Monthly Archives: November 2018

Bar Chart of first month of contributions to Aubrey's Fund

Support Jeff on #GivingTuesday

Fundraising, , , , ,

It has been a month since the sad news of Jeff’s passing. His death ended four years of writing about his experience with lung cancer, but the courage, strength and hope arising from his words persevere. We can continue to be inspired by his optimism and give back to help support his most important project.

A primary concern for Jeff throughout his journey was how to secure future education for his daughter, Aubrey, if he wasn’t around to help. On October 25th, his family took a step to address this by starting a crowdfunding campaign for Aubrey. In the four weeks since, 129 people have contributed over $22,000 toward a goal that would give Jeff’s daughter the financial support to choose her college in 2023.

The target goal was set high enough to meet the projected costs of a four-year undergraduate education. While $150,000 is a daunting amount, that goal does not need to be reached today. We’ll get there by raising $30,000 each year before the first tuition bill comes due. That’s also $2,500 per month, a little more than the average rent in Los Angeles.

It is a goal that is ultimately met through ongoing contributions, such as 100 friends giving $25 monthly, or 500 giving just $5. Given the size of J’s circle and the time to reach this goal, success is possible.

In the initial month of the campaign, most donations were between $100 and $200. The other half of the contributions falls equally between smaller amounts less than $100 and larger donations greater than $200. If you have the resource and the inclination to contribute, imagine taking Jeff out for coffee or dinner and how many times you would want to do that over the course of a year. Consider donating that amount to support Jeff’s passion project for this year.

On this #GivingTuesday, please consider donating to Aubrey’s Education Fund to help reach this first-year goal of $30,000. Together, I know we can make his final project a success.

Young Jeff in the dim light of the WHS dressing room

Losing Bits

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Earlier this month, my computer broke. It was a long time coming, an inevitable journey for a laptop Apple now calls “obsolete.” Having already suffered everything from missing screws to intermittent lines showing the age of the screen,  the slowness eventually made it impossible to complete a backup. My data at risk, I brought the computer in for care.

A week and a few hundred dollars later, a new solid state hard drive lived in my laptop with most of the age dusted off. However, the replaced drive wouldn’t release all of its data and cost me some applications and my bearings. Some of the bits have not yet returned. Some never will.

I’ve experienced other catastrophic computer failures in my life. Despite devoted backup practices, a screenplay was once eaten by the clicking of a SyQuest drive, and a similar thing happened with Iomega a few years later. In both cases, large chunks of my life disappeared, including my first decade of email activity. While I don’t need to every day, more than once I have wanted to look for something old, something that did not survive the waves of technology.

Much of my anxiety about this particular digital crisis stems from the death of my friend, Jeff. The last complete backup I was able to get came in July. I was therefore confident I would avoid starting completely from scratch but assured that no new writing or other correspondence since would be recovered from that backup. Many of our thoughts and interactions are on social media, but some files I wouldn’t be able to recreate.

Death never disrupted my home. Meaning, I have never had the experience of walking past a silent room knowing someone I love used to occupy that space. TV and movies tell me this is a thing the bereaved have to face: what to do with the silent room.

One of the things I have done over the past few weeks is to look at old yearbooks, the social media of my youth. I paged through surviving yearbooks from Freshman, Sophomore and Senior years—what happened to my Junior year, I don’t know—looking at pictures of Jeff and for the words he left for me. This, and a handful of artifacts preserved in some Tupperware box, are the tangible proof of our connection. As long as I keep them close and don’t write on them further, they remain as they were and always will be.

In the decades that followed high school—constituting the bulk of our relationship—the artifacts are mostly digital. While J was always a good letter writer, we embraced email to embrace each other. From politics to entertainment, these remote exchanges left a sizable digital footprint. I don’t have many pictures of us together as adults, but I had the emails. Like the yearbooks, to preserve them I only had to keep them safe.

As I type, I still hope to read them again. Most of my email was sent through a POP account, which ultimately means that the only copy likely in existence is what was on my laptop. Through much effort, I believe I have my email files back on my laptop, but they remain invisible to me when I open the application to view them. Leaving them in that state for the moment, I draw comfort in the uncertainty. I don’t know if they are forever lost, which is better than knowing for sure.

These bits comprise the digital life I have created with Jeff. Every time I open my laptop, I walk past this virtual room, knowing there is an open invitation to walk inside and sit. I can venture in and see him exactly as he was. I can keep my memories fresh. Maybe that is what I fear most about losing these messages: Without them, my memories will fade and Jeff will disappear.

There was a moment in this process of restoration when I launched my computer and saw nothing familiar. My Chrome browser lost all of its open tabs. Many applications reset to scratch. Once I found where that information lived—and realized the techs had not restored a hidden directory—I was able to get those things back.

I launched Chrome to check my work. In my Facebook window, a chat with Jeff reappeared, right where I left it. It contained the last interaction I had with him. I told him I loved him, he told me he loved me, and we ended with a joke. In this new moment, I am relieved to see his room still exists. I read it as a new message saying everything will be all right.

Today, that’s enough. I’m walking away knowing he’s in there, somewhere.

Carter Mondale pin

Voting With Jeff

Grief, , , ,

Today is Election Day, so declared in 1845. It was a practical decision that accounted for a number of factors our young nation was facing.

We recognized the realities of our agrarian nature by scheduling a vote after harvest season, but not so far into winter as to make northern roads impassable from snow. We saw the effects of technology improving our communications, compounding the advantages of some states voting later than others, and so we made everyone in the U.S. vote on the same day. We chose Tuesday so as not to interfere with either Sabbath or Market Day, two institutions of our society. We tossed in the specificity of waiting until after the first Monday of November to keep the vote of electors a consistent 29 days apart.

Today is that day. While some of the magic has dulled from widespread adoption of early voting, I am still an open-presents-on-Christmas kind of guy. I like the pageantry, taking the day off to bask in democracy and share the experience with friends.

One of those friends, however, is now gone.

The earliest conversations Jeff and I had about politics came during our time at Northwood Elementary School. At some point, our teachers taught us about the election process by having us pick sides, hold up signs, and pretend we were at a national convention. Despite living in a Republican county, I started on Team Carter and never looked back. I’m certain Jeff wasn’t on my side of the fence initially, but as the years progressed we found common ground in the same pasture.

Politics drove much of our conversation over the years. We wrote—poorly—articles with political themes for the LeProCon, our high school periodical. We exchanged letters in college, occasionally commenting on the different politics of the Midwest and California. Long before social media, we emailed our debates. At some point, frustrated with the crop of politicians and policies, we created ThirdParty.org to be a forum for alternative politics. Four decades into our relationship, our politics was still central to our interactions.

On this particular Tuesday, I find myself missing Jeff more than any point since I got the sad news of his death. This is the kind of day we lived for, with high stakes following a long period of activism.

I want to talk to him about walking for Liz Watson, my local candidate for Congress, and why it took this long to knock on doors and donate meaningfully to a campaign. I want to tell him when our Indiana polls close and inquire about his own ballot choices. I want to stay up late into the night (for me) to watch the results come in, looking for virtual high fives or hugs, depending on the results. I want to conspire once again on impractical projects to change the world.

Today, I find myself angry at the arbitrary choice to vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. I don’t know if Jeff was able to vote this year. California’s early voting started on October 8th, and it is conceivable he might have stopped his last Uber at a polling center somewhere, just in case, or filled out an absentee ballot as a precaution. Probably not, though. When it came to voting, he was an open-presents-on-Christmas kind of guy, and an eternal optimist. I find myself cursing agrarian society and the Sabbath and Market Day and all of the things that conspired to keep Jeff from enjoying today.

I found an old Carter/Mondale button in my son’s car. It reminded me of those early political conversations with Jeff, so I pinned it to my chest. I carried Jeff with me to the polls, and he helped me fill out my ballot.

Today, should you be on the fence about voting, please let Jeff take you to the polls.

 

 

hands on wall to make 50

Beginning

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“How do I begin?”

This is the question that paralyzes me most when facing the death of someone I know and love. As I start to consider possible answers, my mind and my heart talk over each other with a swirl of suggestions that avoids consensus. I get stuck between a desire to connect with others and the guilt over not doing enough while my friend was alive, between fixing the unfixable and making a bedsheet fort where I will live the rest of my days. I want to do everything and absolutely nothing. How do I begin?

Just Bad for You is an archive of my friend Jeff Poehlmann’s experience living through a serious health challenge that ultimately cost him his life and us his voice. It is a space he made to help himself and others understand the particulars of lung cancer and how to live beyond the prognosis. From the testimonials on Facebook and LungCancer.net, where he spent the past year as a contributing writer, Jeff’s reach proved considerable. While he may not be here to continue publishing, Jeff did leave works-in-progress and a community of friends who can curate and contribute to the continuing story of what makes life meaningful.

In the wake of his death, I find it both comforting and intimidating to read and hear his words. Through his podcast, Jeff accompanies me on walking commutes to work, though usually only at the end of the day for fear I may be rendered useless. I see a dozen or so drafts in his queue, each started at different stages of his health journey, but I cannot yet bring myself to touch them.

With a brain and heart muddled in grief, I don’t have a clear idea how this blog will evolve. Perhaps it will be a place to process his life and our loss, or expand as a resource for the state of care for this and other diseases. Regardless, I do know that I want it to continue.

For four years, Jeff wrote about what he knew, what he learned, and most poignantly what he was experiencing. I do not have lung cancer. What I am experiencing now is loss and the challenge of regaining forward momentum in a world without Jeff. For a little while at least, that’s what this blog may focus on. We’ll draw from the strength he showed, even when not physically at his best, and the time he made to love the world.

I do not expect to be alone in this. Others who knew him or were impacted by his story may contribute as well, by sharing memories of Jeff that continue to resonate in his absence or by making meaning from the struggles they endure. For the moment, this space is for us.

Caring for Jeff’s community, however, requires starting with something. Right now, this is where I am and what I can do. Tomorrow, I will know I have already begun.