That Train Left the Station

It was a tough day, April 10, 2023. On the day after Easter, I learned that, at 3:38 pm on Easter Sunday, my brother, Jimmy, stepped out of his suffering, and in to the Peace of the Gods.

Peace at last, because the final stages of Parkinson’s, are pure torture.

Some folks are quite certain where the other side of death is. Jimmy, born into this world as James Loyd Crockett, he was named after our dad, we would talk about such questions, like what happens to us after death. In fact, we conversed on a variety of subjects. I have bragging rights, that we could have fixed the world, if given the chance. Our conversations were of that calibre. Politics, religion, psychology, our family, make that our messed up family, these were our favorite discussions.

Oh yes, Jimmy would tell that you most families have some sort of mess in their background. It is a human thing.  He understood his own messes, and the choices, that created them. He knew he would hurt for some of those less-than-spectacular decisions. His favorite saying, when speaking about things gone by, was, “That train left the station.” Meaning no one could fix the things that have wandered off into the land of the past. It was a done deal.

Jimmy, or James, as most folks called him, inherited his father’s talents, and his dyslexia. Those talents, of making things with his hands, would not fail him. His mind worked like our father’s worked: he could build things in his mind before he let his hand touch a saw or a sander or a drill. His mind allowed him to memorize things, visually. He didn’t struggle with written instructions. That visualization balanced the dyslexia. If he could see it, he could make it.

The one creation he didn’t visualize was his daughter. She was the unexpected prize that is the result when two young adults shake the sheets before they can see what the consequences might be. Unprepared, they did their best to be a family for the tiny girl. The fact was, our own parents came to be a family through a decision to enjoy the delights before the formalities.

It’s the human condition. Young men and women, since the beginning of civilization, have copied this mistake several times over. It’s the divorces of the modern period that have made the indent into a child’s psyche. That too, was copied. Our parents had divorced when we were young. But Jimmy was my mother’s prize for an indiscretion with a returning soldier. Whatever Jimmy begat, our mother would take that child on, as her own.

In that lay the rub of our sibling resentments. From the beginning, Jimmy adored, and was adored, by our mother. And then I came along. I needed things every infant does. Those things took mother away from the adored one. The family dynamics changed, from the triangle to the square. An even number in human endeavors splits us into two different camps. So I became my Daddy’s girl.

After our parent’s divorce, we came under our paternal grandmother’s loving supervision. Jimmy spent time with his grandfather, hearing the stories of a youth long gone. It broadened the little boy to have the older man on his side. Grandpa told his grandson that life would pass, just like-he snapped his fingers-that. That episode impressed Jimmy, for he repeated the story many times.

Grandpa, of course, was right. The entire world needs to heed Grandpa’s words. For the truth is a man will fall asleep one night to find in the morning, he’s an old guy. But that comes later, or so we think.

During the summer of 1958, our dad remarried. Our life pivoted from the grandparents to the step-mother.

Jimmy did not get along with the step-mother. She was good to us, though at 28 years of age,  she was too inexperienced in marriage and parenting to deal with a couple of wounded kids. She did her best. But there was an instant dislike, an antagonism that should not have been, between the Jimmy and the step-mother.

You may well ask, where was our mother? Hundreds of miles away, she worked in the big city. She loved to work, she loved her independence. She did well in this life. She tried marriage a second time, but it too, failed. Well, this was the fifties. When women began to flex their independence. They could have jobs, and have their own apartments. Mother’s ties with her own family were strong. One of her sisters lived in Los Angeles, so the two became thick. Mother was not lonely.

Mother became a Disneyland mom.

In 1960, she took us to Puerto Rico, the island of her birth. We had a wonderful time, well, what child doesn’t like running around on an island, with its constant sea breezes, and beaches, and all sorts of things to see. When we returned home, Jimmy demanded to live with his mother.

As daddy’s girl, I stayed with my father’s growing, second family. I had a baby sister to occupy my time, in between the horse daddy had given me, and school work. He indulged me, and mother indulged Jimmy. We led separate lives, my brother and I. Until 1964, when I too, came to live with our mother. We were young teens at that time, experiencing the 60s. What a time it was to be alive.

This is where we return to Jimmy’s baby girl. Life was speeding up. Time for Jimmy to get a job, to support his child. And this he did. Except that a divorce took his child away. I went away as well, to university, and then on the road as a singer. Jimmy went to school to learn how to cut hair. He opened  his own salon. Except the business life wasn’t for him. The creative one was. After sellling his business, he made airplanes, painted canvases, created dimensional collages, more sculpture than anything else. He turned to photography, had a long term relationship, married again, divorced, and kept taking photographs.

He immersed himself with an extended family member, and she became his partner. They bought apartment houses together, argued, reconciled, and then Jimmy took on the biggest challenge of his life: Parkinson’s.

What a nasty disease it is, this thing that invades the nervous system, cutting the lines of communication between brain and the body’s functions, until, at the end of its tenure, if messes with the brain itself. For years, meds kept the beast under control.

In 2012, our mother died. In 2013, our father. I lived back East at the time, once again, away from my brother. By the time I returned from the East Coast, he had moved to Arizona. He played the real estate game, big time. And did well at it.

In 2019, I learned that his disease was turning into the beast. That is where the human part of the journey ends, when the beast takes over. The loss of sleep, the hallucinations, the screaming out in the middle of the night, these became his new normal. He kept on with his life, with a devoted cousin ever by his side, protecting him until fatigue overruled the caretaker’s desires to care for him. Jimmy then went into Frontier House in Payson, Arizona. The staff took good care of him. Whether or not he knew me when I went to see him, I don’t know. We held one of our conversations. I mentioned Grandpa’s prediction, about life. Did he remember it? It didn’t matter. I knew I was saying goodby when I saw him last June.

I have the memories to keep me company with a bit of joy, a bit sadness and a bit of the haunting that comes from thinking what could have been, if different choices had been made, not only by us, but those who brought us to life. Nonetheless, what is, is.

Now, I am truly left the orphan, without father, mother, or brother. Well, as the saying goes, someone has to take on the role of the one left standing.

Those rambling conversations are the moments I miss the most when I think of Jimmy. I will go on missing them. If he were here with me, right now, he would remind me that the past is the past, there is nothing to be done about, because that train left the station.

I know damn well that he likes it, that I end this eulogy with that phrase.

Jimmy’s train left the station.