Remembering Ceilee

As I reported in my previous blog, my son, Ceilee, died Aug 5. He was 43. While many family and friends were impacted by his death, I have been thinking mostly about Annie (his mother), Taivyn (his 16-year-old daughter), Connor (his 13-year-old son), and myself.

Here is a photo of Annie, Connor, Taivyn, and Ceilee taken three years ago, during a vastly different, happier August, when all of us were together at a road house on Lake Chautauqua in western NY (where Annie's family shares rights to a lakeside cottage):

After the tide of life ebbed from Ceilee early this August, I have spent much of the month strolling somberly along the agate beach he left behind, randomly picking up and savoring some of the bright stones left there. This sharing highlights some of the mementos that caught my eye and that I hold dear.

Though it is by no means the sum of his life, these are nonetheless fragments of a father’s precious memories, the articulation of which has helped me process my grief.

• Holding his vernix-smeared warm body on my belly right after being born, while Annie continued to labor to deliver the placenta. All of us were exhausted from being up all night, having concentrated on the birth. It was a cold sunny day in January, and I was aglow in the miracle of new life. 

• At his second birthday, we had a party at Sandhill and some of our friends with young children (his peers) were in attendance and I wanted Ceilee to show off what he knew by asking him to identify body parts. With an unfamiliar audience, however, he got shy—and was unwilling to perform. At first I was frustrated, and then it dawned on me how ridiculous I was being. Children are not trained seals.

• As Ceilee was homeschooled until he went to public high school (mainly for social reasons), we were able to do a good deal of traveling together. The first time that just the two us hit the road, was right as he turned three. He and I journeyed by train to Duluth, to visit my good friends from college, Tony & Susan, and their daughter, Britta, who was about Ceilee’s age. I recall revealing to a stranger as we changed trains in St Paul that it was my son's birthday and he spontaneously gave Ceilee a quarter.

Susan and I (we got together in 2015, after Tony died in 2004, and Yana dropped me in 2015) recalled a particular moment of that visit, when Ceilee and Britta decided to set up a play farm. Ceilee suddenly stopped everything to first establish which way was north. While such a directional obsession is somewhat weird in a three-year-old, this turned out to be valuable later on when he rode shotgun on long car trips and I depended on him to read maps and help with directions. 

• Later that year, I took a solo vacation to Alaska for 17 days, to visit another college friend (Peg Kehrer) in Juneau. It was the longest I’d ever been away from my son up to that point, and I recall walking around the farm when I returned (in August) and he accompanied me, showing me the gardens (and all the ripening tomatoes). I have a particular image of his turning his head up to investigate the drooping seed head of a sunflower plant growing on the border of the garden, to see if it had a fragrance. It was such a joy to see his curiosity about Nature.

• When he was five, Ann took him into the county library for reading hour, to increase his contact with other young kids. The concept was that different businessmen and town officials would volunteer to read a story to the children, and that day it was the turn of a local bank president. He had selected a book about pandas, and began his session by asking any of the youngsters gathered around if they knew anything about pandas. One girl enthusiastically piped up, “Pandas are a kind of bear,” to which the bank president responded, “That’s right.”

Ceilee raised his hand at that point, and when called upon, informed the president, “Actually, scientists think pandas are more closely related to raccoons.” You could have heard a pin drop. Suddenly the president realized he was in over his head discussing evolution with a 5-year-old, and hastily ended the Q&A and retreated to the safety of reading the book. Parents sitting in the back of the room, aware of the president’s acute embarrassment, and were stuffing their hands in the mouths to keep from howling with laughter.

What the president was unaware of was that we had a subscription to National Geographic Zoo Books, a periodical devoted to acquainting children with exotic animals and we had just read about pandas. Oops. Bad luck for the president.

• Both of my kids (Ceilee and his younger sister, Jo) were born at Sandhill Farm, where the community had made a conscious decision to not have a television. As part of the deal, I taught both my kids to read, and spent an enormous amount of time reading aloud to both of them, to instill in them a love of books. I’m talking about tens of thousands of pages each, and those hours together were special.

• I recall coming home from a road trip when he was still quite young (maybe 6?) and his greeting me with a new word he’d learned, correctly guessing that I may not know it: crepuscular. He was so proud of reversing the flow of our interactive learning—which from that point forward, it was never again a one-way street.

• From age 7 onward he would often accompany me to community network meetings. We would have the travel time together—often going by car or train. He understood that he would have only limited access to me while I was working but all of me when we were en route, and it pleased me that he had a personal experience of what his father did—a connection I never had with my father.

One time, when he was 8, we were at an FIC board meeting at Shannon Farm in Afton VA. He often chose to sit in on the meetings, even though he never spoke, nor was he expected to. People found it a bit unnerving that an 8-year-old had the discipline and attention span to pull that off, but there we were.

At the closing circle (after three days of meetings), we did a round of appreciation where each person took a turn saying something they appreciated about the person in the spotlight, As it happened, our host, Dan Questenberry, was sitting to Ceilee’s left, and thus was the first speak when it was Ceilee’s turn to receive. Looking appreciatively at my son, Dan began, “Oh good, I get to start you off… “ 

Because of the rotation we used for this exercise, Dan wasn’t in the spotlight until an hour later, right at the end, and Ceilee was the last person to speak. Turning to him, Ceilee began, “Oh good, I get to finish you off.”

He’d been holding onto that rejoinder for an hour, waiting for the right moment. Dan’s partner, Jenny, came up to me afterwards and observed, “Ceilee’s a midget, right?” She couldn’t imagine an 8-year-old with that kind of presence and sense of timing. 

• A key feature of Ceilee’s early teen years was doing Taekwondo once weekly. It was eye-opening for Annie and me to see him accept a level of discipline from his instructors that he railed against with his parents. It has heartening to see him grow up in that way. The key, I suppose, was that he chose Taekwondo, rather than had it imposed upon him.

• I have many memories of being in Nature with Ceilee. Mostly canoeing, but there was a good deal of backpacking interspersed in there. Once, when we were canoeing in northern Manitoba I lost my only pair of glasses in an ill-advised attempt to shoot a rapids. While we survived the dunking just fine, Ceilee had to help me read the road signs on the drive home.

Another time we did a trip that traversed parts of the Nelson, Hayes, and Echimamish Rivers, one of the key features of which was a nasty 4-mile portage—the longest I ever did. Sorting all of our gear (canoe included) into five units for portaging, we had to cover 32 miles between us to schlep everything across (five trips forward when we were loaded, and three backwards, empty-handed). The rhythm of this was to carry one unit as far as you could, and then rest by walking backward until you reached the first unit you could handle, which you then picked up and started forward again. It took us about 5 hours all told and Ceilee never complained once.

Another time, we backpacked a segment and a half of the Pacific Crest Trail one June, from Castle Crags to Old Station in northern California. We got off the southbound Coast Starlight at the Dunsmuir stop, and hitched to Redding to rejoin the train at the end of our trek. We had shipped all our non-camping luggage to the Bay Area before boarding the train in Seattle (where I had been doing some community networking), and caught up with it again in Berkeley. Incredibly, we only encountered 10 people on the trail over the course of 11 days in June—peak hiking season.

One canoe trip we laid out an ambitious circle route in northern Saskatchewan, but realized one-third of the way into the trip that we had bitten off too much, and would need to cut it short. After arriving at the bottom of Reindeer Lake, I left Ceilee bivouacked in the village of Southend, and hitched back to our car. It took me 24 hours to get there and back, as I had to travel the equivalent of Chicago to Washington DC (because the roads that far north are not nearly as direct or numerous as the water routes). By the time I’d returned he’d made friends with a number of the indigenous children.

Hiking once in the Olympic National Park in Washington, I have a memory of urging Ceilee to resist the temptation to walk closer to a mama bear to get a better camera angle. Happily, he never got between mama and her cub. 

• Annie and I both struggled mightily when it came to buying Ceilee clothes. While Annie and I were never much into fashion, Ceilee, naturally enough for a teenager, often wanted something more stylish, and the battles were a strain on all of us. Finally, we hit on an elegant solution. We created an annual clothing allowance for Ceilee, and gave him free rein over managing it. If he wanted to blow one-fourth of his budget on a pair of Air Jordans, that was his call—just don’t come back to us asking for more money. And it worked!

• I visited Ceilee on campus seven times during his undergraduate days at Amherst College, where, among other things, he taught me beer pong (which, for some reason, was called “Beirut” at the time). All that practice paid off during graduation weekend, when he and I formed a Dad-and-Son team that went undefeated.

• In the spring of his senior year, we made it a point to attend a Yankee-Red Sox game at iconic Fenway Park. We both loved sports, and baseball was my first love. It was a proud papa moment for me when, years later, Ceilee confided that he enjoyed going to baseball games twice as much with me as with his friends, because I could illuminate subtleties of the game that most fans miss (like the third baseman dropping back to play deeper when there were two strikes on the batter).

• As an adult, Ceilee and I shared some political views, but not all. I was a liberal Democrat, and he was a libertarian. While we frequently disagreed about the proper role of government—sometimes with animation—we both worked hard to never let that shake the foundations of our love, something I failed to accomplish with my Republican father.

• When my good friend Geoph Kozeny was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, I traveled to the Bay Area to be with him toward the end, and to help him sort out his estate. While there, Ceilee visited to say good-bye to someone who was a regular feature of his growing up at Sandhill (Geoph would visit Sandhill the week between Christmas and New Year’s every year). It was a poignant connection. On the one hand, Geoph was dying. On the other, I recall rendezvousing with Ceilee at the Ashby BART stop after he landed at SFO, and then sitting at the bar at nearby Kirala—one of my favorite Japanese restaurants, where he revealed that he and Tosca were pregnant with Taivyn. The wheel of life.

• I first became aware that drugs were impacting Ceilee’s life when I visited him at his rental house in the suburbs of St Louis to watch the 2013 Super Bowl. Tosca (his wife) had struggled with drugs as a teenager and had recently relapsed. Less clear was how much Ceilee might have been doing drugs with her. He went into a depressive spiral after getting Tosca into rehab, and seeing his family falling apart. Once Tosca got out of rehab (in Los Angeles), she chose to stay there rather than return to Missouri, and Ceilee moved out there with the kids to bring everyone together and attempt to rebuild the family. While Tosca was clear she was happy to co-parent with Ceilee, she didn’t want to continue as intimate partners and that rejection was hard for him. 

For the next decade—right up until his death—Ceilee struggled to right the ship. Sometimes things went better and sometimes not. While I would visit him as much as I could, I never picked up on his doing drugs when I was with him. But it’s also true that I am not skilled at seeing the signs and he never admitted to having a drug habit—even though Annie and I explicitly asked.

During the past decade, Annie and I both anguished over how much to support our son—what was giving him chances to dig himself out of a hole, and what was enabling? Because of the exhaustion associated with being in that state of unknowing, and witnessing his constant state of struggle, there was part of me that felt relief when he died, because the struggle was over. To be clear, this in no way diminishes my overwhelming sense of loss, or the sadness I feel for Annie, Taivyn, and Connor—those of us he left behind.

• I last saw Ceilee in April, when he visited Susan and me in Duluth for 6 days. Among other things he tightened the handrails along the stairs to the basement and the second story. Today, I think of him every time I use the stairs, which is many times daily.