.  The Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer chronicled three major bouts of depression in his book Let Your Life Speak (2000).  One moment I remember best from his story was that a friend would come several times a week and wash his feet, not talking, simply caring.  He wrote that was the only time he could feel anything.


     I have thought for a long time that those who struggle with addiction are simply struggling to stay alive against the death of depression. That addictions strike artists in particularly high percentages isn’t really a surprise:  the job of keeping truth, beauty, romance and love alive in this world, despite and even because of the darkness, can seem so futile, so unrewarded.  So dangerous, even.  Robin Williams lost his job, after all,  for doing just that in both Good Morning and Dead Poets.  In What Dreams May Come, loving his clinically depressed wife almost takes him to hell.


     But then there’s the final scene in Dead Poets, which I’ve just remembered, which has just driven me to write this all down.  He’s in his classroom, gathering up his things to leave after the suicide of one of his students, for which he is silently being blamed.  And despite the overlord standing there, commandeering Robin Williams’ departure, the youngest, most timid student, the roommate of the boy who died - this beautiful young soul gets up and stands on his desk, quoting the opening line of a poem his teacher taught them.  “Oh, Captain, my Captain,” he says, the tears and snot running down his face.  And then the rest of the boys follow suit, despite the presence of darkness.


     Think of me as up there with them, saying good bye to a great fellow traveler.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Robin Williams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Fire & Rain

Published Aug. 9, 2014 in my Fresno Bee column "Letters from Lewis Creek"

Mr. James Chlebda, Heaven

July 29, 2014

Dear Jim,

        There’s a pink tinge to this morning’s sunrise in the remnant of yesterday’s clouds hanging onto your mountains.  Maybe some of that’s smoke – I haven’t checked the news for fires, preoccupied with getting these things into words.

        It’s been a week since you took your last breath.  The news triggered James Taylor’s "Fire and Rain" in my head, that devastating first line “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone.”  It was only hours in my case - your sister Karen texted Betty Blanks, who found the message on her phone during a break from court in Kings County.  She was crying when she called me.  I didn’t cry until we hung up.  Even though we knew it was coming, your death hit hard.  I’ll love her forever for getting up to Stanford to see you the weekend before.  Her reports from that trip have consoled me over and over.

        When I emailed John Dofflemyer, he wrote back and called you “a force in many people’s lives.”  That cowboy poet and fellow publisher who knows his ropes also said now you can operate with a freer hand.  I’ve been gratified to find that’s true.  I don’t know what you’ve been doing with the others, but your presence here with me has been a blessing.

        When I emailed Jeremy Hogan, he began sending YouTube clips of the Grateful Dead and Creedence, John Lennon’s "Mind Games."  I didn’t know 'til later that when he got my email, he left his office, went out to his car and cried for 45 minutes.  Then he began an outpouring of words about how you saved his life, how you were the pivot point between being lost and becoming a photojournalist.  I hope you’re enjoying the force of his flood of love and gratitude.

        Other people have said now you’re with Wilma.  I don’t know about that, but give her a hug for me if you see her.  I think you’re back at Back 40, communing with your brother floras and sister faunas, the granite and gneiss, unconstrained by property lines and deeds, not worried about the drought.  That’s where I feel your heart beating, anyway. 

        Sunday morning I found a crow’s feather on the ground on my way out to the car.  I stuck it in my hair and took you to church with me, where I read the Scriptures aloud, five parables from Matthew about the Kingdom of Heaven – what it is, what it’ll be like.  I still don’t know about all that, but I know better now than I’ve ever known before that when you walked this planet, the kingdom of heaven was near.  You brought it with you, sowed seeds of kindness and appreciation, love and respect everywhere you went.  Some of those seeds are on their way to being trees, nest sites for all those birds you love. The pearls of great price you found on every nature walk, in every poet’s corner, every encounter with the unconformed and wandering souls who became your friends – those pearls are shining now, right here on earth.

        It was hard, imagining what you were facing up there at Stanford: the antibiotics no longer keeping the pseudomonas at bay, the prospect of surgery to swap out those lungs you did your damndest to protect these past fifty-seven years, the need to take on a whole new and unknown medical regime to fool your body into keeping the replacement breathing apparatus someone else didn’t need anymore.  It was hard, but I imagined you daily.  When the Bee carried that great story about the young Clovis woman climbing Half Dome with her new lungs, we sent it right off, hoping the vision of being back in your mountains would help you cross that high desert of fear.  But that afternoon the doctors took you off the lung transplant list.

        I still don’t know all the reasons – do you?  Betty said… Kay said… Karen said… but I don’t know.  Last time we got to talk, you said “I guess now I have to go through this other window.”  I got to wail “We’re all grieving that you have to do that,” probably the most real thing I’ve said in a long time.  And you said, with your characteristic love, “And I’ve been grieving that I haven’t been able to talk with you when you’ve called, Trudy-bud.”  You took my breath away.  You get the last word on this.

        So, yes.  My heart’s still singing “Oh, I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain.  I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.  I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend.  But I always thought that I’d see you again.”  Despite my initial fear of that dead loss, that, in my life, you would go blank, here you are.  Thanks for sticking around all these years, and these last few days especially. Thanks for leading the way now.

Love,

Trudy

 

Editor’s Note:  Jim Chlebda was editor of Southland Magazine, then publisher when it became South Valley Arts serving Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern Counties between 1990 and 2000.  He published Valley poets with his Back 40 Publishing, most notably the Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel and Modesto poet Lillian Vallee (see www.back40publishing.com.)  He was a grateful recipient of excellent health care at Valley Children’s Hospital until he moved to Sonoma County and shifted medical service to Stanford.  He will be missed by many.

Big Jim

Published August 6, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     My friend Jim Chlebda took his last breath a couple of weeks ago.  Once he was taken off the list for a double lung transplant at Stanford, there was little time.  He got his papers in order, gathered up his family and friends for one last good day, and three days later he was gone.

     At least from this form of existence.  After  I heard the news of his passing, I was surprised how my days filled with the sight of him and the sound of his voice, how his normal way of saying goodbye – “hey, now,” became a greeting.  How his motivations and purposes suddenly seemed completely coherent, an integrity that was not only admirable but something to follow in my own life.  So I might say that Jim’s transformation from living to eternal is having a transformative effect in me.

     The Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who Jim loved and supported with his publishing efforts as well as bringing bursts of new life into that old woman’s days, called him “Little Jim.”  He was no taller than I am and weighed significantly less, all muscle and bone with a beautiful skin covering topped by curly hair the ladies had trouble keeping their hands off of.  But there was nothing little about him.  It always rankled me that she could so casually mark him with what most men would receive as a slight.  I mean, even the Pygmy Bushmen of Africa greet each other with a sentence that goes something like “Hey, now, you’re so tall I saw you coming from a long way!”  But Jim just laughed it off.

     As he did most people’s foibles.  What was really big about him is that he did not let others’ faults impinge on his character.  He accepted people for who they were, but (for the most part) he did not let that subtract – or add – to who he was.  It has been easy for me to think that living his entire 57 years with a terminal disease – cystic fibrosis, which took his sister at 21 - was what shaped him into the purposeful, life-embracing, life-giving human I knew him to be.  But as his breathing days came to an end I saw there was more.

     Jim lived with the spirit of Christ, the heart of God, in him.  He wore no external sign of that affiliation, spoke few words of devotion out loud (at least with me).  His ceremonies celebrated the beauty and wonder of the world, particularly the natural world; his publishing efforts supported artists of all kinds.  The gifts he shared were natural shards from the land, like hawk feathers and sprigs of native plants, his photographs of those wonders, or music and books, the works of artists.  His publications were art, from the covers and insides of Southland Magazine and South Valley Arts, to the chapbooks of poets up and down the valley.  On one of Wilma’s little books of prose, Cooking with Eli, he even used spiral binding, like a church cookbook of recipes.  You know, you might want to lay it flat to read while whipping up a batch of pancakes.

     John Dofflemyer, the cowboy poet and fellow publisher who lives along Dry Creek, wrote that Jim was “a force in many people’s lives.”  He was, but not forcibly: it was the force of love.  John also added that “now he can operate with a freer hand.”  I loved that recognition of another realm from this other man of the land, this rancher who copes with the mysteries of life and death on a daily basis.

     But what I finally saw about Jim’s life after his death was that he walked softly and carried no stick at all.  To me, that’s an enormous life accomplishment.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed, just west of Jim’s beloved home Back 40 in North Fork Tule River country.  Visit www.back40publishing.com to view Jim’s publishing accomplishments; visit www.drycrikjournal.com to see John & Robbin Dofflemyers'.