PIECES OF THE PAST story by Tim Flannery

PIECES OF THE PAST
By Tim Flannery

July 6^th my Father Ragon Flannery died in my arms in a San Diego hospital bed. He left behind a body beaten, broken, and bruised from a decade battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He also left a legacy that’s been handed down to a family that loved and cared for him until he took his final breath.
    The Rev. as so many of his church members and friends called him was born a Kentucky hillbilly and raised on discipline compassion and bluegrass music. His mother played banjo and his sister dated Bill Monroe. It doesn’t get more bluegrass than that. He also was raised on love, and was taught to treat others with dignity and grace. Be it the man in a six hundred dollar suit, or the homeless who would come looking for a handout. He ministered at churches all over the country, but Anaheim California is where we spent twenty years, and where I grew up.
    I could talk at length about the last few years of his life. The changes that started taking place that we all noticed, and he noticed for a time too. I could tell the stories of his last grueling year, stories only caregivers understand, or believe. A year where we watched hopelessly as he slipped deeper and deeper into the black hole of Alzheimer’s. Finally surrendering we placed my Father in a home for Alzheimer’s patients, a place where professionals could try their best to help him.
    Instead of telling you about the horrors of the disease, I want to tell you about the miracles. Sure 1999 became the hardest year of my life, I cried plenty, but in the middle of all the madness there were incredible lessons, and unbelievable gifts. Spending the final days of my Fathers life with him I learned what it was like to change his diaper, to hold him up as we took baby steps, to bathe him. I gave back to him those gifts he had given me, and in doing this I felt the power of the circle of life. It would change my views forever about life, and about death.

Tim Flannery is best known to sports fans around the country from his two decades spent with the San Diego padres baseball team. Tim played with the major league team from 1979 to 1989 as an infielder. his fiery play and all-out style made him a fan favorite up until his retirement in 1989. Tim returned to the Padres as a coach in 1992 and has served as the third base coach for the past four years. Tim has played and coached in two World Series.

I’ve been in professional baseball for the last twenty years with the San Diego Padres. I played for eleven years, coached now for nine. I also am a singer-songwriter. It is said baseball is to Americans what music is to the Irish. I guess that explains some of the baseball music thing. Last baseball season during a road trip to Cincinnati I felt compelled to leave the team on an off day and travel across the river and up into the mountains of Kentucky to spend the day with my Uncle, and go see once again my Dads childhood home. I used to visit the mountain home with my Mom and Dad on family vacations years ago , but this time I took my wife and three children so the too could understand a little bit about this place. I also wanted them to be able to run through the mountains and chase the lightning bugs I had always told them about. I wanted them to churn butter by hand, and to draw water from the well. I wanted them to experience mountain life, and meet the people who made up the very fiber of who we are.
    The Flannery family settled in Owsley County Kentucky in the mid 1700’s. They were some of the first Immigrants to settle there after the long journey across the Atlantic traveling aboard the coffin ships that left from Cork Ireland. My Fathers blood is native. Celtic and Cherokee (Tsa-la-gi). And like the ones before him he too was connected to the land. I was so hungry for stories about my Dad. I asked his brothers so many questions. I knew this disease had it’s own time frame and I needed to know more about him, so I would know more about me. It wasn’t long enough but that one day made huge impressions on all of us.
    I returned home to San Diego carrying old photos, great stories, a mason jar of moonshine (mothers milk), and a lump of coal that I grabbed for no reason at all that I found up under the porch of his old home. When I went to see my Dad the next day at the nursing home I gave him the coal and said "Dad this came from your home where you grew up". He looked into my eyes and it was though a switch had been turned on. With this piece of black gold firmly planted in the palm of his hand he began telling stories I had never heard before. Stories of his childhood up on Sturgeon Creek where he would ride horseback, and smoke tobacco they had picked and rolled from their Fathers field. The moonshine his brothers gave me became better than any medicine any of his doctors had ever prescribed. Every drop brought forth memories from the past and for a moment my Dad and I would connect. He didn’t always know who I was, but that didn’t matter, I knew who he was. These pieces of the past were like magic beans that allowed us go somewhere sacred, to go to a place where time meant nothing. To hold on to moments we both knew were to be our last.
    I also found music to be another way I could enter his world, or meet him halfway. I started to write and record songs that seemed to be coming from other places. A songwriter will always tell you that a song is a gift, and when it comes you feel blessed. You feel you have been given something very special. One day I heard him sing these songs along with the recordings I had made, I couldn’t believe it! How could a man who couldn’t put two words together to communicate sing entire songs word for word? Where do these songs come from that have this power? Tom Petty once said "every song has already been written, you just have to tune yourself in to the cosmic radio station". I believe him, I also believe in the DNA thing, you know who we are. We are all made up of our crazy Cousins, wacky Aunts, and fun loving Grandpas. Our bloodlines connect us to our ancestors, and to the power, and mystery of this thing called life. "Who wrote songs like this before" I asked myself, I wasn’t sure, but when we sang them together I felt the door open slightly and inside I saw a master plan. A plan that had my Dad going elsewhere, but if these songs could connect with him, and they seemed to be coming from a different time and place, then where he was going couldn’t be that far away.
    The nursing home we put him in was only two miles from my home so we would visit daily and take him for walks. The first few months I could bring him home for a bath and a glass of the mountain moonshine. One thing about the Rev. was he loved a drink, and a party. Here he would sit in the chair by the fire and not make any sense at all, but I would put on his music, or pick the guitar and he would sing and get lost deep somewhere in his mind. A place I couldn’t go.
    I tried to learn about this disease through books, and from the stories of other caregivers living with this disease. I watched all the different Alzheimer’s patients in their different stages, and tried to prepare for what was ahead. You really can’t. Alzheimer’s is a tricky, twisted, illusive disease, and every one’s story is different. I actually felt being in the Alzheimer’s home wasn’t any crazier than being out on the streets. I mean as nutty as it could get in there around sundowner time (when the sunsets and the lighting changes, all hell breaks loose…every day) no one was shooting anyone. There wasn’t any prejudice. I mean really, what constitutes being crazy. My Dad thought he was six years old, he had come into life a child, and now was leaving as a child. Every moment I had with him I smelled him, kissed him, hugged him so tight. I did not want to forget anything about him, but I knew the time had come. He had now gone where no one could find him, and it was time now for him to die.
    July 5^th I walked into the hospital where he had been moved to die and found my Dad trying "to get out of his skin". He was tied down to keep from hurting himself anymore, or the others around him. His arms were black and blue, and it was time to comfort him with morphine so he could let go and leave us. We cried and sang and prayed that God would take him quick. That night he went through a birthing process that I saw three other times before. It was just like the contractions my wife went through when she brought my children into this world. My father’s contractions were so perfectly timed you could set a watch to them. In perfect rhythm, consistently each minute he would take two big breaths then begin his push to get out. Like the birthing process it was a long grueling night, and like the disease itself it was one last example of how when you think you cannot go anymore, the sky opens up and the light comes shining through.
    July 6^th my Mom and Sister and I sat by my Dad’s bed with our hands on him telling him to go home. We prayed for the chains that held him down to be unleashed. At 5:30 his breathing contractions became longer and his face changed, he had put on his death mask. My Mom was whispering in his ear, and then he looked at something beyond us, something we could not see. He then took one last staggered breath and was gone.
    My brothers came a short time later and we sat around him in celebration and sang four-part harmony of Amazing Grace, and shared a bottle of Irish whiskey. I don’t think the hospital staff expected this reaction but after years of what this disease had done to everyone we were in celebration of his perfect healing. We felt we had helped deliver him to the life he always was committed too.
    We were about to go home so we said our last goodbye and started for the door. The Neptune Society was to come in a few hours and pick up his body for cremation, but I felt weird just leaving him there in the bed so lifeless. I said "we can’t just leave him like this". In a moments time my Brothers and Sister took care of him and we left my Dad in a fitting tribute. A guitar was placed in his bruised arms playing high up the neck in a jazz chord, with a huge sign above his head on the wall over his bed; it read ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING! I’m sure the Rev. was laughing all the way out the door as well.