About The Generous Year
My little brother, Pacific Grove University Professor Mike Charles, died of brain cancer in Forest Grove, Oregon just as Covid hit the U.S., so maybe I got a head start on the grieving that has afflicted just about everyone I know during this pandemic.
I spent the last few weeks of his life with others who loved him, helping him die, and when I returned home the lockdowns were beginning, and I knew that being trapped inside and doing nothing was a certain recipe for depression and alcoholism. I found myself driven by an urgent desire to be with the people, and in the places, I love most. I live in a rural area, so I found ways—safely and legally—to do that as much as I could.
And I began writing these memories as a way of reaching out to the brother I had lost. One of the last things he told me was “Love is not dependent upon proximity.” I took him up on that.
Wonderview
If you’re sitting in the window seat of a jet descending into Phoenix, Arizona on a sunny day, which is most days, you can’t miss Camelback Mountain rising like a mythical beast from amidst the expansive homes, remnants of orange orchards and date palm groves, and the swimming pools scattered like sapphires across Paradise Valley, North Phoenix, and Scottsdale. Viewed from the glide path into Sky Harbor Airport, the mountain seems well-named. The sandstone head leads to a narrow granite hump and, at 2,700 feet, the tallest peak in the city. A non-conformity, geologists call it. It’s actually two separate formations joined, the granite on the hump a half-billion years older than the base sandstone underneath it and on the head. How they got together is a geological mystery.
The Loin Poodle
Startled.
That’s how many of Mike’s dozens and dozens of friends, fellow teachers, former students, and youth group members first feel when they come to visit. It’s not the hospital bed, or the smell of disinfectant, or even my brother’s appearance in these last few weeks of his life that gets to them. He can still get up, still carry on conversation, laugh, sing, gets a bath a couple times a week and is surprisingly spry for a man in hospice care.
What startles, and, occasionally scares the living shit out of our gracious visitors, are the dogs. It’s not their size or fearsome demeanor— you could fit all three of them together inside a golden retriever. But they have their weapons.