So in my blissful ignorance of the futility of my efforts (for the purposes of Todd seeing these videos) I struggled with a glitch in Final Cut where the sound for the Piggys was obliterated by various repeating loops of audio from within their performance. I tried re-rendering and got identical audio oddness. I tried altering the length of segments, re-importing the old files, and finally re-mastering the conversion of the original files and re-importing the new re-mastered versions. Ultimately I was able to get the correct sound for the Piggy's performance, but it was now Wednesday and Todd's life hung in the balance (or so it had nearly seemed at the time).
Dad's reports showed continuing deterioration. Although he knew perfectly well where things were going as Todd's condition worsened, he prolonged the battle in his postings by shifting from daily reports from the battlefront to two-day reports. In this way it seemed to us distant readers that Todd now stairstepped his way down... holding steady at one condition for two days, then suddenly deteriorating the next. Within two more days I managed to put the Bo Bice section together and had it posted to the collection on March 11th.
As the weekend approached I realized that I needed to change from the mindset of a search and rescue operation to a search and recover. Todd was dying and I was now faced with the irrefutable fact that nothing I could do would make the slightest difference for him. My parents were watching him slip away. My sister by now had taken time from her job in Atlanta to join them in the process. I found myself slipping into more frequent bursts of sustained grief as an instantaneous response to images, lyrics, music, spoken tributes from performers on stage... the slightest thing would set me off. After four months of foreknowledge that my brother was dying I had only started to grieve his loss on the weekend before the Red Rooster tribute when I assembled a slide show using my father's photographs. Every time I saw the photo of my mother holding a toddler Todd, I had to pause... even thinking of the image right now as I just typed those sentences brings me to the verge of tears... (past the verge now...)
Late night on Thursday, March 10th I had begun to piece together Todd's Wikipedia page by exploring wiki code from other artists and then substituting names, places, titles etc. so that the picture that the code painted was one of Todd, not of Elvis (one artist whose page I eventually borrowed some code from). I began by creating my wiki editing account and then I started crafting Todd's page. At 2:13 in the morning on Friday March 11th it was done - or rather begun - and I wrapped up for the evening.
Friday morning the wiki page had been flagged for improper references, which I had not the slightest idea of how to repair, but Todd's page itself was not flagged as being problematic (people writing pages of a biographical nature are warned that the subject of the page should be noteworthy enough to deserve an encyclopedia page).
So this was my grieving process, writing Todd's eulogy in present tense on his wiki page, quilting together the searchable patchwork of his life's highlights, discovering an extended community that loved my brother and was going to miss him much more than I ever had in the past thirty years of our lives. It is an odd thing to find one's brother scattered across the internet. I learned about songs he had written, places he had visited, people he worked and performed with... all of these sounds and images played out privately from my computer screen and flowed into my brain. I realized that I needed to find a way to draw my children into better understanding their uncle before he was gone. I needed a grieving partner and my son was there for me.
I set upon the task of getting ASL translations of Todd's greatest hits up on the You Tube channel. But rather than approach this task the way my Deaf children have typically experienced interpreted life, I decided to ask them to provide the translation rather than forcing them to watch Dad tell them how the world was. (So much of an interpreted life must seem this way... "there he is again, telling us what so-and-so says") This needed their direct involvement in the process. Unfortunately for my son, this meant that he received the brunt of my assignment because his sisters were finished with high school and out of the house. Fortunatley for both of us, Alosha had a friend staying for the extended weekend (teacher conferences on Friday) and together they were willing to work up translations for the four Todd songs that were performed by the original artists that cut the work. Task number one: Restless Heart and "I'll Still Be Loving You".
While the kids worked on generating a translation into ASL from the original lyrics, I focused my attention on linking Todd's Wikipedia pages. Now that Todd had a page in his name I could link his name references on other wiki pages to his home page. For example, Pam Rose and Mary Ann Kennedy both have wikipedia pages in their names. On the "I'll Still Be Loving You" wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'll_Still_Be_Loving_You) the reader sees that their names also serve as highlighted links to each artist's page. I edited the song's page to change Todd's name so that it also linked to his page; and I repeated the process on all of the pages I could find that referenced Todd's name (and cleaned up mispellings of his name along the way).
On Friday the kids pumped out Steve Holy's "Good Morning Beautiful" and Saturday resulted in "No Mercy" (a harder song to put into meaningful ASL since the song's meaning is a bit less clear than the other two songs).
This left "Keep On Rolling" by Bo Bice, Buffy Lawson and Todd Cerney as the last song to need a translation. The kids gave a good effort, but again, the song's lyrics are vague and the essential rhythm of the song was not present because I had only given them lyrics to work from (which had been sufficient for the three previous ballads). "Keep On Rolling" needed more work to include the group-cheer quality of the song within the translation.
Saturday's news from Dad revealed that Todd was in no condition to see any of his nephew's performances of his songs. I didn't see Dad's note until Sunday morning right before church and so I called a stop to the translation process. In church I prayed for Todd's release. We have two particularly expressive song-signers among our church's Deaf congregants (Azael and Mercy) and I kept looking at the joy of their expressions as we piled worship song upon worship song that Sunday morning and afternoon. After church I asked them to join me on Thursday, March 17th to put together a translation of Ty Herndon's song "Journey On" which he had closed his set with at the Red Rooster Tribute. I had assigned additional meaning to the song during the previous two weeks, regardless of whether it had been Ty's personal wish to Todd. Somehow I had expected that Todd would die around the 17th and I had anticipated that Thursday's recordings of the translation would be a send-off tribute.
Todd didn't make it to St. Patrick's day. He died on Monday morning, March 14th... only twenty-two hours after I had prayed for his release from the pain of this world. Mercy and Azael both kept their Thursday appointment with me on St. Patrick's day and they performed their parts against the green screen. As I write this, I have yet to edit their performances into Ty's Red Rooster performance, but look for it in future postings.
