Category Archives: grief

Death and the Nebulas

Nebulas 2024 sign

The 2024 Nebula Conference was held this month in Pasadena, which is a ridiculously short flight away (Oakland—Burbank), so I bought a ticket and signed up to volunteer. Decided to pass on the banquet due to $$. (Later, I was given a dinner ticket by mistake and they refused to take it back. Free rubber chicken!)

But the week before the event was a confluence of DayJob stress, side effects from my prescription, and the death of a friend, Gabriel de Anda. Since Gabriel was one of my three oldest friends who still lived in the greater Los Angeles area, I had planned to see him. It had been a few years. Plague, political fuckwits, and contracting chaos had all contributed to the situation.

It’s a pretty poor excuse in retrospect. The constant distraction of Mundane Reality is, well, distracting. You talk with friends, or see them on Zoom, but if they’re more than a hour or two away by any sort of transit, any plans for sitting down to eat freshly grilled fish and drink pisco sour never come to fruition.

Then that bastard cancer drops by and well, bad things happen. Sometimes they happy really fast. I had just emailed Gabriel to confirm his physical address so I could drop a graduation announcement in the mail. Oh, and I was going to be in Pasadena the following weekend. Maybe we could get together.

He responded immediately. Said he’d been in the hospital for two weeks and was now home under hospice. Some kind of unknown cancer. He expected to be gone in a few days and was starting to say his goodbyes.

WTF? WTAF? I mean, he was doing edits on a story promised to a pro SF magazine. This was a totally shitty time to die. (Yes, there’s rarely a good time.)

I almost canceled my plans. Looked into a last-minute flight and hotel, but couldn’t put it together. (Migraines are a grand thing, aren’t they?) I hoped that Gabriel would still be around in a week when my brain was back online and I was within striking distance.

He wasn’t. Three days after we corresponded about literary estates and my possible contribution of an afterward to his story, his widow posted the news of his passing.

Shit.

So I went to the Nebula Conference in a weird fog. While it was truly good to see a few friends, it was also good that the panels were being streamed and recorded because I hid out in my room. A lot. I threw myself into a new flash story for a contest with a painfully short deadline. I slept more than usual.

Then I saw that my latest podcast story had dropped (“There are Worse Travel Companions” – Sudden Fictions). The story is about a man who works in an orbital crematorium. It’s a brief conversation about how we treat the remains (cremains) of loved ones.

The synchronicity wasn’t pleasant.

Fortunately, I have two dear friends, Tash and Dan, who live in the greater LA/Orange County. I saw them both last weekend. Gave them books. Talked their ears off. Hugged and was hugged in returned.

It struck me at one point that all four of us had shared only one experience: my wedding. Here’s Gabriel back on that day in 2000:

Gabriel de Anda, Esq.

I like to think his mind was filled at that moment with its usual urbane and clever thoughts. In addition to being an attorney fighting for the underdog, Gabriel was a writer of lush, poetic SF. He was one of my first students in a continuing ed course of “Writing the Fantastic” or some-such. After the class ended, we became friends, trading letters and story drafts for three decades.

Our styles were nearly opposite. He sometimes compared my writing to a zen garden, clean and focused (ha!), while his writing felt more like a swirl of ants trying to find a scent trail. My advice to him usually boiled down to Whoa there, partner. Do you really think you need three adjectives to describe that thing? Pick the best one. But Gabriel was a baroque artiste who believed in good excess. He loved Ridley Scott and Gaudí, William Gibson and secret interstellar societies, good coffee and street art.

He read everything I published (and some things I didn’t) and asked me repeatedly when was I going to write a novel. When I retire, I answered. Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to see the first draft.

Damn.

So tomorrow I will go back into the word mines and chip away at a new vein, because someone has to tell the story.

Adios mi amigo. Adios.

War and (Inner) Peace

The anthology Strange Religion launched today, the companion volume to Strange Wars (which debuted last week). I’m pleased to say that in addition to assisting with first reads (i.e., slush), I contributed one original story and one reprint to the project.

(Some of you may remember my appearance in the first volume in the Strange series, “Supply and Demand Among the Sidhe” in Strange Economics. So I’m 3/3. Huzzah!)

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“Burial Detail” is a reprint (with minor edits/updates) from The Word Count Podcast. It’s lovely to see “Burial Detail” in print, though it was published not long after the death of my university partner-in-crime, Dr. John A. Maynard. Our conversations about his military service helped inform the story.

“Jizo Rides the Bus” was a much more difficult story to write since it was the first new fiction I attempted after the death of my father, Frank Schlosser. I learned about Jizo, a bodhisattva popular in Japan, during a practice offered at the San Francisco Zen Center. Jizo is the patron of travelers and children who die before reaching adulthood. An unusual bodhisattva, Jizo vowed to avoid Nirvana until he could accompany all beings to safety, even those trapped in the hell realms.

Statues of Jizo are common in Japan, especially in graveyards, and are often decorated with red hats and scarves, since the color is often associated with protection from evil.

After I completed the practice period, I decided that Jizo would make an excellent POV character for a story about grief and samsara set in Silicon Valley. I hope you enjoy it.

For the next few days (May 7-11) Strange Religion is available as a free Kindle download. Please have a look. It’s a big volume with a lot of ideas.

Grief is a ninja

Today was tough.

I had serious issues on a financial website that absolutely didn’t want to work with my security software even though it was just freaking fine yesterday. Took me an hour to resolve the problem and download the docs I needed for my taxes — just to learn that I wouldn’t get the deduction.

Then I spent another 90 minutes, plus two phone calls, trying to get through a government site so I could get the appropriate ID number to submit paperwork to an insurance company for my wife’s corporation.

DayJob was… well, DayJob. Three reminders from the Powers That Be to submit our timesheets appropriately and please reply to this email by 3 PM saying you read and understood all the minutia contained therein.

So when the cold rains starting whipping the house I thought I would take a break and walk to the post office to drop off an important letter. Almost lost my umbrella. Dropped the letter (missed the puddle, though).

On the way home, umbrella folded, rain soaking my pandemic mask, I was struck by a craving for an overly sweet Hot Butter Rum. Like my Dad sometimes made for me when I was sick. It probably wasn’t very good (made from a grainy batter in a jar, I recall) but in that moment, all I wanted was a fire, and a hot drink.

And my father.

The grief darted out from its hiding place and punched me in the solar plexus, then disappeared into the gray. I had almost forgotten it was there.

So I’m calling it a night. Going to make chicken soup, read a good book, and stare into the fire. I don’t have any rum but I have my spouse and several warm kitties.

Be good to each other.

Father’s Day gift, delayed

My father passed away a week ago. In the interim, the wildfires have produced orange skies and hazardous air. Ash falls everywhere, and even taking walks seems like a chore.

We also passed the six-month mark in our Sheltering in Place, which means all the easy things are done. We’ve baked and cooked and binge-watched. We’ve also worked our usual schedule.

But things are a tad easier. I don’t look at my emails, wondering what’s changed. No more texts comparing my father’s cognitive state between one visit and the next. No more tracking the credit cards to make sure my mother isn’t being billed for some service he ordered last year and forgot to cancel.

The grief is there. I dust around it as I clean. I add it to the laundry with the rags. I check it off the shopping list. I add stamps to it as I forward mail to my daughter at college.

When I couldn’t check the air quality app anymore, I started picking up the garage. I was organizing the art supplies and vacuuming last week when my father hit his last stretch. I left things half-finished, including an unopened bathroom faucet.

We had replaced the fixtures in the master bath about 10 years after fighting an incursion of black mold. The faucet was decent, but not great. The water always had a metallic taste. So I asked for a new one for Father’s Day, something expensive and German that should outlast the house. And now I finally unboxed it.

It was hard to fold myself into the space between the sink and the shower, and harder still to unscrew the old connections. The whole process took twice as long as predicted. (I think I pulled a muscle as well.)

My father used to do basic handyman stuff around the house, and it usually had this “good enough” quality. He was impatient, and aligning edges and hiding the screws wasn’t high on his list. I’m not terribly handy myself, although I have the benefit of YouTube and occasional advice from paid professionals (“Didn’t you ground that switch? What’s wrong with you?!”).

At the end of the day, I had a beautiful chrome faucet that produces a strong flow while saving water. And the water is clean and refreshing.

Happy Father’s Day to me. Miss you.

Hospice 10: And Then There Were None

Schlosser Clan, circa 1946

I spoke to my father on the phone briefly last Sunday. We were driving back from the store, on a hot, dusty afternoon. I’d heard that he was slipping, and I had just returned from Chicago, wondering when I might see him again. (I was waiting on the results of a COVID test — airports, y’all.)

He had trouble following the conversation. His speech was halting, weak. I told him that we’d set up our child at college and she was having a good time, despite the quarantine. Her roommate was a great match, at least so far. He was pleased to hear that.

When I asked about him, he said he was tired of sitting on his ass. Just tired.

Two days later, I got word that my father was no longer able to swallow, so he couldn’t take his pain medication. I contacted hospice and they assured me that they would switch him over to sublingual morphine. Then after sitting with that image for a few minutes, I packed an overnight bag and my work laptop.

The drive down wasn’t fast: enough people were back at the office that traffic in Silicon Valley felt more like pre-pandemic times. Once I escaped San Jose, I grabbed dinner, and drove hard. My soundtrack was old Prog rock, a Tom Papas comedy special, and a welcome phone call from my best friend, Dan.

I’d left a message on Dan’s voicemail, and the transcription read, “My father is going shopping.” What I actually said was I thought my father was getting ready to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” We had a good laugh over the foibles of technology.

Santa Maria was quiet at 9:15 pm, and I settled into a spare room. Woke up at 1:30 am, and watched my monkey brain as it jumped through the canopy of my thoughts. Fell back asleep around 3 (?).

The alarm woke me at 6:15, and I stumbled into the kitchen to make strong tea. Before I could finish, the phone rang. Frank had died during the night. The oldest member of the clan. The last child of John and Ethel Schlosser.

Off I went to Hillview to meet with the nurse. In the few weeks since I’d last seen him, my father had shrunken in on himself. He was a corpse: thin, pale, silent.

The temporary room where they’d moved him was nearly bare: only a few photographs on the wall. No birthday cards, no drawings. It might have been a hotel room, or a doctor’s office.

The funeral home sent two attendants about an hour later. They were very solicitous and respectful. They made sure I knew what they were doing at every step, and gave me a choice to stay or wait outside. I stayed, although I had to back into the backroom to give them room to maneuver the gurney.

Their vehicle was a white cargo van. As they left, an Amazon truck passed in the opposite direction, its gray paint job an imperfect mirror of the funeral vehicle. Yin and yang. Pick up and delivery.

Later in the morning, we called the funeral home and authorized the cremation for later this week. The skies are so filled with ash, would anyone notice?

Rest, father. We’ll take it from here.

Hospice 9: On the outside, looking in

Normally, members of the immediate family can sit with a resident during hospice. Due to the pandemic, though, they limited that to one person.

When two staff members at my father’s facility recently tested positive for COVID-19 virus, they cut in-person visits. So I sat outside Frank’s room, along with my wife and daughter. My daughter was scheduled to leave for college in two weeks (where she would undergo her own quarantine before the fall semester), and she wanted to have a final visit with her grandfather.

It was difficult. He managed to position himself close to the window so he could see and hear us. The staff made him wear a mask (even if it slipped).

It’s been almost two months since my father has received a blood transfusion, with a commensurate drop in his blood oxygenation. That translates into even more pronounced cognitive decline and paranoia.

On this visit, he was convinced that “the military” owed him a chunk of money, a reward for keeping his unit expenses under budget. He didn’t have any documentation, but he had a distinct memory of a photo of a number of American soldiers by a river, carrying what might have been German swag.

I assured him that I was very clear on his financial picture, and there were no loose ends with the VA. His financial advisor had all the accounts, and they were invested in boring, conservative funds. Don’t worry about it. (Later, I realized he was conflating one of the many WWII documentaries he’d watched on the History Channel with his never-ending dream to leave behind a sizable inheritance for his family.)

Still, he insisted. Fortunately, my wife interrupted, and reminded Frank that his granddaughter was leaving for college soon. Perhaps we could talk about that?

And we did. He remarked on her “crazy pink” hair, the opportunities of Chicago, and his belief that she would be successful.

It was, on the whole, a good visit, but one that ended in tears all around.

P.S. Two days later, when I was back home, my father called me. This was a good sign, I thought. He’s using his mobile phone again.

“Can I ask you a favor?”

Sure.

“Do you have your mother’s phone number?”

He was asking me for the landline number, which is the first speed dial on his mobile.

The number hasn’t changed in half a century. He called it every day from the office to say he was leaving. He called it from the hospital when he was under psychiatric observation. And he asked the staff at the assisted living facility to call that number when he couldn’t find his phone.

I took a deep breath and gave it to him.

Death has two speeds

My experience of Death falls into two general categories: quick and slow. There never seems to be a middle ground, a saunter. You either see it coming and have time to prepare (and fret and worry), or bang! It’s right there, and you deal with it mostly in the rearview mirror.

My father is fading. He’s nearly 91 years old, and it’s clear to anyone with even a modicum of medical training that he’s not long for this life. To his credit, he is the last survivor of 9 (!) siblings, and has set a new endurance record for his bloodline.

It’s no small feat to push yourself into nine decades; it’s even more impressive when you consider the time he lived — standards for healthcare were much lower, nutrition was worse, the air pollution in most major cities was worse, and seat belts and antibiotics  and yoga classes didn’t exist.

My father has survived a tour as a paratrooper during the latter part of WW2, 60 years of tobacco use, 70+ years of drinking, a bout of cancer, lifelong anxiety, depression, lack of exercise, and the Catholic church. But his main spring is winding down. Mentally and physically, he’s batting in the bottom half of the ninth inning.

The very languid approach of death has given the family a lot of time — perhaps too much — to deal with the challenges of his later  life care. Thus far, he has stayed at home but at a very high cost, physically and emotionally. The last few years have been an exercise in simmering grief.

Very soon I expect to get the phone call that tells me that he’s passed, or is in the hospital, attached to expensive machines trying to eke out another few weeks of life. Then I’ll put the grieving process into full speed, and deal with it.

But it’s really tiring.

Karl and Frank

Frank’s 90th Birthday

Then there’s the quick death. The unexpected fatality. The oh-shit-I-just-talked-to-them-yesterday moment.

I met Chris Cornell at a writing workshop in Texas, and was delighted to discover that he lived only one town over. I enjoyed his writing, his humor, his gentleness, and his generosity. When he started a publishing company and invited me to submit a story to a new anthology, I was happy to participate. It was a great experience and I looked forward to future collaborations.

I last saw Chris two weeks ago at the Nebula Awards conference in southern California. He was happy and full of life.

He died on Monday night. I got the news on Tuesday. Apparently, he was riding the local transit (BART) and just keeled over.

I realize there are many invisible health issues — high-blood pressure, for example, but I hadn’t heard anything and he was still relatively young. There were decades of stories waiting to come out.

Death, however, came swiftly for Chris, and now his family and many friends are heartbroken, shattered.  There is a collective shock and disbelief that has only begun to settle into grief.

I’m still processing, of course. But I do know there will be one less glass raised at our next writing getaway.

Just as there will be one less place set at my parents’  table in the near future.

Fast or slow, Death comes, so keep your eyes open. Hug your loved ones.

Raise a glass.

Chris reading from ABANDONED PLACES at Book Passage, San Francisco

karl reading in San Francisco

Launch of ABANDONED PLACES anthology