the captain

This day started off differently. I slept in and when I woke up I lay there and remembered having several dreams that included people I knew. Usually my dreams are quickly forgotten once I become fully awake but not on this day. Got up and did my regular routine and came and sat down to look through and heavily delete emails and the internet junk I have increasingly come to despise. 

A headline that caught my eye, "70s star Toni Tennille reflects on her final moments with Daryl Dragon (aka as, the captain of Captain and Tennile) who had died in 2019 same year my mom passed away. I hadn't heard that he had died but I remember them from when I was a record store manager back in those days and selling their pop albums. The further I read into the article the more familiar the story became and not because I knew of his life and not because I knew of his demise, but because his personal life as it turns out was much like my own and of his demise, he had what I know I, will not. 

These two had been married for a long time and had divorced. Of his demise, his life and her perceptions of him sounded as though she was describing me. 

"He was raised quite differently than I was," she added. "None of this is his fault."

Tennille says, "the marriage lasted for as long as it did because she was trying to fix things. I kept trying and trying and thinking I could bring this man who has so much to give into the light, I wanted him to experience the joy that I had with my very loving family."

In the end Toni Tennille had to walk away from the marriage and move on with her life and Daryl then divorced, lived alone.

"He was a difficult man. He was difficult in many ways. I loved him, but he was impossible in many ways." 

I don't believe in coincidences and feel everything we go through and experience is meant to be. The good the bad, the tough and easy, the heartaches and grief and happiness, all of it is meant for us and the meanings behind it all aren't meant to always be understood. This account of her life with this guy read eerily close to how the two loves of my own life, describe their life, with me before walking away.  

Then I wanted to know what had happened to him and how he died so I went to search and the headline just blew me away. Daryl died of Kidney failure. Yikes- another bombshell headline that stopped me in my tracks for several minutes as already his life was familiar and now his cause of death was what I too am facing. 

It's funny in an odd way how I have dealt with life since my mom passed away and finding out a year after that I have a fatal disease for which there is no cure. Is Daryl's story my own, I wonder?? Well not exactly it seems and this quote from Toni Tennille is a clue of how his last breath will be different than mine.

"I was always there for him because he really didn’t have anybody else," 

-Tennille

Since my diagnosis in 2021, I haven't really come to any reasonable terms with the future that comes with it. I'm right with God although I do check in with him frequently to make sure he's good with our deal. Death, I don't fear death much at all and I attribute the reason to being right with God and knowing I will once again be with my mom and the rest of the family. My only real fear or anxiety is, knowing that my last breath will be taken in the presence of strangers or completely alone. 

Not having someone there in the room to represent the kindness and love I have felt for and from others, that does give me a feeling of anxiety or fear, I can't describe it exactly. 

This blog has been a conversation with myself having first started as a way for my son to know who his father was unlike me having nothing to go back to with my own father to know some about him. Since I created this thing and even though there have been some twenty thousand or so who have read some of it none of which I even know who they are, today it only serves as a way to sort of have a conversation when my world is so quiet and without people. You tend to find coping mechanisms when you live a life alone and even though I prefer it this way, I feel there is an easier path I could have chosen that for me, like for Daryl's last moments, could have provided me with someone I knew, someone who loved and cared for me like he had, that perhaps eased his final breath and might have eased my own. 

"Sex is not love, sex is not intimacy," she said. "He just couldn't be affectionate, he couldn't just give me a hug. And I don't blame him because he came from a very, very difficult family."

"I loved him with all my heart," said Tennille, who is 75. "But what I was projecting on him was something he could never be."

"I remember when the young men came with the gurney to take him to hospice," she shared. "He was going to die soon. They came to take him, and I was standing there by the room door. I saw them joking around. Who knows how old they were? But I just got so mad. I went out there, and I said to them, ‘I want you to understand that this man that you are getting ready to take to hospice to die was a brilliant man. I want you to treat him with respect.’ Maybe to them, it was just some other old guy they had to pick up and take to hospice. Maybe joking was their way of dealing with what they had to do. But I made it clear they weren’t allowed to do that. I just wouldn’t let them do that to Daryl." - Tennille

Despite problems with his upbringing, despite all he wanted and tried to be but couldn't be, despite his money or fame, he loved as best he knew how, he felt love in return, and in his final moments someone was there with him to honor his meaning to another, hold his hand, and say goodbye to him. It is a wonderful thing she did for him at a time when he had no one else and it's something I wish for everyone and even for me, but God has another plan.. 

old dogs

A few nights ago I got the idea of searching the internet for the name of an old friend from decades ago and while I didn't exactly find him, I found an obituary for his father who I had also known long ago. In the obituary for his father it named survived by with the name of the friend I had looked for, his brother who I had known, and then the part where his mother had also passed away years before and his sister all that I had known and been very close to all those many years ago when I was in the process of getting through the trauma of divorce and just trying to find my way. 

As I have gotten older I've found that deaths have the effect of forcing me to look closer at my own mortality and just how quickly death can come and how instant the finality of life is at death. 

I began looking up other names from the past and even the high school FB page from the class I would have graduated in. This was a mistake for me as many names I was familiar with have died. This put me in a place of deep sadness when I realize how short a time we are actually here and how much of that time we just waste as if we can make it up tomorrow. 

I've done very well in some areas of my life and failed miserably at many others. I've spent more time trying to look back and figure out how those failures happened even while knowing there is no going back to fix that stuff and none of those opportunities to make wonderful memories has a do over option. My time spent looking back is an example of the waste a lot of us probably do that makes no sense but we do it anyway and then some of us write about it compounding the waste.

When the minutes, months and decades are pissed off, we don't get any of those back. They are gone forever and in their place lies piles of regrets we take with us for the rest of our days. I'm finding the load to be quite heavy and hard to manage these days. I need to stop beating myself up so viciously at this stage of the life I have left and find ways of not adding more weight to the regrets I already carry. 

Can't go back, can't recover what has been lost or given away, and those who have passed before me would have given anything to have had one more day and you can bet it wouldn't have been wasted looking back and drowning in grief and depression.