Post by Stu-E Price on Jul 28, 2007 8:19:20 GMT -5
SHAVED ICE
Not long after that, Dean came home for good. He was so sick. His kidneys were shutting down. Dean used to open up my dad's big oven (it was big enough to cook 20 chickens,) turn the heat up to 500 degrees and just sit in front of it chewing shaved ice.
He was freezing and thirsty, but he couldn't drink anything, even water, because his kidneys couldn't flush it out. So he'd eat the shaved ice. Then he'd get so cold from eating the shaved ice. And he was so thin. He'd sit in front of that oven with his heels tucked right underneath his seat, right up underneath him. He'd just sit there eating shaved ice.
He must have wondered, though he never talked about it, why none of us ever gave him a kidney. There were 13 potential donors including my parents, not even counting the nieces and nephews or his own kids. None of us was even tested. I still can't explain why nobody gave Dean the kidney he needed. There was a lot of talk about it, but no action. There was no deadline. The doctors never called anybody. We were so caught up in our own worlds we didn't recognize that Dean had a limited amount of time.
One day, as he was readying for a shower in the boys' bathroom on the second floor of the house, his heart just gave out. Alison's daughter Brooke popped her head in to use the toilet and saw him lying naked on the floor. She ran down the stairs crying, "Dean's dead!"
Georgia and my dad hurried upstairs and pulled Dean into the adjoining office, trying to shake him awake and get him dressed at the same time. Alison called 911.
I was at Bret's house. I had gone over there trying to bury the hatchet with his wife Julie. She hadn't accepted my calls for a year because she thought I told people Bret only married her because she was pregnant with their first child, Jade. She had been pregnant at the time, but I believe they would have gotten married anyway.
It was a Tuesday morning. The phone rang. Julie answered and after listening for a moment, she got a grave look on her face. She hung up and told me to call home. Alison answered and gave me the bad news. Dean was dead. He was pronounced dead en route to the hospital. (In Calgary, when the paramedics arrive they work on you until you are loaded into the ambulance, even if you've been dead a while, because if they pronounce you dead at home they have to leave the body there until the medical examiner arrives.)
I was in disbelief and in denial. How could this be? I had just seen him two days before.
"How are you doing, Dean?" I had asked.
"Barely functioning," he had answered. But I hadn't taken him seriously. I thought it was just his dry sense of humor.
Then he died and we were all in shock.
Owen was wrestling in Germany when Dean died. I got the message to him through Jockam Herrmann. He was a German immigrant who came to Calgary and became a referee for my dad. Jockam had worked for the police force in Hamburg. He was with the vice squad there and moved to Canada when the work became so dangerous he was afraid he would be killed. He brought his wife and son Dennis, who now wrestles, over to Calgary. My dad sponsored them. They bought a farm out in High River, a town thirty 30minutes south of Calgary.
Owen and his new wife Martha were touring around Europe and Martha's mother was staying at their house on Siricco Drive in Calgary, taking care of their cat and watering the plants and stuff.
Jockam got hold of Owen and told him to call home. I gave Owen the sad news. He was calling from a pay phone and I could hear him adding change every few minutes. He was crying and crying and repeating, "No, No, No." It must have been just awful for him to be so far away. Then we got cut off and he had to call back again because he ran out of change. He just didn't know what to do.
Martha must have convinced him to stay in Germany, as he did not come home for the funeral. Instead, Martha's mother and sister came and brought a card and read it at the funeral. Quite frankly, Martha's sister Virginia was fine. I always thought she was pretty nice, not too complicated, not looking to have a fight with anyone, just kind of blindly loyal to her younger sister who's a bitch to her all the time. Martha's mother, Joan Patterson, read some sappy card about our sorrow, signed, “love Owen and Martha.” But she pronounced Martha's name "Marta."
At the wake she began throwing back the liquor, one glass of red wine after another after another, and she was delivering them just as fast to my mom. I got really uncomfortable with this and so did my sister Alison.
We were thinking, "What the hell is she doing? We don't want our mom bombed." I went to say something, but Bret moved between me and my mom and said, "Don't say anything. It's not the place, it's not the time."
"Well, Bret," I said, "Mom has got diabetes and it's not good for her to be getting drunk and, you know, we might need her too. She is our mother, and Dad might need her. He just lost his son. Dad doesn't go get bombed."
I was so upset about it. I never could really understand addictions. But more than anything, I was really pissed off with Martha's mom for encouraging my mom to get so drunk.
We went out across the highway to the acreage that my dad owns, across from our house. It's this beautiful parcel of land on the ridge in Edworthy Park where we used to play when we were little. We thought it would be symbolic to have Dean's ashes thrown there on this cool November evening. It turned out that throwing ashes was like throwing that fine sand you see in ashtrays. It was the first and only time I've ever grabbed hold of ashes. When we threw them they sort of swirled around in the air in a mystical way.
Smith read a very heart-wrenching speech about Dean, saying goodbye to our most beautiful brother. Ross' eulogy was more upbeat, chronicling the funny parts of Dean's life. It even brought us to the point where we were laughing and cracking up about Dean's pranks and his love of horseback riding and mechanics.
Then Wayne sang "Hallelujah."
Everyone but Bruce's wife Andrea joined hands and made a circle. Wayne was quite religious and still reads the Bible faithfully. He's a good person and he has a good heart. He just never really had the relationship with my dad that he had with my mom.
My dad could never really tolerate that Wayne smoked and wore his hair long. My dad attributed this to peer pressure and that is something he cannot tolerate.
Wayne and my dad had a terrible row when Wayne was in high school. I think it affected their relationship forever. Wayne wanted to run for president of the school. Elections were always held before the school year was over so that when the new year started in the fall, they had their president already in office.
But Wayne was a rebel; the teachers really disliked him and his attitude. One teacher lowered Wayne's math mark so he wouldn't have the 65% average needed to run. Wayne's disqualification caused such a protest around the school that the students decided to have a sit-in. The school called my dad and said, “Your son is causing problems,” and would you please come down and get him.
While my dad was talking to the principal on the phone, he caught the television news out of the corner of his eye and saw Wayne in the back of a green half ton shouting through a megaphone. He had long hair and love beads and a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Enraged, my dad stormed down to the school. He grabbed Wayne in front of his peers and told him to get the hell home and straighten out.
Wayne figured he had been embarrassed for life by his own father and I think that incident poked a hole in his love for my dad. I see a lot of similarities between Wayne and my other brothers. It's just that Wayne went out a little farther than the rest of us. He was a little more daring and tried a lot more things than any of us were willing to do.
So we threw the ashes. Dean's old girlfriend Pat Seigers was there, heartbroken. I always thought somehow that she and Dean would get back together and she'd marry him and she would become one of the Harts. A sister to the Hart girls. She had been Ellie's best friend, but they hadn't seen each other in a couple of years. She was so well liked by our whole family it's a shame they didn't marry.
Keith said Leslie was never the same after the Hans beating Jane incident, because she sat there and watched the whole thing and heard the screaming and the crying and the shouting and the accusations. She was traumatized and had nightmares for years. However Keith and Leslie did eventually get married.
Keith claims that that incident caused a lot of turmoil in their marriage and eventually led to their divorce. She never got over it. She could not accept wrestlers after that and Keith being from a wrestling family and loving it didn't help.
Keith and Leslie had some luck. They won $100,000 in the Western Express Lottery on New Year's Eve a few years after they married. A lot of family members resented them for that. They were jealous. In 1994, when Keith ran for provincial politics, he put quite a bit of that money into his campaign and that became another point of friction between Leslie and him.
She was in there pretty strong for the beginning of the campaign when it looked like he might have a chance. I think if he had won maybe she would have stayed with him as a politician's wife, not a wrestler's wife anymore. But by the time he lost the election, Keith said she felt that politicians and wrestlers were cut from the same cloth. They were all dishonest and she had no regard for any of them.
Keith's job as a firefighter was noble enough, but he wouldn't quit wrestling. According to Keith she became agoraphobic and would clean the house for days refusing to take off her rubber gloves or touch anything. But that's not what I saw. Leslie looks a little like Pamela Anderson before all the surgery. She entered university to become a geologist but ended up with a business degree. She's always behaved lovingly toward me and never caused any trouble in the family. Because of her quiet demeanor I think she was overlooked by all of us.
She filed for divorce in 1995 and Keith says she got the house, $2,500 a month alimony, plus $1,800 for child support and custody of 13-year-old Stewart, 7-year-old Conor and 4-year old Brock. She and Keith are still wrangling over child support issues today so their divorce isn't final but Keith moved across the street and they remain friendly for their boys' sake.
Not long after that, Dean came home for good. He was so sick. His kidneys were shutting down. Dean used to open up my dad's big oven (it was big enough to cook 20 chickens,) turn the heat up to 500 degrees and just sit in front of it chewing shaved ice.
He was freezing and thirsty, but he couldn't drink anything, even water, because his kidneys couldn't flush it out. So he'd eat the shaved ice. Then he'd get so cold from eating the shaved ice. And he was so thin. He'd sit in front of that oven with his heels tucked right underneath his seat, right up underneath him. He'd just sit there eating shaved ice.
He must have wondered, though he never talked about it, why none of us ever gave him a kidney. There were 13 potential donors including my parents, not even counting the nieces and nephews or his own kids. None of us was even tested. I still can't explain why nobody gave Dean the kidney he needed. There was a lot of talk about it, but no action. There was no deadline. The doctors never called anybody. We were so caught up in our own worlds we didn't recognize that Dean had a limited amount of time.
One day, as he was readying for a shower in the boys' bathroom on the second floor of the house, his heart just gave out. Alison's daughter Brooke popped her head in to use the toilet and saw him lying naked on the floor. She ran down the stairs crying, "Dean's dead!"
Georgia and my dad hurried upstairs and pulled Dean into the adjoining office, trying to shake him awake and get him dressed at the same time. Alison called 911.
I was at Bret's house. I had gone over there trying to bury the hatchet with his wife Julie. She hadn't accepted my calls for a year because she thought I told people Bret only married her because she was pregnant with their first child, Jade. She had been pregnant at the time, but I believe they would have gotten married anyway.
It was a Tuesday morning. The phone rang. Julie answered and after listening for a moment, she got a grave look on her face. She hung up and told me to call home. Alison answered and gave me the bad news. Dean was dead. He was pronounced dead en route to the hospital. (In Calgary, when the paramedics arrive they work on you until you are loaded into the ambulance, even if you've been dead a while, because if they pronounce you dead at home they have to leave the body there until the medical examiner arrives.)
I was in disbelief and in denial. How could this be? I had just seen him two days before.
"How are you doing, Dean?" I had asked.
"Barely functioning," he had answered. But I hadn't taken him seriously. I thought it was just his dry sense of humor.
Then he died and we were all in shock.
Owen was wrestling in Germany when Dean died. I got the message to him through Jockam Herrmann. He was a German immigrant who came to Calgary and became a referee for my dad. Jockam had worked for the police force in Hamburg. He was with the vice squad there and moved to Canada when the work became so dangerous he was afraid he would be killed. He brought his wife and son Dennis, who now wrestles, over to Calgary. My dad sponsored them. They bought a farm out in High River, a town thirty 30minutes south of Calgary.
Owen and his new wife Martha were touring around Europe and Martha's mother was staying at their house on Siricco Drive in Calgary, taking care of their cat and watering the plants and stuff.
Jockam got hold of Owen and told him to call home. I gave Owen the sad news. He was calling from a pay phone and I could hear him adding change every few minutes. He was crying and crying and repeating, "No, No, No." It must have been just awful for him to be so far away. Then we got cut off and he had to call back again because he ran out of change. He just didn't know what to do.
Martha must have convinced him to stay in Germany, as he did not come home for the funeral. Instead, Martha's mother and sister came and brought a card and read it at the funeral. Quite frankly, Martha's sister Virginia was fine. I always thought she was pretty nice, not too complicated, not looking to have a fight with anyone, just kind of blindly loyal to her younger sister who's a bitch to her all the time. Martha's mother, Joan Patterson, read some sappy card about our sorrow, signed, “love Owen and Martha.” But she pronounced Martha's name "Marta."
At the wake she began throwing back the liquor, one glass of red wine after another after another, and she was delivering them just as fast to my mom. I got really uncomfortable with this and so did my sister Alison.
We were thinking, "What the hell is she doing? We don't want our mom bombed." I went to say something, but Bret moved between me and my mom and said, "Don't say anything. It's not the place, it's not the time."
"Well, Bret," I said, "Mom has got diabetes and it's not good for her to be getting drunk and, you know, we might need her too. She is our mother, and Dad might need her. He just lost his son. Dad doesn't go get bombed."
I was so upset about it. I never could really understand addictions. But more than anything, I was really pissed off with Martha's mom for encouraging my mom to get so drunk.
We went out across the highway to the acreage that my dad owns, across from our house. It's this beautiful parcel of land on the ridge in Edworthy Park where we used to play when we were little. We thought it would be symbolic to have Dean's ashes thrown there on this cool November evening. It turned out that throwing ashes was like throwing that fine sand you see in ashtrays. It was the first and only time I've ever grabbed hold of ashes. When we threw them they sort of swirled around in the air in a mystical way.
Smith read a very heart-wrenching speech about Dean, saying goodbye to our most beautiful brother. Ross' eulogy was more upbeat, chronicling the funny parts of Dean's life. It even brought us to the point where we were laughing and cracking up about Dean's pranks and his love of horseback riding and mechanics.
Then Wayne sang "Hallelujah."
Everyone but Bruce's wife Andrea joined hands and made a circle. Wayne was quite religious and still reads the Bible faithfully. He's a good person and he has a good heart. He just never really had the relationship with my dad that he had with my mom.
My dad could never really tolerate that Wayne smoked and wore his hair long. My dad attributed this to peer pressure and that is something he cannot tolerate.
Wayne and my dad had a terrible row when Wayne was in high school. I think it affected their relationship forever. Wayne wanted to run for president of the school. Elections were always held before the school year was over so that when the new year started in the fall, they had their president already in office.
But Wayne was a rebel; the teachers really disliked him and his attitude. One teacher lowered Wayne's math mark so he wouldn't have the 65% average needed to run. Wayne's disqualification caused such a protest around the school that the students decided to have a sit-in. The school called my dad and said, “Your son is causing problems,” and would you please come down and get him.
While my dad was talking to the principal on the phone, he caught the television news out of the corner of his eye and saw Wayne in the back of a green half ton shouting through a megaphone. He had long hair and love beads and a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Enraged, my dad stormed down to the school. He grabbed Wayne in front of his peers and told him to get the hell home and straighten out.
Wayne figured he had been embarrassed for life by his own father and I think that incident poked a hole in his love for my dad. I see a lot of similarities between Wayne and my other brothers. It's just that Wayne went out a little farther than the rest of us. He was a little more daring and tried a lot more things than any of us were willing to do.
So we threw the ashes. Dean's old girlfriend Pat Seigers was there, heartbroken. I always thought somehow that she and Dean would get back together and she'd marry him and she would become one of the Harts. A sister to the Hart girls. She had been Ellie's best friend, but they hadn't seen each other in a couple of years. She was so well liked by our whole family it's a shame they didn't marry.
Keith said Leslie was never the same after the Hans beating Jane incident, because she sat there and watched the whole thing and heard the screaming and the crying and the shouting and the accusations. She was traumatized and had nightmares for years. However Keith and Leslie did eventually get married.
Keith claims that that incident caused a lot of turmoil in their marriage and eventually led to their divorce. She never got over it. She could not accept wrestlers after that and Keith being from a wrestling family and loving it didn't help.
Keith and Leslie had some luck. They won $100,000 in the Western Express Lottery on New Year's Eve a few years after they married. A lot of family members resented them for that. They were jealous. In 1994, when Keith ran for provincial politics, he put quite a bit of that money into his campaign and that became another point of friction between Leslie and him.
She was in there pretty strong for the beginning of the campaign when it looked like he might have a chance. I think if he had won maybe she would have stayed with him as a politician's wife, not a wrestler's wife anymore. But by the time he lost the election, Keith said she felt that politicians and wrestlers were cut from the same cloth. They were all dishonest and she had no regard for any of them.
Keith's job as a firefighter was noble enough, but he wouldn't quit wrestling. According to Keith she became agoraphobic and would clean the house for days refusing to take off her rubber gloves or touch anything. But that's not what I saw. Leslie looks a little like Pamela Anderson before all the surgery. She entered university to become a geologist but ended up with a business degree. She's always behaved lovingly toward me and never caused any trouble in the family. Because of her quiet demeanor I think she was overlooked by all of us.
She filed for divorce in 1995 and Keith says she got the house, $2,500 a month alimony, plus $1,800 for child support and custody of 13-year-old Stewart, 7-year-old Conor and 4-year old Brock. She and Keith are still wrangling over child support issues today so their divorce isn't final but Keith moved across the street and they remain friendly for their boys' sake.