Wesley Britton's Blog, page 18

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The Story of Betty's Couch

There she sits, the spectral image of the short-haired Betty Britton leaning forward on her relatively new couch. She wanted that couch from Bob’s Furniture last year after she decided that would give her her own space to relax on when at home. Better than her old recliner, apparently.

When she was home, she sat or laid on that couch with a little table-tray in front of her with her various small possessions surrounding the space where she placed her breakfast and dinners. That’s where she ate her Meals on Wheels which she usually liked better than I ever did. There, she enjoyed her cans of ginger ale, chocolate Glucerna, and cups of ice. Once upon a time, she loved crystal lite but, for some reason, lost her desire for that. She loved her morning coffee in that huge cup of hers into which she poured her sweet vanilla creamer. She usually filled that cup to the brim but rarely drank enough to make it worthwhile.

She had a little shallow glass cup in which she kept the change for the Share Ride drivers. By it was a stack of one dollar bills for the same reason. She had her strips of blister-packs of her daily pills organized by the Medicine Shop for her medicine regimen. She had her glasses which she often lost and the cell phone which she lost just as often, usually in her bed.

She had her blood sugar Glucometer which she needed to use more regularly than she did. Oh, she got so mad with me for asking several times a day what her sugar level was. That was until her visiting nurses let her know I was doing a good thing by keeping up with her numbers. “I’m a grown-ass woman! I can do whatever I want! I don’t need you watching over my every move!”

The last time she went into the hospital, Ron Collins came by to make a few changes Betty wanted. She often had a difficult time rising from her couch without help. She often complained the TV was too low for her to see over her walker. So Ron put the TV on a riser it still sits on. He put little risers under each of the couch legs to make it easier for Betty to get up and down. She never made it home to try these things out.

So the image I’m seeing and hearing on the couch is the image of a Betty eating her dinner with all her necessities spread around in front of her. Oh yes, the mail too. The little table is gone now as it rather crowded that side of this little living room. But that was the place Betty spent most of her waking hours last year when she was home. Me, I can’t go near that couch. It hurts just to know it’s there.

“Here,” the spectre says, holding out a plastic Solo Cup, “get me a glass of ice. No water.”

More Reflections on Betty Britton

I write this memorial to Betty today thinking the only road out of my depression and retaining sanity is to stop dwelling on Betty. Stop thinking about her. Is that possible? Or healthy? Gotta be a balance as I walk around this little house still feeling all this is surreal, unreal, unbelievable. I can’t understand this new empty, lonely normal. It’s not a normal I want to sludge through day after day, month after month all on my own. Well, too bad Wesley Britton. Get a grip. Cope.

My mind goes back to how Betty’s condition began to deteriorate after Chris’s death. There was the first 2015 heart attack which I thought would keep her in the hospital, unable to attend her son’s funeral. Oh no, that fighter was not only there, but she sat at the front presiding over things. She remembered the early days when Chris wasn’t too sure I was good enough for his Mom. He came around, very much so.

But her brain was already having its difficulties. She had been given the gift of being able to work from home and stuck with that until she was unable to process complex numbers. The other day, we discovered a pile of patient records in the shed that need to be shredded because they include confidential patient information. I don’t know why Betty forgot about them.

Maybe I do. I think the most poignant night I spent with my wife, the Betty before the 2017 breakdowns, was when we watched the 2014 Glen Campbell documentary, “I’ll Be Me” which chronicled the singer’s breakdown due to Alzheimer’s disease. Quiet tears flowed down Betty’s cheeks as she related so much to his story. In particular, she took to heart one song he sang and made it her own:

I’m still here, but yet I'm gone
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end
You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not going to miss you
Not gonna miss you
I'm never going to hold you like I did
Or say I love you to the kids
You're never going to see it in my eyes
It's not going to hurt me when you cry
I'm never going to know what you go through
All the things I say or do
All the hurt and all the pain
One thing selfishly remains
I'm not going to miss you
I'm not going to miss you.

For a long time, that was her theme song. She tried to fight the dementia, especially playing her luminosity until one doctor said he didn’t believe she had dementia because her memory, both short and long-term, was too good. I thought that was a quick, off-the-cuff diagnosis as he knew Betty for, at tops, five minutes.

Well, water under the bridge.

It was around then I retired from teaching, in part, to take the burden of being my secretary off her shoulders. She was already trying to scale down her driving as well. Then she decided it was time to move again, this time from Patton Road to Larue Street.

One major motivation was getting away from a house with any steps at all. On Linglestown Road, we had those long staircases going upstairs and down into the basement. At Patton road, we had just two short sets of stairs, the one going into the basement with no railing and was simply dangerous to anyone.

The doctor even wrote up a letter pretty much ordering us to move for Betty’s safety. That didn’t impress our greedy landlord, Bob Fried. He thought we should live out the lease or buy the house. He thought everything was intended to screw him over, somehow, someway. I think he was the first nail in Betty’s stress coffin as he harassed us to buy out of our lease. He found all sorts of things to screw us out of our security deposit despite our spending near $500.00 in professional cleaners hitting the house. The second nail, in my opinion, was a slightly less greedy quasi-daughter-in-law who seemed to think Betty was her personal bank account. I think the third nail was the moving company that got us here, but leaving us with issues still unresolved out in that shed.

After all, Betty was in her dream house just over a month when her first heart attacks hit before the year-long decline. You’ll never convince me all that stress didn’t build up and topple her over in Feb. 2017.

From that point on, my life was all Betty Britton. When she was in hospital or rehab, my days were spent chasing down rides to get me to her bedside. When she was home, I was pretty much a 24/7 caretaker. Oh, for those days again. I thought that was going to be my life—doing my best to help Betty get as good as she could be, as independent as she could be, as dignified as she could be. There were many, many times those goals seemed quite realistic. As many have often said, she was a fighter. For better and worse, she simply wanted to do it her way. Patience wasn’t her strongest virtue.

Now, Wesley Britton has to become the solo fighter and to do that, he needs some sort of fire in his belly. He knows he needs to return to reading and writing but can’t find the mental focus to do that. Yet. Can’t imagine a mental landscape with anything that motivates me to pull my head out of my past. And not just me. Last night, little Clipper was crying all over the living room. Nothing special was going on—I think he was just missing his Mommy.

Still, from time to time, something sparkly pops into my life to brighten it up, even so fleetingly. Yesterday, I got an e-mail titled “Appreciating you.” In part, it read:

I was a student of yours at HACC and feel that a moment of appreciation is in order. Every single time I am writing a professional document, I think of your class. I'm not the world's greatest writer by any stretch, but I truly learned what good writing looks like (or perhaps what bad writing looks like first). I struggle with ambiguity in my writing and structuring the sentence in a way to clearly articulate my message; I constantly think, "if only he could proofread my letter".
I'm sure I've made all sorts of mistakes in this email alone, but my intention is for you to be reminded of how wonderful an instructor you were to me and probably so many other students.

* * * *

I’d like to share credit for that note with my partner, Betty Britton, who was certainly a huge part of my teaching career up here at HACC. Nice to know I have something of a legacy, even if I rarely see glimpses of it. Again, it’s in the past.

On Friday, we all saw that Betty Britton left an undeniable legacy on no small number of family and friends. I just watch the video of our gathering at the funeral home. Yesterday, I took our wedding video to Wal-Mart to see if I can get it transferred to a disc. My life with Betty on two discs, one at the beginning, one at the end

The past. The past. I have a present but have no glimmer of my future other than that dark room with the extinguished candle.

A New Bit of Beta-Earth Business

Thanks to Mary Woldering, you can now read the very first interview with Dr. Malcolm Eric Renbourn, the “Blind Alien” of the Beta-Earth Chronicles:
https://www.maryrwoldering.com/single...

Grief for a man, Betty, and a forlorn cat

Tonight, with your indulgence, I thought I’d share a story of grief that Betty, I, and a cat with a forgotten name shared a few years ago.

It was back in our beloved home on Linglestown Road when we got our first Yorkie, a little tyke I named Corky. Well, that rhymed. In many ways, little Clipper is a successor to Corky who was but the first of a run of our Britton Yorkies.

Little Corky was an absolute delight to have in the house, to put on his leash, and take for walks in our huge backyard. He seemed to be so proud to go outside with his daddy, his nose cocked up in the air as if he owned the world. My imagination, perhaps.

His best friend, besides his human parents, was one of our cats whose name I sadly forget. The most surprising part of their friendship was how protective the cat was of Corky. Corky slept in his dog-crate in the mud-room by the front door. The cat always crawled inside that crate to sleep with Corky. They were inseparable buds.

Then, Corky went to the vets to have his teeth cleaned. I was coming out of the shower when a tearful Betty came to me and said Corky had died on the operating table. His over-sized heart couldn’t take the Anastasia. Oh, that hurt us both. Before Corky, I had only one box of animal ashes, that for my dog Annie who had come with me from Texas. Now I had a new box, an extremely small box for a tiny little friend.

But human grief was nothing compared to one miserable cat. How do you console a relentlessly howling and crying creature standing by her buddy’s crate? Where is my friend? When is he coming home? When will you go and get him?

I forget how much later it was when we got Corey, a somewhat less than successful replacement for Corky. The cat knew immediately Corey was no Corky and showed no interest in the new dog. After one good sniffing, the cat snubbed the new puppy. It wasn’t much later the cat disappeared.

When we moved away from our home on Linglestown Road, I spread Corky and Annie’s ashes on the hill behind our enclosed porch, the hill I called “Annie’s Hill” as that was her dumping ground. So I left Corky at the only home he ever knew, the home where he was a treasured little friend to a Mom, Dad, and one devoted feline companion.

Betty Memories Part III: The Wedding

Betty Stories Part III: The Wedding

I know it, I admit it, all this writing about my deceased wife is nothing less than therapy. Sooner or later I’ll get back to writing book reviews and promoting my own books, and hopefully sooner rather than later, although hope isn’t one of my favorite words this month. So I’ll make you a deal. This will be my last Betty post for today. Just today.

The other day, I found a video cassette that was Betty’s favorite. It has our wedding. At least, I hope this is the video I’m thinking of. I’m hoping I can take it to Wal-Mart or wherever and get it copied onto a disc. Should have done this a long time ago. Betty wanted to.

If this is the video I think it might be, there’s one scene where my brother-in-law Amos is interviewing me in the groom’s room. There, I proclaim I’m not doing dishes on my wedding day.

Then we should see the procession of Betty and her entourage marching up the center aisle at the Silver Springs Fire Hall. A very slow march as the little flower girls were the slowest walkers you will ever see. That wasn’t good for an impatient bride clearly wanting to get this show on the road. I often thought it would be funny to speed up the tape during this march to reflect Betty’s state of mind. Oh, with her son Joe tripping on her train.

On the stage, Betty surprised me by pulling out her own vows which she read to me. I will never forget the final sentence: “Grow old with me.” The line from the John Lennon song. Grow old with me was what she asked, what she expected, what I promised, what I expected. Richer and poorer, we did all that. Grow old? A relative term.

Then there’s the moment where I prematurely kissed the bride, much to the audience’s delight. Speaking of moments, the Unitarian minister said many times she’d never seen a couple so “in the moment.” Make of that what you will. We were never certain.

In the reception, you might see her brother Mooch in his new suit purchased from “Moochie-Mart”—the Salvation Army, Goodwill, one of those thrift stores. Speaking of thrift, Mooch also brought along a large quantity of “America’s Best” beer, a cheap brand I hadn’t heard of before or since.

I remember the four Vietnam vets Pap Meyer invited even though neither the bride nor groom knew them. The point was? For the vets, a free meal. For Pap--?? We never asked.

I think the reception was the one and only time I saw her brother Jerry play guitar and sing Bruce Springsteen songs. Later, I went along with him to see the Boss at State College. Betty didn’t like rock concerts. The only one I remember talking her into going to was the Who. I had better luck with Chris. I went with him to see Ian Anderson, John Fogerty, John Mellonkamp, and The Smithereens.

Next chapter: The Honeymoon—the Uncensored parts. (After all, they star my parents and sister in Virginia and Kentucky.)

More Betty Britton Stories

Verbal Snapshots of Betty Britton

Touching Betty’s urn on the mantle is weirdly comforting. It makes it all real. It makes the unbelievable tactile and tangible.

* * * * *

Once Betty came to one of my classes to do some secretarial help, to record daily drafts in the gradebook. Some of the students started talking to her, wanting to know what it was like being married to a blind person.

After a pause, Betty started a lecture I would hear many, many times. Anytime someone opened the door to the lecture.

“Consider my husband,” she began. “He’s a man who earned his B.A., M.A., and doctorate—blind. He’s a world-recognized Mark Twain expert.” (At the time, I was.) “He’s written his first book, is a highly-regarded poet. He’s a college professor. He did all that blind.”

She paused and sat back. “What’s your excuse?”

I was stunned. I’d never thought of myself that way before. Yea, what is your excuse? This is little ole Freshman English 101, not the roughest, toughest class you’ll ever take. So why all the excuses to not succeed here? Over the years, I certainly heard my share.

* * * * *

Like many of you, Betty never got her left and right correct when giving me directions. Her son Chris remembered the day she walked me into a tree in her father’s back yard, poking my eye with a pine needle branch.

That wasn’t quite as dramatic as the day she was dropping me off at HACC and hit me with her car. Oh, I yelled at her.

“Don’t yell at me!” she cried.

Well, if getting hit by your own car isn’t grounds for yelling at your wife, what is?

* * * *

I can’t tell all the stories I remember from our glory years, the times we lived at 4420 Linglestown Rd. It was a wonderful home with a gigantic back yard where we had huge gardens Chris helped work on. We had a top floor, attic if you prefer, where we shared an office. Our computers were set up side by side an we often worked on our various projects at the same time. My drum set was also up there as well as my two small “museums” of spy and sci-fi memorbelia.

We had an enclosed back porch that started out filled with many garden plants and a long table where we had an ongoing series of monthly poker games. There were so many places where weeds could grow that I ended up building up ridiculously huge compost bins.

It was a good place to entertain. We had the picnic table we still have and the swing we also still have set just down by the long stone driveway that circled around into our very large basement.

We had a series of riding mowers Betty just loved. She would ride up and down the yard singing at the top of her lungs—“I’m mowing! I love my mower!” Unfortunately, she had a tendency to run over tree stumps and tear up the cutting blades. No one could hear her sing anyway over the noise of the mowers. But I swear those hours on the mowers were among the happiest hours of her life. I loved listening to her.

I don’t think anyone was very happy when Betty told me we had to move. Stairs were just getting too hard for her. She could no longer go up to the office upstairs or downstairs to the washer and dryer. She could walk to her car in the driveway but couldn’t easily go into the uneven yard anymore. So off we went, downsizing to our house on Patton Road, a home I don’t think either of us gained much affection for. Certainly, none for our greedy miser of a landlord.

Well, enough stories for now. Please feel free to share your own in the comments section of this blog.

Goodbye, Goodbye to my Wife, My Heart

Betty Britton’s obituary and video tribute are posted at:

https://www.Buhrig.com/notices/Betty-...

Where is a place Betty Britton didn’t touch in this quiet, empty house of ours?

In the refrigerator, I see all those small fruit cups we kept for Betty to take with her to dialysis. I see all those half-sized ginger ale cans she loved.

On TV today, I see the Boston Legal marathon, a show we once watched religiously. One channel over on BBC-America is another Star Trek: Voyager marathon, a show Betty loved. Blame that on me. We ended up owning all the Star Trek DVD sets to go along with all the Star Trek doodads I’d been collecting for years before I met Betty.

Among all the condolence cards I’ve been receiving this week, one image doesn’t let go. That of a dark room with one candle illuminating the dark. Then the candle goes out and all there is is dark. That’s my life.

At 10:22 am on April 26, 2018 Betty Bebe Jane Meyer Britton finally found eternal rest after a horribly long decline after her heart attacks in February 2017.

What began seemingly as a case of simple pneumonia led to Betty coding four times in Harrisburg Hospital before going into a month-long coma. Back then, we all feared she might not be coming back. We all feared that if she did, her mental capacities might be severely compromised.

A weakened Betty Britton did return to us with no discernable brain issues. Instead, as a result of tubes going down her throat, her voice never recovered. She spent the last year of her life fighting to scratch out her words and ideas. Combined with her poor hearing, this often made communicating for her an ongoing struggle.

Thus began a cycle of Betty spending time in a hospital, time in a rehab facility, rehab at home before repeating the same pattern. Her candle light would flare brightly, dim, and seem so fragile. She would seem to recover so well and stay home for perhaps two months and then something would send her back into Community General Osteopathic.

Sometimes, she was just so weak, she couldn’t make it from her bedroom to the bathroom. Or get up off the couch. She fell so often despite having a walker she often refused to use.

Once, they put a tube in to drain her gall bladder. They had to do that again in her last stay this year. All along, they knew there were things they needed to do but couldn’t because of her severely weakened heart which was only functioning around 20 %. That made any needed surgery completely impossible.

So, after each of her four stints in the hospital, Betty went to Hershey rehab or Helen Simpson rehab or Spring Creek rehab or perhaps both Helen Simpson and Spring Creek before being released with the promise that home health care would do the trick while she spent three days a week in dialysis. I well remember last summer when she was so constantly viciously mean to me, a case of something inside her she later said she couldn’t control. The anger came out and she didn’t know who was talking, she said. That phase went away, thank goodness.

Betty was a stubborn woman, unwilling to follow all the medical, diet, and exercise instructions she was given. That’s not to say she wasn’t fighting for her life—she was. She was fighting to make it possible to stay home and never be put into a permanent home. She just wanted to do it her way. In fact, she always resisted going to a hospital no matter who told her she had to. She always feared that the next time she was hospitalized, she would never come home again. That was her greatest fear.

What, for me, made this fear especially poignant was that we had moved into Betty’s dream house just two months before her first hospitalization. More than once, she mourned the idea that she would never spend much time in the house she wanted. On the other hand, she often fantasized about being able to drive again and seeing her grandson Joey graduate from high school. It was more than appropriate the last song we played for her at her funeral was Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” That was Betty, through and through.

But her last stint in the hospital, then rehab, then back to the hospital was very different. She had stopped fighting. She said she was tired of being poked and prodded. She just wanted to go home—meaning with God. She needed peace. Her body was failing in so many ways—her brain, gall bladder, kidneys, liver, limbs.

But those final months had their moments of optimism. This February, she finally had the two cataract surgeries she needed to see clearly. We never did get her the hearing aids that would have made her life better.

For Christmas, she wanted a new wedding ring and engagement ring as the originals disappeared during our move to our Larue house. So we renewed our vows for Christmas, very simply, in her Spring creek room.

Then the candle light went out.

At her funeral yesterday, I told a few stories of our 19 years together. How it all began-when Ron Collins took his son Jonathan in to Holy Spirit hospital and the registration clerk remembered him. Betty seemed to remember all the graduates from the class of 71 from Cumberland Valley High School. Ron told her another CV grad—meaning me—had just moved back to the area. He knew I was unmarried, he noticed she was single as well. So he got her phone number for me.

I called. We talked. Ultimately, she came to my Penn Street row house for our first date. She remembered me coming to the door in a stained, ugly sweat suit. But when my arms wrapped around her, she said she knew she was home.

It wasn’t long before her Dad asked when she was going to move in with that guy. My parents too, that Christmas, knew a marriage was in the works. That happened July 2, 1999.

I often used the line from Mark Twain that Betty Britton remembered everything, whether it happened or not. We did find proof that we were in the same 5th grade class—we found a class picture of us all at Ft. Hunter. We were both in Mrs. Miller’s class the day JFK was shot. I’m not sure about some of her stories, like saying I wouldn’t dance with her back at Willow Mill park because she had “cooties.” Possible, but suspiciously unlikely.

Betty often told the story about a time when she was doing something with her face that made the other girls think of me. Back in those days, I had to wear ridiculously thick eyeglasses which forced me to scrunch up my face to keep them on. “Scrunch up your face like that,” the girls teased Betty, “and you’ll end up looking like Wesley Britton!”

Betty said she told them, “Leave Wesley Britton alone! He’s not hurting anybody.’”

“Mrs. Britton, Mrs. Britton,” the girls taunted, at least in Betty’s memory. Well, that is just what happened.

And I remain grateful that happened. I am grateful for the 19 years of that candle. I am grateful for the family Betty gave me. Betty, I’ll always take care of little Clipper for you. Your memory will always be precious to me.

What I’m not grateful for is my new life in this dark room. It’s spring for everyone else. It’s a long, dark winter for me.

An exercise for writing teachers

Writing Teacher Passes Along "Legacy" Writing Tips

By Dr. Wesley Britton

It’s been over 30 years since this happened, so there are details long lost in the fog of my teaching memories.

It was in one of my World Literature evening classes when we were all listening to student reports discussing one author or literary work or another. Then she took the podium.

She was a rather exotic Mediterranean (I think) blonde beauty. An art student. The sort of student a teacher is well advised to keep his thoughts about to himself. I did.

She stood at the front of the class and asked for a volunteer. One gentlemen joined her and she asked him to turn his back to her and cup his hands behind his back. She said she was going to place a series of objects in his hands, ask him to describe the object in question without identifying it, and then ask the class to guess what the object was. She didn’t reveal what each object was until the guessing game was over.

I don’t remember what her objects were—I think they included a hairbrush and seashell. I don’t remember how well the class did at guessing the objects. But I do remember that, when she was done, she looked out at us and said, “This is what a writer does. Try to describe something so we can identify it without seeing it.”

She didn’t elaborate on that point, if memory serves. I do know I imitated her demonstration for many years in my writing classes and kept a bag of objects I used over and over. I’m pretty sure I had a clothes brush and a genuine cowboy spur in the mix. If memory serves, many classes did very well at guessing the objects, others not so much. One thing was consistent. For a few minutes, I definitely had their attention.

If you’re a writing teacher, writing coach, the like, try this little demo yourself. If nothing else, you’ll engage your students for a few minutes and perhaps give them writing prompts to play with.

This article first appeared on May 1, 2018at:

https://sharingwithwriters.blogspot.c...

courtesy of Carolyn Howard-Johnson
The Frugal Editor: Do-it-yourself editing secrets for authors

New Blind Alien blog tour started this week!

Until May 14, Silver Dagger Book Tours is hosting a blog tour to spread the word about Wes Britton’s The Blind Alien!

Here’s the schedule so you can check out the fun at your convenience!


Apr 30

kickoff at Silver Dagger Book Tours


Mythical Books
Cloe Michael's Reads Blog

May 1
Laurie's Thoughts and Reviews
Spunky N Sassy
Books all things paranormal and romance
Paranormal Palace of Pleasures

May 2
UrbanHype101
Book-Lover
2 Girls & A Book
3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too!

May 3
Bound 2 Escape
Book Review Virignia Lee
books are love
Stacking My Book Shelves!

May 4
A Mama's Corner of the World
Inside the Insanity
Laurisa White Reyes, Author
The Authors Blog

May 5
Aconite Cafe
Brianna Remus Books

May 6
BookwormBridgette's World
Deal Sharing Aunt

May 7
Maiden of the Pages
Millsy Loves Books
Queen of All She Reads
The Book Town

May 8
Little Ray Of Sunshine
Ms. Cat's Honest World
Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer
The lives and loves of a book nerd

May 9
Jazzy Book Reviews
Stormy Nights Reviewing & Bloggin'
Sylv.net
Yearwood La Novela

May 10
Girl with Pen
nanasbookreviews
Rabid Readers Book Blog

May 11
Romance That's 'Out Of This world'
T's Stuff
Teatime and Books

May 12
James Quinlan Meservy - Author
Lisa-Queen of Random
Luv Saving Money

May 13
Readeropolis
Loves Great Reads Blog

May 14
a small girl, her man and her books
eBook Addicts
Tales of A Wanna-Be SuperHero Mom