The Yard

A couple of orchids are blooming on the trees right now. I still get such a kick out of the fact that they are epiphytes and hang on with roots only, getting what they need from the air and rain and bird poop. Isn't nature grand? They are survivors!

Thanksgiving Song

My father sang this song to us every Thanksgiving, and I in turn sang it (albeit poorly since I am tone deaf) to my children. You will be happy that you cannot hear me sing it but I will write the lyrics, nonetheless. Let the tradition continue...

If Turkeys were tall

As telegraph poles

And ten times wider and fatter

Who'd do the carving

To keep us from starving

And what would we use for a platter?

Happy Thanksgiving 2011!

Douglas Howard Caplan

Today would have been Douglas's 44th birthday. Doug was my husband's oldest child, and my stepson. He took his own life in February of 2007.

Suicide is one of the taboo topics, like miscarriage, that leave the grieving people who experienced the loss feeling isolated and incomplete. Nothing stops conversations as quickly as the mention of having lost a child, and especially, how. You can almost hear the thoughts running through the other person's mind and the curiosity they have about how and why.

Douglas was handsome and charming and yet also darkly disturbed and mentally ill. As he aged, his functioning declined. He was involved with drugs at a young age and seemed to have a life that flirted on the edge of a drug world that most of us know nothing about. He was diagnosed as bi-polar. He did not like taking medication though, and did not stay on any regimen consistently. He had Hepatitis C and we do not know how he got it. We always suspected IV drug use as the cause. He drifted in and out of AA although he did not drink very much. I think the AA support helped him when he felt the drug use (mostly marijuana in later years) was getting out of hand. I always felt that the marijuana calmed his manic episodes but actually he got worse the more he smoked.

There were years of normalcy. A job as a construction carpenter. The development of a business making surf board cases. A marriage to a wonderful woman and two children born. Then, suddenly, he wanted a divorce. The ex-wife moved back to Brazil with his blessing and took his children with her. And, from that time on, his life seemed to deteriorate. He missed his children. He left the construction work. He could not support himself and his children and needed financial help from his father and grandfather and the more help he received, the more difficult he became. His last year of life, he was isolated from his sister and his father and only communicated with his mother. He alternated his relationships. When he was speaking to his father, he trashed his mother, and visa versa. Everyone stepped on eggshells in order to help him. And then, a call came. That he was found dead on the morning Harry's brother was going to take him to see a Psychiatrist. He had been agitated, hallucinating, had thrown away his cell phone and abandoned his car. His home was bare. Minimalistic living. Much of the furniture we had given him over the years was gone. Nothing was in the refrigerator but a bag of carrots. I found the notes on his desk which were his beliefs that he had solved the DaVinci code. He was clearly sick and I was angry. Why had Harry's father and brother not called us to inform us of how bad his functioning was. That is, of course, the 20/20 hindsight that we all have when we feel we should have done something else. In reality, I know that many people tried to help him. Many were manipulated by him. And many people were left with very confusing feelings about him.

His life was so complex that his sister, who did the funeral eulogy, created two versions. The one for the funeral and the one for her and her parents. The truths that had to be kept private, so that mourners could leave with positive thoughts and memories of a man the way they wanted to see him. But, no one will ever really know Douglas. He took a lot of the truths with him the night he left us.