The Beginning and The End

It’s strange. Very strange. I don’t know how to describe my feelings when I write about LaReta, ("Lore") as a three-year-old and then see my eighty-year-old sister at the Wesley Homes Health Center.

I’m sad. Her beginnings were difficult as a child when her mother, Dorothy, died in 1939 . Lore was three years old. Dorothy’s death had repercussions the rest of Lore's life. It impacted how she was raised, her relationships with our father, Webb, and what became important to her.

To see her now on hospice care and near death also makes me very sad. I’m looking at both ends of her life at the same time. Her son, Dan, pointed out that the beginning and the end are very close together. So true.

But I’m also glad that Lore and I became close, not only as sisters, but as friends. We've had great fun together talking, eating out, going to movies, and traveling to Hawaii to see two of her children, even though we had to walk up a hill to her home in six inches of snow when we got back. We laughed about that a lot.

Lore's told me more than once she had a good life. She is very proud of her five children, knows she is loved, and can say she had one great love in her life.

On our trips back and forth to the clinic this year for her radiation treatments, Lore let me know she’s ready to die. She’s been ready for five years, having made all her preparations when she was first treated for breast cancer in 2011. She did have four years of being cancer free, but this year she was diagnosed with bone cancer, her breast cancer had metastasized. It's hard to believe that the end of 2015, she was leading her life, walking her son's dog every day and just being Lore.

A couple months ago, I wasn’t ready to let her go. I was focused on keeping her alive for as long as possible, but it was an excruciating process for Lore. Any movement at all was extremely painful in spite of all her pain medication. The meds only succeeded in causing chronic nausea.

Now seeing her comfortable and no longer in pain, I can more readily accept the inevitable. Yesterday, her words were few, She said over and over, “I love you very much.” Who could ask for more.

A New Title

The first draft of Cat Skinner is finished and the work of revision has begun. It's going slowly, but serves as a refuge for me to focus on the story in a new way and think about nothing else for a few hours at a time.

I've been doing a lot of driving to transport my sister to doctor appointments and serve as her advocate with doctors and the nursing staff at the Swedish Cancer Institute in Burien and at the Wesley Homes Health Center in Des Moines.

Since my last post in April, LaReta's health has declined. She's gone through radiation in an effort to reduce tumors close to her spine and is on a regimen of shots for cancer which has metastasized into her bones. Her oncologist said, "There is no cure, only treatment."

Unfortunately, the treatment has not eased her pain or chronic nausea which is the worst he's ever seen - and he's been in the cancer business a long time. In an effort to find out what's causing the extreme nausea aside from radiation, chemo therapy and pain pills, he's ordered a brain scan for next week.

The story of Webster Warren Bateman (the Cat Skinner) is also the story of my sister, LaReta, when she was three years old. I'm hoping and praying she'll find some comfort at age 80, in her last days. She already knows I've changed the title to LaReta's Cat Skinner, A Story of Love and Loss in the 1930's. Right now, her story is one of love from her family and our sense of loss at the prospect of her passing.

His Women

The story, Cat Skinner, is not only a story of a young man finding his way and learning what’s important in life, it’s about the women who influenced him. There were six. All of these women, whether they assumed the Bateman name in marriage or were born to it, were survivors whose strength and perseverance becomes more evident as the story goes on.

Webster Warren Bateman’s mother, Dena, is initially seen as cold and detached, preferring her boys stay out of trouble and out of sight. Once you see her life circumstances in the 1920’s, you understand her motives.

Toots, Webb’s older sister, and the oldest of six children takes on the role of mother hen to her wayward brothers and younger sisters. She fills the emotional void Dena can’t muster because she’s running a hotel and restaurant to keep the family afloat financially.

Dorothy, Webb’s first wife, is initially in love with the concept of marriage and family, but once she experiences the reality of being married to a man whose work comes first, finds her own strength to survive and make her own way.

Blanche, Webb’s youngest sister, gives birth at sixteen to a baby boy she gives up for adoption. Although she regrets her “mistake,” she longs for a relationship with a child and determines she’ll make something of herself.

Laura, Webb’s mother-in-law (Dorothy’s mother) has experienced extreme loss, the death of five of her twelve children, but fights fiercely to raise her granddaughter, LaReta.

And LaReta, Webb’s three-year-old daughter, who doesn’t understand her mother’s death, is determined to “find my mommy.”

While Cat Skinner has an end when LaReta is three-years-old, her real life story goes on as does her determination. Today, “Lore” as she nicknamed herself years ago, is nearly 81-years-old. She has survived two divorces, nervous breakdowns, breast cancer, surgeries, and is now facing the challenge of bone cancer and its treatment. But she’s focusing on the positive.

Lore has five children of whom she’s very proud, grandchildren whom she adores, a beautiful home on a hill and she’s managed her finances and her life with independence and flair. Funny, opinionated, generous, controlling and artistic, Lore is most of all carrying on the Bateman women’s legacy of strength and perseverance.   

Journey

The difference between the writer and the wannabe writer is … one writes and the other, due to choice, chance or circumstance, thinks about writing rather than getting it done. That’s where I’ve been the last couple weeks. Thinking, reading, procrastinating.

From what I’ve read and been told, that’s not unusual, but it’s also what keeps a story in one’s head and not on paper. 

I’m now in Part 3 - The Funeral of Cat Skinner: A Story of Lust, Love and Loss in the 1930’s. This is the final third of the story. Webb and his sister, Blanche, have exchanged personal information and experiences as they motor the 350 miles from Billings, Montana to Dunn Center, North Dakota on Friday, March 10, 1939. Their goal is to reach Dunn Center by 1 pm in time for Dorothy’s funeral.

The journey is more than watching the straight-as-an-arrow highway disappear beneath the spoke wheels of the 1930 Chevy. It is a journey for Webb to figure out, with the help of his sister, what kind of man he wants to be, the real thing or a wannabe. Is he going to think about what he should have done and what he should do now regarding his three-year-old daughter, LaReta, or is he going to do it.

I’ve been stuck these past few weeks trying to think my way to the end of the story. How do I pay homage to the real people who lived this story, show their perspectives, their feelings and fears, in a fictionalized version of the truth? Tonight is the first time I’ve gained a little traction. I'm letting the story tell me where it wants to go.

Hopefully, the story will reveal itself in a way that readers remain sympathetic to all the characters, including Webb, and in part, to this wannabe writer, his daughter.

Getting out of Bed

I woke up this morning thinking about a response to an exercise I gave the students in my memoir writing class yesterday. We had discussed the use of sensory description, dialogue and action in writing about a location where they used to live.

The exercise was to describe getting out of bed and moving to another room; not just telling about it, but enabling the reader of the story to see what was happening. Show don’t tell – one of the principles of writing. I’m trying to use the principle in the book I’m writing, Cat Skinner: A Story of Lust, Love and Loss in the 1930’s, but here’s my own response to yesterday’s exercise.

Light filters through my sheer curtains, teasing my eyes to open. My alarm with its incessant beeping brings more than a tease to the process. I slap it quiet for another seven minutes and roll from my left side onto my back. I love stretching like the cat beside me. Pointing my toes toward the end of the bed, my elbows are thrust toward the headboard, fists on either side of my neck. Maybe a strange way to stretch, but it frees spine and muscle kinks until my calf threatens a Charlie. Not Charlie my dog, but Charlie, my horse. I let up on the toe pointing and relax, until the muscle spasm subsides, and then return to my fetal, left side position. Just a few more minutes in this warm, toasty environment won’t hurt.

The alarm beeps again, quietly at first and then louder and louder until I can’t ignore it any longer. One more slap to shut it up. There have been times when I’ve let it go on and on because in a half sleep, dream state, I’ve imagined it was a truck backing up. This morning I got the message without a garbage truck in the room.

I slip my feet off the side of the bed, the rest of me following into an upright position, however reluctant certain body parts are to follow others. My toes slide into my slippers. I sit on the edge of the bed, turn off the alarm, stand up and shake down my older than dirt, purple, granny nightgown. Love the thing. (Girls, feel free to bury me in it. I’m sure you won’t want an open casket anyway, so no one will know the truth of the matter).

Walking to the door of my bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom is dangerous business. The same cat whose stretching I emulate, enjoys weaving in and out of my legs as I walk. While silky soft against my legs, Riley’s erratic movement keeps me guessing about where I step next. 

Charlie, my dog, is behind the gate in the utility room, just across from the bathroom. He’s deaf, but when it comes to the possibility of getting fed in the morning, he knows I’m up and with paws up on the gate, in all his Malti-poo cuteness, he whines until I give him what he wants, one-third cup of dog chow. (Of course, he wants more, but unlike me – he’s on a diet).

And so my morning begins - every morning, although now that I’m retired, I must admit, some mornings look more like Noon.

Dunn Center, North Dakota

I've never been to Dunn Center, North Dakota, but here it is.

With the assistance of Google Maps, I am able to see the road from Billings, MT northeast along old Highway 10 to Glendive, then east to Dickinson, ND. It gives me a birds eye view of the route my dad, Webster Warren Bateman, and his sister travelled on March 10, 1939 to the funeral of dad's first wife, Dorothy. From Dickinson, they turned north on Highway 22 and then east on Highway 200 to arrive - late - to the funeral at the Normanna Lutheran Church.

In this photo, you can see the location of the church. It's the grey area on the east side of Dunn Center, the right side of the photo. The grey area is parking lot. The north/south road on the far right of Dunn Center leading to the church is the same road where Webb's 1930's Chevy kicked up snow as he put the pedal to the metal (literally) the last mile to the church. Top speed for the vehicle was about 45 miles per hour the entire 350 miles from Billings.

I'm sure the church itself has been remodeled over time, but when I zoomed in I could still see a tall steeple so typical of other Lutheran churches in North Dakota.  I have a photo of the small, white wooden church in which Dorothy was confirmed, she and Webb were married, and where on that day in 1939, her funeral service was held. This aerial view shows the same church 77 years later.

March 10, 1939 was a sad day. Dorothy was only 26 years old. She would have been 27 on August 8, 1939. The novel I'm writing, Cat Skinner, A Story of Lust, Love and Loss in the 1930's is not only a story about Webb and Dorothy, but about the other women in his life: his mother Dena, sister Blanche, his three year old daughter LaReta, and another woman - my mother, Julia. It's on the road to Dunn Center and to the church, that the stories of these women unfold in surprising ways.

Stuck in the Middle

I’m in the middle, the middle of Cat Skinner, A Story of Lust, Love and Loss in the 1930’s.

At least I believe I’m in the middle. According to experts, a story has a beginning, middle and end. Since I haven’t finished the novel, I’m estimating that I’m in the middle. This is the part of the story when the dramatic arc is supposed to rise to a crisis point, then dip a bit in terms of action, then rise again to the climax and recede to the denouement. (Love that word; just fancy and French for ending or resolution).

Visualize Mt. Rainier from the Puyallup Valley. I’m climbing up the left side of the mountain and when I reach the top, there is a double scallop on the way down.

My problem? I feel I’ve plateaued on the left side of the mountain. I gained traction in Part 1 of the story which is my dad, Webb’s wild and crazy youth. Now that I’m in Part 2 – His Women, the women are more sedate and the pace of the story has slowed instead of escalated. It’s more about the characters than about action.

To get a better run at the mountain, my tendency has been to retreat to more familiar territory in chapters previously written. I review and revise, hoping that will give me inertia to keep moving toward new territory.

I asked my husband for ideas. His sage advice, certainly not unexpected from Scott was, “Add sex and violence.” Thanks, Honey Haverly. He may have something there, but I’m not sure it fits with who ‘His Women’ were.

Dena, Webb’s mother is 51 years old in this portion of the story. Blanche, Webb’s sister is almost 21 and riding with him to Dorothy’s funeral; and of course there’s Dorothy who is lying in a coffin at the end of the journey.

My mountain is certainly worth climbing, even though the challenge seems daunting. The answer I’m told - by those who know – Keep going. I’ll give that a try.