Sempervirens

“So…where are we going?”

“Coon Rapids.”

“I see.”  My dad pulled out of the driveway, the back of the van empty, just as I’d asked.  A few minutes later: “Dare I even ask what we’re picking up?”

“Nope,” I said. “Secret.”

Jack grinned.  I’d pulled stunts like this before.  Half an hour later, we rolled into the receiving docks at the freight yard.  After a bit of paperwork, a forklift came from the warehouse with a shipping palette from California.  Strapped to the palette was a tangle of roots and a massive slab of redwood burl.  My dining room table in the rough.

Oh, how he smiled.

My dad always loved wood, but redwood had a special place in his heart.  Deservedly so.  The facts alone are impressive.  Did you know that redwood roots blend and intertwine with their neighbors so much that redwood forests are effectively a single organism?  That most of the time they only drink the morning fog, despite being some of the largest living things on earth?  That they can survive for more than two thousand years?  That there are trees you can visit—now, today—that are older than the Roman Empire?  It’s true.

But even more true is the feeling of being in their presence.  One January, my dad and I went for a walk through the old-growth redwoods in Henry Cowell’s state park.  Mist coming down.  Except for the trees—wide as houses, tall as skyscrapers—we were alone.  And that’s when the feeling descends.  Of setting foot among ancient sentinels, who began their watch long before you and will continue long after.  Of gigantic silence.  Of deep time.  I felt so small in that moment.  I felt so immense.  My dad gave voice to that feeling in one of my favorite songs: “Sequoia Sempervirens.”  It’s the Latin name for the coastal redwood and literally means “always living.”  Redwoods die, of course.  They fall over.  They burn.  But left to their own devices, without interference, they’ll live forever.  A redwood’s spirit is immortal.

My dad and I loaded the redwood burl into the van and drove home.  Over the coming weeks, we sanded, shaped, brushed, and polished until it shone like living flame.

– Peter

Jack’s Memorial Fund & Celebration

Jack was an extraordinary person who deserves an extraordinary celebration of his life.  We don’t have the energy to do that right now, but later we will.  Jack’s memorial will be on Saturday, May 6th at St. Joan of Arc Church (venue switched from Plymouth Church to better accommodate our audio and video needs).  More details in the coming weeks.

Many of you have asked what you can do to help.  Frankly, one of the big needs right now is financial.  Beyond the significant medical bills Jack incurred in the ICU, Nancy no longer has an income and can’t work because of her MS.  This is hugely stressful.  If you’d like to help ease the financial burden, you can do that here:

https://www.gofundme.com/jack-pearson-memorial-fund

If you’d rather mail a check, here’s the address:

Nancy Pearson
4533 16th Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55407

– Peter

Jack Pearson: 1953–2017

One of my dad’s musical heroes was the banjo player John Hartford.  John was a true original.  In a bluegrass world obsessed with tradition, John broke new ground relentlessly.  In fact, the opening and closing tracks of Jack’s first album, “The Bluegrass Gospel,” were a direct homage to John’s legendary recording “Aereo-Plain” (which also inspired me to pick up the banjo myself, years later).  Despite his success, John spent part of every year as a steamboat captain, just because he loved rivers.  The Mississippi, The Illinois, The Ohio—all of them flowed through his songs as mystical, muddy metaphors.  Two days ago, one of my dad’s friends quietly dropped off a banjo practice board, meant to help his fingerpicking as he recovered.  At first I thought the friend had signed it, but as I looked closer, I read the writing true: Thanks for all the help. – John Hartford

John and Jack also had something else in common: They both had lymphoma.  John died when he was only 63.  And today, high atop the Mississippi river bluffs in a room surrounded by his friends and family, so did my dad.

The day of reckoning arrived last night.  After intense strategizing for a new kind of chemo, the doctors discovered internal bleeding within Jack’s abdomen, an effect of the vicious strain of cancer that ravaged his body.  He was too fragile for any further treatment.  There was nothing more we could do.  So, we made the decision to keep him on medical support through the night, come back in the morning, and let him go.

Cancer is a nightmare.  These updates have been filled with our hope and desperation as Jack’s body betrayed itself at breathtaking speed, despite continuous care from some of the best specialists in the world.  That’s not what you should remember.  Instead, you should remember this.

This morning, we squeezed into his room, his closest friends and family.  The machines were cleared away, and after an agonizing struggle, Jack was resting.  Not in pain.  Peaceful.  And we played music.  For two hours, we listened to our favorite Jack songs, swapping stories, reminiscing, and singing him home.  He was wearing his rainbow glasses, and his favorite plaid shirt and bright yellow suspenders were laid on top of him.  The banjo he made was nearby.  The agate we melted out of the snow together.  Nancy and Kari were holding his hands.  And in the midst of it all, with all of us surrounding him, loving him, his exit was so quiet that most of us didn’t even notice.  Looking back, it was during “A Song To Make Mister Rogers Smile.”  I don’t know exactly when it happened, but the last words Jack heard on this earth may well have been these:

If God’s like Mister Rogers
I will not be afraid to die
I’ll dance right up to those pearly gates
And here’s the reason why
I know I’ll be a neighbor
With nothing I need to hide

And then he slipped away.  And the music kept going.

– Peter

Pancakes: A Guided Meditation

Imagine something with me.  You’re about to make pancakes.  Delicious, buttermilk pancakes.  Mmmmm.

First, you take out your favorite bowl.  You crack some eggs, add the buttermilk, oil, and vanilla.  Then you mix together the dry ingredients.  Flour.  Baking soda.  Baking powder.  Salt.  You add it to the bowl and whisk it all together.  The batter is light and fluffy.  Perfect.

Then you take out your lefse griddle.  When it’s good and hot, you spoon out the batter.  The pancakes are starting to bubble.  You flip them.  They smell absolutely incredible.

The pancakes are done!  You put them on a plate with your spatula.  You spread some butter on them and cover them with maple syrup.  These are the best pancakes you’ve ever made.  And now they’re ready to eat.

And now, dear reader, I will tell you something truly amazing.  If you love pancakes as much as Jack does, you had a physical response to that story.  Specifically, your pyloric sphincter just opened.  It’s the gateway between your stomach and your intestines, and you have to get past it to put in a feeding tube.  When the nurse was having trouble, she asked if Jack had a favorite food.  “Pancakes!” Kari said.  And then my mom improvised something like what you just read, and at the very end—voila!—the gateway opened.  The nurse said that trick only works for a few people.  Surprising no one, Jack is one of them.  In the good news column, he can still comprehend stories even though he’s not responding much.

Jack also switched to 4-hour dialysis today from the continuous stuff.  He won’t be tethered to the room in the same way now, which opens up different treatment options.  Another good thing.

However, Jack is still at sea.  He hasn’t woken up yet, so he had a late-night MRI to make sure that there weren’t extenuating circumstances beyond the chemical cocktail (the cancer had spread to his brain or spine, a nerve is being pinched, etc.).  We’ll know more from radiology tomorrow.

And also, looming over everything, is this: We don’t know whether Jack’s shock recovery is moving fast enough to beat the cancer.  This lymphoma is aggressive, and every day they can’t treat it at full strength is another day it can grow and advance.  How much?  We don’t know yet.  Maybe the treatments so far have been enough to slow it.  Maybe not.  At some point we’ll find out, and that will be a day of reckoning.  For now, we’re blanketing Jack in as much love and music as we can, staying at the hospital as much as we can bear, resting as much as possible, and keeping our bellies full.  Basic, human things.  I still have the leftover chocolate chip pancakes I made for my dad the morning he went to the hospital.  A lifetime ago.  He only had the strength to eat one.  Maybe I’ll have them for breakfast.  I hope they’re still good.

– Peter

The Ballad of Jack and Emma

In 1878, my dad’s great-grandmother, Emma Carlotta, came to the United States on a ship from Sweden.  Her father was a harsh sea captain, so she figured she’d take her chances across the Atlantic.  She’d heard of a place called “Chicago” where they had relatives and knew she had to go somewhere called “New York” to get there.  So, she waited until her father was away on a voyage, booked passage on a ship, and decided to travel alone.  She was fifteen years old.

As with many voyages in those days, things went terribly, terribly wrong.  A hurricane blew them hundreds of miles to the south and the ship sat for weeks in the doldrums without a breath of wind.  By the time they finally made port, they were months behind schedule.  What’s more, they didn’t even land in New York.  They landed in a city Emma had never even heard of, didn’t even know existed.  New Orleans.  She finally made her way north, married a woodworker named Nels Pearson, and never ventured more than eight miles from home for the rest of her days.

In many ways, Jack is on a calamitous trans-Atlantic voyage of his own.  After coming into the hospital with fever and fatigue eleven days ago, he’s been blown wildly off course, adrift on an ocean of chemicals and disease.  Right now, he’s in the doldrums.  His vitals are fairly strong and stable, but the paralysis of his vocal cords means he can’t come off the ventilator unless something changes.  The internal medicine doctors may end up putting in a temporary tracheostomy—an incision further down the windpipe that lets air in while giving the vocal cords a break from the aggravation of the ventilator.  We’re not quite there yet, but it’s a possibility.  The ear, nose, and throat docs are going to weigh in soon with options.

Not everything is stagnant, though.  Jack is going off continuous dialysis tomorrow and switching to a kind that’s only four hours a day.  Hooray!  This will allow him to be wheeled around and start physical therapy.  He still hasn’t woken from his delirious slumber (which is somewhat concerning), but the neurology folks think it’s probably because his liver and kidneys are processing medication much slower than they normally would, which leaves Jack submerged in a mind-altering soup of narcotics and chemotherapy.  (Note to self: Do not order that at a restaurant.)  This takes time to surface from.  In honor of Jack’s long journey at sea, I’m giving you the song he wrote for Emma, who made it back more than a hundred years before.  Let’s hope it runs in the family.

– Peter

(Dad, I know this is another one of those demo recordings and your voice cracks a little and there’s someone hammering in the background or whatever, but you’ll just have to deal with it, okay?  Geez.  Get a grip.)

Clean Air Lullaby

Sing sweet, Mother Earth, breathe deep, Father Sky
And rock me to sleep with a clean air lullaby

The U of M Medical Center is overrun with wild turkeys.  Seriously.  I saw fourteen of them as I was walking down towards the Mississippi River, which is pretty low—twenty is more usual.  They stepped delicately up the walking path, pecking at the exposed skirt of grass and jousting each other for the choicest frozen bits.  Perfectly at peace in the iron jaws of January.  May we all be so lucky.

While I was down by the river, I got a call from Dawn, the ICU nurse.  “We’re intubating again,” she said. “I didn’t want you to be surprised when you came back.”

Honestly, I wasn’t surprised.  Sad, but not surprised.  Jack had a tough night last night.  Despite maintaining his blood oxygen levels, his breathing was labored and the respiratory nurses were particularly concerned that he couldn’t cough or gag, which is the bare minimum for being off the vent.  For a man who’s on nausea-inducing chemo drugs, the risk was just too great.  If you vomit and can’t clear your airways, you immediately suck it down into your lungs, which is about as catastrophic as you’d expect.  They’d given him a few hours to rally, but to no avail—his vocal cords weren’t working right now and he was just too weak.  So, back on the ventilator he went.  His liver and kidneys were still going in the right direction, thank God, but now he needed to gather strength.  Somehow.

When your loved one is in trouble, they follow you around more than normal.  After I hung up the phone, I found a bright, banded agate sticking out of the asphalt path.  I desperately wanted to show it to my dad.  Years ago, I’d found an even bigger one frozen into the ground by the Minnehaha creek, and he’d been so excited that he went home and came back with a thermos of boiling water so that we could melt it out.  Alas, this new agate was stuck, caught by something stronger than I had the tools for.  Kind of like him.

A few people have mentioned that they’d like to stop by the hospital, but were afraid of being in the way.  Don’t be.  Come.  Please.  This kind of pain is best borne in groups, and the support you feel unable to give Jack you can happily give to us.  We, who are driven down to rivers for a break from something we can’t really escape.  Stay a while, and chat about anything you want.  It helps.  Trust me.

I found myself behind the U of M Boathouse.  The path back to the medical center was long and winding, but there was also another way.  A set of stairs that switchbacked up the steep embankment, open in summer, but closed in winter because of the ice floes that pour down the steps like wax.  A calculated risk.  This one’s for you, dad.  I took the stairs.

I made it.

– Peter

New Year’s Dream

In that grand New Year’s Eve tradition, my dad and I held hands in the final seconds of 2016 as a nurse changed out his dialysis filters.  Pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to celebrate.  That’s what we picked, anyway.

After all my overnight visits, Jack is starting to repay the favor.  Last night I dreamed we took out the breathing tube and suddenly he was young and strong, chatting with us as though nothing had ever happened.  And you know?  Today his breathing tube really did come out.  That awful, aggravating, necessary 25 centimeters of plastic is now gone, replaced with a far more comfortable oxygen mask, which will make sleeping much, much easier.  (He’s snoozing right beside me as I write this.)  I can’t imagine the seas of exhaustion he’s currently sailing, but hopefully this will help him chart a course back.

Remember the chemo treatment they started last night?  He tolerated it just fine.  No fallout, no sharp decline.  We were a bit concerned by the oncologists’ dire assessment of his kidneys and liver yesterday, but the internal medicine ICU team assured us that was perfectly normal in the kinds of patients they see, and that Jack’s levels continue to inch in the right direction.  Not fast, but hopefully fast enough.  They fully believe he’ll leave the ICU in the coming days and go to a less intensive floor of the hospital, which is heartening.  We’re choosing to hope.  That sounds like a good motto for 2017.

I wonder if any songs will come from the long, strange dream Jack has been in for the last few days.  I expect so.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  One of the songs on his newest album is called “The Pearl,” which he heard someone singing in a dream.  It’s a beautiful tune, sweet with a touch of melancholy, which seems appropriate for a time like this.  The version I’ve picked isn’t the studio recording (which you can listen to here), but a demo he made on his own, just him and a guitar.  It’s how the song would sound if you and Jack were on a park bench somewhere, maybe up near The Point at Lake Nokomis, where he came as a high school student to write poetry.  On a fine summer day, with the breeze on your face and cottonwood fluff tickling your nose, this is what you’d hear.  Close your eyes and listen.  He’s singing to you.  To all of us.

– Peter