Saturday Musings, 14 May 2016

Good morning,

The rain has passed.  I've warmed a mug of coffee, peered out the back door, and checked the perimeter of my dwelling. Seeing no intruders, I gazed for a moment at the sleeping dog and then came back upstairs, mug in hand, to stare out my window and watch the sun rise.

Memories crowd me this morning, begging for my attention, boasting of a richness that they crow will not be found in the present.  I stare at the computer screen, willing it to flicker with images of old familiar faces.  I think about a long conversation that I had last night, one into which no artifice crept.  Our words flowed easily, free of any subtext, tinged with pain, with regret, with compassion, with sweet disclosure.  A gift, that conversation; and a useful one, which I will keep at hand and study often.

My house fell silent once that conversation ended, with  only my footfalls and the whisper of the dog's movement as she settled for the evening.  Into the silence came echoes of the past -- shadows of fifty years ago dancing beside those of last week, mingling, waltzing, taunting me.  Here is my mother, holding my son though he came into this world six years after she departed.  Here the small clumsy feet of my childhood struggle to climb the Arkansas mountain where I camped in 1986 with the man whom I would marry the next year.  Time folds over itself, twisting, weaving.

I close my eyes and see boxes in this house.  Someone stands in the front bedroom assembling the frame of a toddler bed.  A little boy carries a stuffed bunny.  One tiny fist rubs a sleepy eye.  I raise him in my arms and we settle into a rocking chair, ignoring the moving mess, waiting for all the kind helpers to pack their tools and leave us to the evening.  We'll unpack tomorrow.

May 29th, 1993.  The first night that my son and I spent in this house.  Before his eyes flickered shut, he said, Is this our forever home?

Now the only  possessions of his which take any space here are three guitars with missing strings, a set of weights, and two boxes of God-knows-what brought home from his college fraternity house three years ago.  The favorite guitars, his keyboard, the small desk from his room, and everything else he valued fill a basement apartment in Evanston, Illinois.

On  Wednesday morning, my son casually announced over the phone that he had been awarded his MFA.  I nearly wrecked the Prius.  I had known that something happened on Tuesday, something he described as "defending my portfolio" but I did not realize it had such significance.  After four years of college, a gap year and two years of graduate school, my little boy now holds a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting.

I think about the child whom I first held in my arms shortly after 1:00 p.m. on 08 July 1991, born six weeks early but still weighing over seven pounds.  Good god, the midwife exclaimed.  Just think if you'd carried the lad to term.  We all laughed, our voices bouncing from the sterile walls of the operating room.  Though that lad struggled for the first few years from the effects of a shortened gestation, nonetheless he now stands nearly six feet tall, with the broad shoulders and narrow waist of his father's Native American heritage.   Of me, he inherited only my troubled soul, which I got from my father, and which my father brought home from his march down the Burma trail.

Perhaps he got his writing talent from me; and if so, that, too, I inherited from my father, and he from his.  My grandfather John L. Corley, a lawyer who haunted the halls of Notre Dame, published poetry under the name Louis Millwood, a nom de plume combining his middle name and the name of the town where he lived.  Patrick carries that tradition, along with a tendency towards isolation; both proclivities smack of the Corley heritage.

I hear the alarm ring and I am not sure why I wanted to rise at 7:30 but I've been up since six, thinking about being a girl, a wife, a step-parent, parent, a lawyer, a friend, a solitary woman. Everything that I have done, everyone whom I have known, and all of my choices paved the path that brought me to this moment.  As I said goodbye to my visitor of last evening, standing on my lovely porch in the chilly night air, I felt the keenness of my sixty years full upon my shoulders.  Some future hovered just beyond my sight, dancing in the darkness, twirling to the vibrant lilting tune of a pipe I cannot quite hear.  I put out the lights and retired for the evening, feeling another page about to turn, giddy with anticipation.

Mugwumpishy tendered,

Corinne Corley

My son, PATRICK CHARLES CORLEY, MFA

CONGRATULATIONS, BUDDY!  JOB WELL DONE!

If you would like to read the entry which I wrote after Patrick started college,

CLICK HERE.

Saturday Musings, 07 May 2016

Good morning,

As I write today, my window overlooks a windswept parking lot between two hotels in St. Ann, Missouri.  A nudge to the north sits Lambert-St. Louis Airport.  A few miles to the east of  that, my childhood home squats amid a rusty rubble of cars waiting to be repaired, presumably by the current owner.  Another notch towards the river takes me to the cemetery where  my mother lies.

I have not set foot in that green-space since 21 June 1997, when we buried my brother Stephen's cremains in their brass box adorned with a Grateful Dead skull and roses sticker.  I intend to try to find their resting place today.

The stories of my mother that I most long to tell would frighten the casual reader.  They give me the greatest sense of her character, though.  Her resilience, her creativity, her compassion, her courage: these shine through the accounts of how she dealt with the terror of her husband's alcoholic rages.  Those times made me what I am:  If I am tough, my toughness comes from hers; if I am timid, the need to hide comes from curling myself into a ball to escape the screams.  But many times my mother brought us together in laughter -- just as on many nights she sheltered us in her protective arms.

My mother laughed with her entire body, from her face to her belly to her toes.  My brothers pranced around the living room singing and making wild gestures while she giggled until she raced to the bathroom, only to find that a co-conspirator had slipped inside and locked the door.  Outside we would howl with laughter while my mother rapped on the wood and the child inside would run the water, shouting, I'll be out in a minute as my mother jiggled with her legs crossed.

Mom never let a good thing go.  She found a pattern for a wrap-around skirt and made it in a plethora of colors and fabrics.  She wore those skirts with T-shirts and sweaters, rotating tops and skirts to make a myriad of outfits.  She sewed a simple handbag and that, too, she fabricated in assorted materials, scraps from the skirts -- corduroy, denim, and heavy cotton.  Mother pre-dated Vera Bradley and could have given her a run for her money.

I have some of my mother's features: Her hair, the shape of her eyebrows, her small bosom, her slender calves.  My paleness flows from my father's heritage, as do my blue-grey eyes.  But my personality is pure Lucille, though whether by nature or nurture, I could not say.  I never surrender, even in the face of certain doom.  I poke around the dirt and nip the dead buds on a begonia, something I watched her do a thousand times.  I'm happy with dirt under my fingernails and a clean face without adornment.  From my mother, I got my inventive parenting style -- part teacher, part soldier, part cheerleader, part confessor.

In my sharpest memory, my mother stands at the kitchen counter with her hands in bread dough.  She wears an apron over church clothes -- a flowered dress, stockings, a pair of black pumps.  Her hair curls in the waves that wire rollers held with plastic stick pins produce overnight beneath a tied kerchief.  She wears lipstick and powder.  She raises her eyes as I pass through on the way to setting the breakfast room table.  She smiles.  In that smile, I see that she accepts me; she loves me; and she forgives me.  I have no other needs.

I have tried to be my mother's kind of woman.  She held her own views.  She believed that everyone should have a chance in life.  She defended her children, stuck by her husband, and pushed her own desires to the background so that we could excel.  She endured abuse, rose above adversity, and saw the flicker of color on a bird's wing in the thorniest overgrown bramble.  My mother cherished the broken, the bent, and the battered.  She threw nothing and no one away.  I have tried to be like that -- to be the kind of person that accepted life's travails without lament, while seeing beauty in the quiet around me.

By no means did my mother hold her tongue in every situation.  She picketed the convent when one of the nuns punished my brother for having long hair.  She stuck her tongue out at a lady in church who scolded me for asking my mother a question about the sermon.  She dashed down a sidewalk to chase away boys who had followed me home from school imitating my wobbly walk.

My mother never failed me.  She  held me when I bled away my first pregnancy on her bathroom tile, soothing me with her gentle voice, singing to me as she had done when my legs hurt so much I could not sleep, all those years before that terrible afternoon.  By the same token, she did not cut me too much slack.  When I had trouble with my first "real" job, she sat me at the table and ordered me to make a list of ways that I had failed, and a second list of how I could change the situation.  I get my problem-solving strategies from her.  Make a list of chores; tick each item off as you complete it.  When the list is done, you can rest and enjoy the holiday.

From my mother, too, I learned to love without reservation; to be loyal in the face of betrayal; and to keep expecting that the cloud will part and reveal the silver lining -- even if the earth has already split open beneath my feet and the heavens have unleashed a deluge on my head.

My mother wanted to name me "Mary Kathleen".  My father chose "Bridget Corinne".  They compromised, at first, on "Bridget Kathleen" and planned to call me "Bridget Kay".  As my father told the story, he and some friends wrote the various permutations of the four names on a cocktail napkin at the bar where he drank.  They decided that "Mary Corinne" looked best with "Corley", and he went to the hospital and named me that.  My father swore that my mother did not know for several weeks after my birth.  It made a good story.  He would tell it and my mother would sit knitting, raising her eyebrows, letting him have his moment.

She did that for all of us:  Let us take the limelight, pushed forward by the deft application of her guiding hand.

My mother died from uterine cancer which metastisized due, in large part, from the incompetence of her doctors.  Her OB-GYN diagnosed her symptoms as "female trouble", and gave her Premarin, a known aggravant of uterine cancer.  It spread before my mother could consult another doctor, which she did only at the urging of the cardiologist who headed the EKG department in which she worked.  The surgeon cut her urethra when he biopsied to check for cancer in her intestines during the hysterectomy, and her radiation had to be delayed.  By the time the wound healed, the cancer had spread beyond hope.  She died a few months later, just two weeks before her 59th birthday.

I am older than my mother ever got to be.  I feel the fullness of that statement.  In some ways, I feel as though I am living the old-age that she did not get to enjoy.  I do not look much like her, but I hear her voice in my words.  I carry the best of her in my heart.  I try to honor the best of her.  I have no other gift to offer in her memory.  I hold that out in my trembling hands, hoping it will be enough.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

LUCILLE JOHANNA LYONS CORLEY

10 SEPT 1926 - 21 AUGUST 1985

FOREVER IN MY HEART

Saturday Musings, 30 April 2016

Good morning,

The storm broke just moments ago.  Now the heavy air has lifted.  Rain pounds on the roof but the pressure of waiting has been released.  I sit in the north-facing window.  The neighbor's light, my constant guide, shines into the darkness, waiting for dawn.

Last evening I dined with a client who has become a friend.  After we had ordered, she excused herself and with her gone from the table my view to the back wall cleared.  I saw a family:  small child; attentive mother, tall and lean father.  I briefly thought, That child is so small to be in this fancy restaurant! and I watched the father gently instructing his son while the mother studied her husband intently.  And another small son's face raised itself before me, and I lost myself in the memory.

1996; Border's Bookstore coffee shop.  I have a book propped open and a cup of coffee sitting idle.  My son, four years old, sits across from me reading aloud from his  own book which we have just purchased.  I pay little heed, lost in the story of the novel which I have chosen.  Patrick continues reading, his little voice clear, his small hands holding the edges of the book's cover, his cup of cocoa forgotten.

Suddenly a movement catches my attention and I raise my eyes.  Two men and a woman stand behind my son.  They seem astonished at something -- something I missed, perhaps; I am not sure.  Guilt floods through me.  Has Patrick done or said something wrong?  What did I miss?

One of the men speaks.  Is this your child, he asks.  I feel my face scrunch with puzzlement.  Whose child would he be, but mine?  I nod.  Do you know he's reading, the man continues.  My mystification continues.  I nod again.

The woman says, How old is he? and I reply, "Four.  He'll be five in July."  I am less and less certain that I know what is happening.  Are these the truancy police?  Have we bothered them?  Did Patrick say something naughty?  What is in that book???  Patrick's voice continues, lilting, eager.  He has not noticed the conversation taking place over his head.

Finally I say to the first man who had spoken, Is something wrong? and he shakes his head.  The second man speaks then, asking me if I realized that my son could read.  My confusion deepens.  I'm oblivious, I suppose; but this is my son and yes, I tell them, I know he can read.  And he's only four, the woman remarks, as though perhaps I have forgotten.  Five in July, I repeat.

At that point Patrick gets to the end of his book.  He looks at me and then notices the people standing around him.  Were you even listening, he asks me, in that voice that children use when they already know what your answer will be.  We laugh then; and the three move on, away from me and my son, taking with them God knows what impression of a clever little boy and his mother who takes him for granted.

Twenty years later, that little boy will soon turn twenty-five and leave Evanston with an MFA in screenwriting from Northwestern University.  I've been trying to recall what book he read aloud in that coffee shop, so many years ago, but I cannot.  I wasn't really listening, it must be said.  But I am listening now.  I no longer take my son for granted.  No mother should.  Their lives might be fleeting; and they might leave us to our eternal sorrow.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

In Memory of 

JOSHUA GRIFFITH, a Mother's Son

GONE TOO SOON

Saturday Musings, 23 April 2016

Good morning,

Daylight savings time sent a stream of light through the open blind at six a.m.  I've given up on that blind.  Today I intend to measure the window and try to find a match online.  I'll order a new piece and con someone into hanging it for me.  I thought that I might repair this one, but after three or four months, I cannot pretend any longer.

In the meantime, the sun intrudes into the room earlier than I would request of it.  I stretch, and rise, and move around the room thinking about the tasks that will fill my day.  The ordinary errands of an everyday life; the chores; a trip to the cemetery; a few phone calls; a pleasant hour at the plant store.

But first: let the dog out, make coffee.  After the kettle boils for my pour-through, I trudge back upstairs with my Harvard cup and settle before the laptop, thinking about my mother and wondering if she's happy in heaven.

My mother would have liked this house.  She enjoyed wood, and character, and old things.  This place has plenty of each.  The built-in bookshelf; the cupboards in the breakfast nook; all the unpainted wood here in the upstairs; my mother would have smiled, nodded, and settled into a rocker with a book, her knitting in a holder on the floor beside her.  The television would have stayed off, or played low for my father's sake.

Mother's eyebrows would have shot clear through her forehead at the sight of my ragged sideyard and the weeds beneath the failing holly bush.  I would be asked to carry my tools down the driveway and she would sit on the old stone wall wearing worn gardening gloves, pulling weeds, singing softly while she worked.  Her legs would fold beneath her denim skirt; her arms would move rhythmically as the pile of pullings grew on the asphalt beside her feet.  She'd wear a bandanna tied around her short brown  hair.  I would fetch glasses of iced tea.  Beneath her deft ministrations, my yard would come to life.  I would not be able to keep up with her planting, her weeding, her tending, but I would spend the time sitting on a bench near her, warming myself in the glow cast by her connection to the earth.

She would hollow a well in the dirt near the downward slope of the driveway and nestle a clay birdbath into the ground.  I'd pull the hose over to where she stood and watch as she filled the vessel with water.  She'd lament the loss of the old cedar tree and cast her eyes about for somewhere to hang a bird feeder.  Her hands would raise to point and I'd follow her direction, sweeping and bagging the clippings, chasing broken pottery around the yard and gathering the shards for the trash.  The dog would find all this activity delightful, and run back and forth, yipping in her Beagle way, happy, hopeful, knowing that when the afternoon ended, my mother would take her for a walk.

When nighttime came, we'd chop carrots, onions, and potatoes for a stir-fry, and eat in my dining room, with the windows open and the cool evening wind blowing through the house.  My mother would listen to my soft mutterings, my heart-aches, my broken dreams, my shattered illusions.  I would see compassion in her luminous brown eyes and across the drawn furrows of her olive skin.  She would touch my hand and offer me a handkerchief.

Then we would look at pictures of my son, Patrick, and she would tell me that I had done well with this boy.  I would show her some of his writings, and the three guitars with their broken strings that he plays when he comes to visit.  We would stand in my breakfast nook and look at Patrick's clay hand-print hanging next to the one her baby boy, Stephen Patrick,  made fifty years ago in a kindergarten classroom.  It would be my mother's turn to shed a tear; and I would do my best to comfort her.

In the distance, outside my bedroom window, I see a tree rising tall above the others.  The shimmering light paints its leaves with gold.  It reaches towards the clouds, towards heaven, and I picture my mother seeing those same leaves from her eternal perch on a slatted wooden bench in the garden of paradise.  I find myself smiling.  I will carry that image through my day, and into evening.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 16 April 2016

Good morning,

Before I even got out of bed this morning, I grabbed my cell phone, hoping to beat my sisters Ann and Adrienne to the punch.  I texted my sister Joyce: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!  Then I scrolled over to Facebook, where she's recently started using a profile that I created for her.  I posted the same birthday message.  For good measure, I called and sang on her voice mail.

I like a good tradition -- ours is, "See who can call someone first on their birthday"!!!!

My sister Joyce and I shared a bedroom during my childhood.  She never cleaned her side of the room; I always kept mine "neat and tidy" and made my bed "tight as a drum, neat as a pin" so that our Nana could bounce a quarter off the quilt.  Joyce and I shared the sunroom for a while, with its nine windows to the outside world.  She had the half farthest from the door.  Once I braided a rope and  stretched it wall-to-wall, dividing the room in half to stake a claim to cleanliness.  That lasted until my mother pointed out that I had blocked Joyce's exit from the room.

Like everyone in our family, Joyce started working an after-school job as soon as she could.  She got a job at Kresge's, the dime store at Northland Shopping Center.  I'd walk the three or four blocks up Kinamore to sit at the soda fountain after school, until I started my own after-school job.  I would watch her waiting on customers and tell people, That's my sister.  I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

Joyce taught me how to shave my legs and wear blue eye shadow.  I adored her.  I would do anything my brother Mark told me to do because I thought he was smarter than I, but my sister Joyce could command me and I would obey out of sheer devotion.  I fetched food from the kitchen for her when she lay in bed needing sleep from working too late.  I gathered her laundry and took her turn doing dishes.  I never complained.  I adored her.

One summer Joyce found a black rock embedded in the edge of our driveway.  She called it "shiny rock" and polished it with spit and her sleeve.  She told me it might be worth thousands of dollars, and if she could get it out of the concrete, she would sell it and give the money to our mother.  So she won't cry anymore, Joyce told me.  We spent hours studying that rock, crouched on the driveway, knees bent, trying to pry it out with sticks.

Joyce worked full-time or more during college and never had enough hours to get her course-work done.  The summer before her graduation, she discovered that she lacked a required credit in Children's Literature.  She worked out a deal with the professor to do reports on 100 children's books.  She went to the bookmobile and came home with a box of kiddie lit.  We divided the stack in half.  She read 50; I read 50.  Half of  the reports were written in my careful high school penmanship.  She got an A for the class.  I've never been more proud of a grade, including when I made Law Review.

Joyce got married for the first time in 1969.  I walked in her wedding.  I wore a green dress and dangle earrings which I still have.  She had her daughter on January 29, 1977, and a million miles away in Boston, I wrote my new niece's name and birth-weight on a wall of graffiti that my roommates had in the kitchen.  Ten years later, my sister stood beside me when I got married.

We held each other through both divorces.  She holds me still.  She holds me still.

My sister Joyce tried to get me to climb into the casket we selected for our Mother.  She told the funeral guy, We want our Mom to be comfortable.  I would have done it.  I would do anything she asked.  But the salesman would not let us.  He said, Ladies, your mother will not know the difference.  Joyce told him, You don't know our mother!  We laughed so loud I nearly wet my pants, while the funeral director watched us with dismay.  Later Joyce told him that we only wanted St. Theresa of the Little Flowers in the holy cards.  Our mother's favorite saint, she explained.  He told us he would personally remove all the St. Theresa's from the pack of "assorted saints" and insure that the siblings received them.  I understood his willingness to do what Joyce asked.  I had been eagerly following her commands for three decades.

In the last three years, Joyce has faced some ugly hidden truths about the events of her life.  The process nearly killed her, but she prevailed.  She has survived.  She proved that my adoration of her has a solid foundation.  She is the bravest woman I know.  I could not do -- have not done -- the self-searching which she used to  confront her demons.  Mine lie in wait, watching for a chance to torture me, while hers have been cast into the light and shiver beneath my sister's fierce and determined glare.

Happy birthday, J-Bear.  See you tomorrow.  Rock on!

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 09 April 2016

Good morning,

Something jarred me awake shortly after midnight.  I could not decide whether I had been pulled from sleep by the jab of bruised ribs or hunger pangs.  I stood in the darkened room, bending to look through the broken slats of the blind on the north-facing window.  Porch lights stretch into the distance, across the horizon.  I cannot see the stars.

Thoughts of Arkansas rise unbidden in the silence.  I think about the many trips downward, towards the Missouri border, winding into the welcoming slopes of the Ozarks.  A perfect snippet of Ellen Gilchrist sifts itself from the morass of my memory: her description of a car floating through space and time, on a winding road in the mountains coming into Fayetteville.  I catch my breath, close my eyes, fall into the rhythm of those remembered words and the times I traveled that same road.  I feel the contours of those  miles,  eastward to Jasper and my estranged husband;  coming back to town, dogged by the lingering odor of desperation and failure.

I am a woman too familiar with that pungent scent.

I pace; I feel now that rippling burning in my legs which tells me that my brain has given over its duties to the damaged cells.  I force my body to reach, bend, contort, working the kinks.  I will my brain to take charge, to grab the lightening bolts and shoot them across the synapses.  I visualize the pitching arc, the flash of blue, the landing.  I laugh outloud at the cursedness of my writer's way of tackling any problem.

A memory slips from the recesses, darting between the bursts of light in the murky pools.  Driving to Kansas City, 1991, with Patrick nestled in the car seat.  Suddenly my body begins to shudder and I can no longer drive.  I pull off the highway; park on a road to nowhere.  I lift my sleeping infant and hold him against me.  We have no one; we are utterly alone.  My chest tightens.  A sob escapes and echoes in the little cavern where we huddle.  I cannot move.  

I sat in that car cradling my son, until a highway patrol car pulled behind me.  The officer rapped on my window.  We exchanged a few words through the lowered glass and then  I secured my child and continued my journey northwards, to the only place where I could hope to find comfort.

The highway patrolman followed me for miles.  I did not blame him.  I guessed what he had seen in my eyes.

A ripple across my shoulder tells me that I've sat too long at this computer.  In three hours the sun will pull itself into the eastern sky and I will rouse my brain with coffee.  I will dress and drive the few miles to the cemetery for a brief commune with the dead, two dear old souls who once loved me.  Then I will return home and start my spring cleaning.   But just now, here, in the dark of the room lit only by the glow of the laptop, I let the cobwebs linger, seduced by their silken caress.

 I peer into the night. A distant  shape  flickers across the glow of a streetlight, then quickly vanishes, too fleeting for me to discern its nature.  I linger for a moment longer; then close down the computer and go to summon sleep.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 02 April 2016

Good morning,

The week flew by.  I found myself managing a crisis on a case in which I am the guardian ad litem which consumed so many hours that I forgot to eat for an entire day, which my friends will find astonishing.  But I managed to cram calories into my mouth on the run late in the evening.  Then, on Thursday, I savored a stark departure from my vegetarian diet by devouring gluten-free fish and chips at Louie's Wine Dive.  (I recommend the petit sirah to pair.  The slaw needed seasoning.)  I crashed last evening, worn, weak, and wobbly.  But today dawned early and I awakened feeling if not refreshed, at least not like I'd been mowed down by a crazed uninsured non-English speaking driver in a mid-sized VW -- a sensation which I've actually experienced so I feel qualified to compare.

In a few hours, two youngish Waldo Brookside Rotarians will squire me to the 7th Annual Benefit for the American Foundation to Prevent Suicide in honor of Kenny Kauffman, hosted by another WB Rotarian, Erika Kauffman Wheeler and her husband, Jack Wheeler.  My escorts' wives will be at home with their children; we'll join fifty or so people who've donated to AFSP, one of the leading organizations tackling education, intervention, and comfort for those contemplating suicide and those surviving the self-inflicted deaths of someone whom they loved and could not save.

Like my brother Stephen.

A few weeks ago, I cleaned out a cupboard that I cannot really reach, and out fell a sheath of thin, yellowed computer paper.  I lifted it from the floor, knowing from its age and the dot-matrix print what it had to be.  Yes -- the title page:  Resurrecting Stephen.  My feeble, unfinished attempt to make sense of my baby brother's death.

As far as I know my brother only tried to kill himself twice, once by taking an overdose and once, the last, with a shotgun.  The story of my brother's despair lives on telephone lines in my memory.  Mary, can you come home, Stephen might need a kidney.  He had fallen into a coma, near death, and a virus attacked his kidney.  He awakened with swollen legs from the poison flooding his muscles and veins. He called 911.  He did not ultimately need a kidney but his legs never recovered, something I learned after he died.  He faced amputation, or at the very least, crippling decline.

At a gathering some months after his hospitalization, I teased him about that 911 call in the raunchy, brutal way that big families have of making everything a joke.  Yo, dude, really, try to kill yourself and call 911?  Makes no sense.  He did not laugh.  He said, instead, with that quiet backwards glance my brothers all use to quell nonsense, I wanted to end pain, not make it worse.

My stomach lurched.

I've written of that exchange in other blogs, on Facebook, in letters, in journals.  Each of my siblings has some ghost that lurks beneath the surface, rising when they glimpse some reminder of the youngest of the eight Corleys.  I have no leave to speak of what haunts anyone but me; and I have not shaken the feeling of having failed my little brother, in that moment, by making jokes about his agony.

In June of the year following Steve's failed attempt, my nephew Nicholas took the train to Kansas City to spend the summer with "Aunt Mary and little Boomer", his nickname for my son Patrick.  I called his mother to let him know that he had safely arrived at my bungalow in Brookside.  Gabe sobbed into the phone, Call your brother Mark, Nick's dad, Gabe's husband.  I cannot forget my demanding reply:  Kevin or Stephen? 

She would not say.  Just call Mark.  Just call Mark.

Nick and I drove to St. Louis in the morning.  I left Patrick with someone -- Katrina, maybe; or Punky Thomas; I can't recall.  I debated taking him to the funeral but did not want him to remember his Uncle Steve as ashes in a brass box, even that brass box, with a Grateful Dead skull sticker plastered on the side.  Instead of hugging my son as we listened to Steve's friends mourn him from the pulpit of my brother Frank's little parish church; instead of standing with my arms around five-year-old Patrick, in the humidity of that June St. Louis day in the cemetery by my parents' graves; I looped my arm through that of Steve's ex-wife, the mother of one of his two lost daughters.  My siblings avoided her for reasons that I have no license to relate.  But I could not; I knew he had loved her, knew he had adored her daughter, and knew that the loss of them had driven him insane.

Just as I knew that his ragged soul had been the reason for that loss.

A million film clips play in my head when I think of my brother Stephen.  From his mouth and his alone, the sound of my first name did not make me cringe.  In his eyes, I could dance -- hell, I could fly.  He saw beneath the crippled limbs; I do not think he even perceived me as the least impaired.

In another drawer, recently, I found a letter that he wrote me from New Orleans, in which he spoke of trying to make a new life.  He lasted another decade after that attempt, which clearly failed.  He could not shed his ghosts.  He let them carry him away.

When Erika told me about the benefit she started in honor of her father who committed suicide eight years ago, I never hesitated.  I bought a ticket.  In the 19 years since my brother killed himself, I have seen struggles to combat the lure of death in others whom I love; again, I have no license to tell those stories, but even being on the periphery of their agony moved me beyond reason.  In 2014, after the death of my favorite curmudgeon, after the decampment of another whom I loved, I nearly succumbed myself on one grim night, in my car, in front of the public library.  Had my friend Paula not sent her husband to find me after my phone accidentally dialed her so that she heard the wracking sobs, my wailed lament, I would not be here to write these words.

I did not know Kenny Kauffman, but I know his daughter.  I know the light in her eyes when she speaks of him; I know the grit within her, the determination that compelled her to start this benefit in his honor.  I know her grief.  I know her sorrow.  I will stand with her tonight; and each year, when she hosts the eighth annual, the ninth annual, the tenth annual, I will stand with her again.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Stephen Patrick Corley

25 December 1959 - 14 June 1997

Fare Thee Well, Fare Thee Well

I loved you more than words can tell.

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