Tag Archives: stories

Best laid plans…

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The GrowthLines blog is about growing up, becoming a complete person.  Growing up is the process of a lifetime, literally.  Our growth often depends on our willingness to make a change.  It seems only fitting that a blog inviting readers to grow, should be willing to change for growth too.  With that in mind, I hope you will consider joining me in thinking out loud about:

  • conversation by photograph – We’re probably all familiar with, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  Some say the original quote actually referred to “ten thousand words”.  Either way, we know the power of images to speak.  Bloggers have recognized the benefits of purposeful silence in Silent Sundays, and of using photography in lieu of words in Wordless Wednesdays.  I haven’t chosen a standing title.  I may not hold to a single day.  I do plan to post a single photograph on a weekly basis, sometimes accompanied by a quote.  No explanation or commentary.  A photograph standing on its own.  That’s where you come in.  I hope readers will share their thoughts about the voices and stories in the image.  I’m eager to hear the growing conversation that begins in silence, observation, and thought.
  • a broader view – Since the first week of November, the focus has been on grief and loss.  In the days ahead, the GrowthLines blog will take an expanded look at life and growth by thinking about community, relationships, parenting, and self awareness, to name a few.  I hope you will…, join the conversation by sharing your thoughts on posted topics and by suggesting topics for us to talk about.  (Please keep in mind, it’s not personal if a suggested subject doesn’t become a post topic.)
  • layers of loss – because grief is an intricate part of our experience, we will continue to talk about both the pain of loss and the growth that is possible in our seasons of grief.  I appreciate the courageous fellow strugglers who have taken pain in hand and stepped into this important conversation to the benefit of us all.

Watch for picture, and start the conversation.

Versatile Blogger

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A heart felt “Thank You” to Jen at Step On a Crack…, for nominating the GrowthLines blog for The Versatile Blogger Award.  I began blogging as a way to think out loud with a larger community, outside the therapy room.  To think about the growth that comes from our experiences.  To recognize the incredible resilience of humans.  To highlight the hope to be found even in our darkest moments.

In the process of writing my thoughts, I have encountered an amazing fabric of fellow travelers who push me to listen more closely, think more clearly, and to see the raw beauty in each of us.  Fellow bloggers have expressed that beauty with humor and wit.  With warmth and encouragement.  With agony and longing.  With confusion and uncertainty.  With candor and honesty.

Thank you, Jen, for your continued presence in the blogging world.  Thank you for your willingness to give us a window into the complexity of your relationship with your mother, and your grief over her living, and her dying.  You invite and inspire all of us to engage in honest conversation about our own lives.

According to the requirements of the award I must:

• Nominate 15 other bloggers

• Inform my nominees

• Share 7 random facts about myself

• Thank those who nominated me

• Add a picture of the award to this post

Congratulations Versatile Bloggers!

I am honored to nominate the following blogs for the Versatile Blogger Award:

http://www.thursdaymorningmeditations.wordpress.com – Emerson J. Winchester invites me to think with her every Thursday morning through her writing.  Her meditations push us to think as a springboard to action, as in her recent post , Pop Music Failure (or, A Step in the Wrong Direction).

http://www.creatingyourbeyond.com – Check out this blog on “survivors creating a life beyond Loss and Trauma”.  I found Brenda’s post on self-forgiveness to be insightful.

http://www.findinglifeinadeath.wordpress.com – a rich and poetic blog about the simultaneous dance we do with life and death, loss and change.  The final post of 2011 was especially thought provoking.

http://www.thereinventedlass.wordpress.com – join a fellow blogger at a crossroads with the chance and challenge to reinvent her life.  One view of the crossroads can be found in the Weekly roundup post.

http://www.ptsdawayout.com – a wonderful “voice of experience” resource for people living with complex PTSD.  “Show up empty and experience everything joyfully.”

http://www.fewerforgreater.wordpress.com – Consider fewer possessions for a greater quality of life.  I was intrigued by the most recent post, Pick four people.

http://www.workthedream.wordpress.com – I was delighted to discover this blog about daring to dream your life, and then working the dream.  I was even more delighted to discover that the dream is being worked out in the shadow of one of my favorite places on this earth, The Spanish Twin Peaks near LaVeta, CO.  The indigenous tribes of the area called them Wahatoya, the “breasts of the world”.

http://www.grandfathersky.wordpress.com – Written by “a poet and a dreamer”, asking “Why Life?”  Beautiful photographs and thought provoking posts, such as Walking Between Worlds.

http://www.cocorum.wordpress.com – She’s a seventeen year old thinking beyond her years, and writing her thoughts.  Listen to her in “What’s the point of kindness?”

http://www.katiedodson.wordpress.com – following the musings at the People Always Leave blog, and read Hanging By A Moment

http://www.belleofthecarnival.com – Join the “head clown” at the Cameron family Carnival as she looks at being family yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Hear her honor her own father’s spirit in A Skier’s Dream

http://www.nidhisays.wordpress.com – Thank you for poetry and prose.  Make sure you read “To a special man…”

http://www.ariannasrandomthoughts.com – Arianna invites us to join her in a discussion of resilience, motivation, and personal development.  She sometimes uses sports as a metaphor for our discoveries about life, as in Press On!  What Rowing Taught Me About Resilience

http://www.anissastein.wordpress.com – an interesting blog about “living the life less traveled”, which includes among other topics, “Mistakes introverts make”.

http://ashleycherie.wordpress.com – Another young, talented artist who is letting the blogging community join her as she “paints” her thoughts with words.  I appreciate her candid thinking in Recap: 2011.

Congratulations again to my Versatile Blogger nominees! 

Now for the seven random facts about me:
  1. I have lived long enough that after years of wearing glasses and contacts, I now have 20/20 vision to see anything within 18 inches of the end of my nose.  Since I love to read, write, and “google”, all of which fall within the 18 inch range, I’m ecstatic.  Anything past the magical 18 inches is a blur, including the glasses I took off in my moment of “clarity”.  On more than one occasion I’ve had to put in contacts in order to find where I left my glasses.
  2. I too am a “one-sneezer”, and sometimes pretty loud.  I am occasionally embarrassed when a sneeze refuses to be stifled.  On the heels of nearly every sneeze I have a memory moment of my grandad.  Our sneezing behaviors are identical, which means my sneezes are often followed by a smile.
  3. I grew up watching my Dad work on cars, literally a “shade tree mechanic”.  Later, with the luxury of a garage, he taught me how to maintain and repair my first car, a 66 Mustang.  I spent years worth of happy moments in that garage getting my hands dirty and my heart filled.  Some of my hardest moments were being there alone, packing up the remains of my shade tree mechanic dad, when dementia made it necessary for him to move to a nursing home.  Sometimes I go to my own garage and hold his socket wrench in my hand for old time’s sake.
  4. When I was old enough to know better, I left my grandad’s horse grazing in the yard while I went to get a drink of water.  In less than five minutes, Old Red had caught the saddle horn on the clothesline wire, and was racing around the yard in a panic dragging one of my grandmother’s new iron clothesline poles behind him.  The other pole was bent to the ground.  I had to wait for grandad to come home so I could look into his clear, blue eyes, and explain what had happened.  I had to live knowing I had destroyed something my grandma had waited for, for years.  Red and I both survived the experience, him with a small cut over one eye and me with a better understanding of responsibility, and that it takes less than five minutes for things to “go to hell in a handbasket”.  My grandparents kept on loving and investing in me in spite of my mistakes…, priceless.
  5. I like hiking with a camera and a sketch pad.
  6. I’ve been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every year since Hurricane Katrina.  If I could rewind my life, I would shake the limitations of a “no dancing” religious code, and learn to do the Zydeco.  The next best thing is to be at the Fais Do Do stage watching a mass of people dancing zydeco to live music.
  7. I love Vivian Higginbotham’s seafood gumbo, and am so glad she gave me her recipe and taught me how to make it before she died.

 

Our Universal Loss

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The first time I saw a portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt was in 1991, in Wichita, KS.  It was a small part of the entire quilt, and it filled the floor of the convention center.  I had read about the quilt from the beginning.  I had seen photographs of the display on the mall in Washington, D.C.  None of that prepared me for the flood of emotion I felt as I walked among the quilt blocks on display that day.  Looking at the first block, I knew I had stepped into sacred space, as though I had been allowed to witness thousands of private moments of loss and remembrance.

Each quilt block held the remnants of a life.  Stories told piece by piece through pictures, pieces of clothing, belongings that identified each person as unique, known, loved.  The fabric blocks were tangible evidence that this person participated with family and friends in this life, and was now gone, but never forgotten.

Harold Marcuse, is a professor of German history at University of California, Santa Barbara.  His research on the view of different groups looking back on the Nazi period since 1945 is presented in his book, Legacies of Dachau, 1933-2001.  One of the stories is of German pastor, Martin Niemöller’s visit to Dachau concentration camp in November 1945.  Noemöller had been imprisoned at Dachau from 1941 to April 1945.  Marcuse notes that Niemöller’s November diary entry and subsequent speeches suggest returning to Dachau prompted thoughts that by the early 1950s had become this familiar poem.

First they came for the
socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the
trade unionists,
And I did not speak out
because I was not
a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left
to speak for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller 

Today, December 1, 2011, is World AIDS Day.  A day that will be just another day for many.  A day when many will not speak out, because they believe AIDS is someone else’s loss.  But today is a day that belongs to us all.  It is symbolic of our universal loss, whether we recognize or acknowledge it.  We believed AIDS belonged only to the indiscriminate, the addict, the transfused, the gay, and have said nothing.  Can we hear that 1000 babies are born with HIV every day and say this loss is not ours.

I recently watched Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story with a group of middle school students.  Liz lost both of her parents to AIDS over a ten year span.  In the discussion following the film, a student ask “What is AIDS?”  In that moment I was reminded that the advances in treating AIDS leaves us at risk of forgetting that the disease exists, and there is still no cure.  That people’s lives are still being forever changed, and lost.  Take time today to acknowledge that AIDS is a loss that belongs to us all, and decide how you will speak out.

 

Papa’s Stocking

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I attended a Hospice Memorial service just before Thanksgiving several years ago.  The room was filled with families and friends who had experienced the death of someone they loved during the past year.  It was a time of remembering.  And a time to focus on the journey of living through grief.

Loss is one of the few experiences besides our birth that is universal.  We would be hard pressed to find a single person in a crowd, who has not had some personal contact with grief.  How is it then that grief can feel so solitary?  Perhaps that mixture of solitary and universal is why talking about our grief brings both pain and relief.  But talking about loss and the grief that follows is important if we are to weave both joy and sorrow into our own rich fabric.

I don’t remember the name of the speaker at that Hospice service, but I remember the personal story he told about finding joy in the midst of grief.   After his wife’s mother passed away, his father in law came to live in their home.  He quickly became an integral part of their daily lives.  And then last year, in the fall, Papa had died.  The man, his wife, and two daughters were left with the empty spaces that Papa had once filled.  As Christmas drew near, the depth of their loss was magnified.  Christmas traditions that had been a source of joy, were now a reminder of Papa’s absence.  This was especially true when it was time to hang their Christmas stockings.  There was Papa’s stocking, empty.  Just like his chair at the table.  Just like the hole left in their hearts.

They began to talk about the pain of Papa’s absence, and the dilemma of how to have Christmas without him.  A new tradition, a ritual of healing, was born out of that conversation.  Papa’s stocking would be hung in its place on the mantel, with slips of paper near by.  In the days leading up to Christmas morning, family members wrote their thoughts, memories, feelings about Papa and dropped them in his stocking.  On Christmas morning after presents had been opened, and their own stockings emptied, they read the notes from Papa’s stocking. There were tears, and laughter, and connection with each other and with Papa on that Christmas morning.

I don’t know if they hung Papa’s stocking beyond that first year he was gone.  But I do know their Christmas story is a wonderful example of partnering with grief to create a moment of celebration that will last a lifetime. They had discovered that although Papa was gone, he was not lost to them.  Sometimes healing comes not from avoiding the painful moment, but from stepping into it to create a new meaning.

“a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief”

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"a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief."My grandfather died at sixty nine, after a life filled with farming, ranching, and carpentering on the side.  My great grandmother, Nora, was still living and ninety years old.  She had lost her oldest grandson, and less than two years later, her husband.  She had been a widow for thirty five years.  I was devastated by my grandfather’s death.  But, I guess I thought my great grandmother had seen so much loss and grief in her ninety years, that it was different for her.  Maybe she had gained immunity from loss.  And then she was in front of his casket, weeping and repeating, “My baby, oh, my baby”, a mantra that captured all she had lost.  In that moment I knew there was no age limit, no statute of limitations, no point at which losing your child felt less, rather than more.

John Claypool wrote Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, following the death of his ten year old daughter from acute leukemia.  He reminds us that we are all “a person of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”, for grief is ours whenever we lose something we value.  Claypool identifies loss and grief , not as isolated events, but as an integral part of our life journey.

“Learning to handle these in a healthy way–learning how to lose, so to speak–is one of life’s most important challenges.  It can hardly be begun too soon.”

He acknowledges our attempts to protect our children from grief, while pointing out that…

“as soon as a child is old enough to love something that can be lost, that one is a candidate to become ‘a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief.’  Very few get very far without experiencing loss in some way.

“The truth is–for every one of us–that there is no way to avoid the trauma of loss if we love even a little.  This is what makes the task of learning to handle grief so important.”

I think my great grandmother had spent her life “learning to lose”.  She was well acquainted with grief.  I watched her handle loss by returning to life, from my earliest memories until her own death at ninety-two.  I also watched her step into the painful presence of loss when my grandfather died.

I have not had to find life after the death of a child.  Having stood by as friends entered this dark night of the soul, I have asked myself the question a colleague of John Claypool asked.  “Those of us who have not been there wonder what it is like out there in the Darkness.  Can you tell us?”  Claypool’s response was both profound and ambiguous.  “Yes and no.”  Perhaps the path to learning to handle grief begins with the courage to start the conversation.

“The first thing I want you to know…”

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There may be no loss so out of sync as the death of a child.  And as if that monumental death alone is not enough, the death of our child brings a partnership with loss that spans our lifetime.  I heard an interview a few years ago with a mother whose young son had been killed in a bicycle accident.  She described the breadth of this loss by saying,

“When I woke up the next morning, I was surprised that I was still here.  I couldn’t imagine how I could have survived his death.  A year later, I was still surprised.  It’s been 10 years, and I still don’t understand how I’m here.”

She voices for every parent, the perpetual dance of grieving for your child while continuing to live your own life, and theirs.

My first experience with the permanent impact of a child’s death on a parent came when I was twelve years old, sitting on the bed in my Grandma’s bedroom.  She was cleaning house as I followed her from room to room.  There was a group of photographs on the wall by the door.  They were the last pictures of my Dad’s older brother, Junior, taken a week before he died at age 13.

He came home from school, saying he didn’t feel good, and in less than two days was dead from spinal meningitis.  His funeral was held at home under quarantine, with only family present.  He was something of a mystery to me, made more so by the black and white photographs that had been enlarged and hand painted in pale, transparent colors.

Grandma cleaned and I sat on her bed, staring at those pictures.  Then I said, “Grandma, tell me about Junior.”.  She opened her mouth to speak, and instead began to cry.  I have no memory of what happened after that, of what she did or didn’t say, of how I got out of the room.  I just felt the power of my question to make her cry, and the depth of her wound.  Later, after I was grown, I wondered if her tears were only tears of pain, or also tears of thanks, of relief, that someone remembered and asked about her son.  I knew my Grandma as a hard-working, caring woman, with a delightful, childlike laugh.  Somehow she had continued living, while carrying this loss just below the surface.

Doug Manning, author and speaker on grief, tells about a friend leading a group at a local funeral home, for parents who had lost a child.  An 80 year old woman was the first person to arrive.  The group facilitator asked if he could help her, assuming that she was at the funeral home for visitation.  She told him she was there for the group, but was uncertain about whether she should stay.  He asked her if she had lost a child.  She told him her story.  That her son had been stillborn at a time when people didn’t talk about grief.  That her husband and family refused to talk about the loss.  For nearly 60 years she had been grieving in silence.  She went on to say, “My husband is dead now, and it’s just me.”  The man asked what she would like for him to know about her son.  Her response…”The first thing I want you to know is his name is Tommy.”  She had never spoken his name aloud.

Maybe my Grandma was waiting, just like the 80 year old woman was waiting, for someone to ask about her child.  To join her in giving her child’s life meaning and significance, sometimes through the simple gift of speaking a name.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…

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As we rapidly approach the holiday period that includes Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, I feel compelled to write about loss.  It seems odd doesn’t it, that holidays and celebration would leave me thinking about the sadness that can surround us during our “happy” times.  What a contradiction that the very happiness we feel reminds us of the changes we have endured, and the people who will not be there to join us in the next joyous occasion.

Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,… it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, …

Dickens reminds us that our joy and sorrow coexist.  So, because the period from November 1 to January 2 is a strange mix of “the best of times” and “the worst of times”,  I will think out loud about what it means to step into a single moment of mourning loss and celebrating life.  Maybe that’s what Walter Wangerin intended when he titled his book, Mourning Into Dancing.  Maybe he wanted to help us find words to describe our experience with that thing so present, and so unspoken, death.

Death comes, and we grieve.  If Dickens had written about the contradiction of grief, he might have said,

Grief is an odd thing.  Reminder of our loss and the last connection between us and the person we loved.  Our numbing and our unspeakable pain.  Our tears and our rage. Grief feels like the enemy, while absorbing our time like a best friend.  At once universal and unique.

I believe there is power in our stories.  I believe there is healing and growth in our stories of loss.  I believe there is beauty, and yes, even celebration in sharing our stories.

More than you’ll ever know.

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Trivia is intriguing.  Trivia couched in a story becomes less trivial and more about “fleshing out” a person or situation.  I knew Brian May played lead guitar for Queen.  I didn’t know he also held a PhD in astrophysics.  I discovered that piece of trivia listening to the story of how in 2007, a Dutch school teacher discovered “a great, green blob floating in space”.  She knew very little about astronomy but while looking on Brian May’s website, followed a link to Galaxy Zoo photos, where she made the discovery.

What interests me about this bit of trivia has nothing to do with astronomy and very little to do with Brian May.  It has to with drawing conclusions based on partial information, making assumptions.  The moment I learned that Brian May has a PhD in astrophysics I realized “again” how often I assume that all I know about a person is all there is to know.  I thought of how easy it is to forget that people have a history of experiences and stories that precedes my stepping into their lives, and how that view may limit my definition of who they are.

Marie Hughes was one of the sweetest people I have ever known.  She seemed almost too nice to be real.  I knew Marie had been married for a long time to Luther, a gentle, pleasant man in spite of having been a POW during the Vietnam war.  Over time I think I began to assume that only someone incredibly innocent could be that sweet, a 20th century Pollyanna.  If Marie had reached her senior years with innocence intact, then I had to conclude she hadn’t felt the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.  I think I began to see Marie as sweet, and diminished.

I was facilitating a women’s book discussion group which Marie attended regularly.  One night the discussion focused on how we live in spite of difficult life experiences and loss.  That night I learned how much I didn’t know about Marie Hughes as she told us about her first husband, a railroad worker who was killed on the job, leaving her a young, widowed bride.  She described her devastation and grief, how empty and lost she felt, how she didn’t think she could go on.  She told us how her father’s strength helped her and what a godsend it had been when she met Luther and they began to build a life together.  I was stunned. Marie was still one the sweetest people I had ever known, but she was no longer untested, and she would never be diminished to me again.

Tracy Kidder wrote about life in a nursing home in his novel, Old Friends.  It is a wonderful, insightful story of strangers becoming community, of people near the end of life whose history and stories seem present in fragments if at all.  Kidder borrows a line from a Frost poem as he wonders, “What to make of a diminished thing…”  After the revelation about Marie, I began to look at the people around me wondering how many of them I had diminished simply because I didn’t know more of their story. How many had I discounted without intending to, due to my tunnel vision about who they were, what they had accomplished, and what they had to contribute.  I became more aware of the risk of living out of my own perception without acknowledging the inherent limitations.

I could suggest that we focus on gathering every tidbit of information we can about those we encounter.  Although there are occasions when we should be open to a fuller life story, it isn’t practical to think we can literally know everything about someone before we assess who they will be to us or who will be to them.  What I am suggesting is that we work to be fully aware that there will always be more to the story than we will ever know. That our respective stories will be a part of our exchange even when we don’t know they’re there.  And knowing that, we will add an extra measure of grace to our giving and our taking.

I think Plato said it well…

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Turning the day RED

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Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day.  For years the symbol of a single red ribbon has called us to care, and to act.  In 1996, I completed my master’s thesis on the impact of  individuals disclosing to their family that they were HIV positive. During my research I interviewed people diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and in various stages of their journey with a terminal illness.  My time spent hearing their stories was life changing.

I discovered individuals living with courage in the face of a disease that isolated and ostracized.  I discovered many families rising up with compassion and integrity to surround their loved one with their presence.  In spite of the stigma, the known and the unknown, the agony of watching their child, sibling, parent, spouse, friend waste away before their eyes. . .they stayed, and they loved.

I discovered the power of numbers to tell us, “Somebody should do something.”.  I discovered the power of names and faces that told me, “I must do something.”.

A lot has changed in the 15 years since I heard those stories.  Too many have died.  Medicine has helped the battle be more chronic and less terminal.  We’ve gotten smarter and better at prevention.

What hasn’t changed?

  • We are still at risk of letting stigma and ignorance blind us to the names and faces of the individuals and families living with AIDS.
  • We are still at risk of believing HIV/AIDS is not our problem.
  • We are still at risk of robbing ourselves of the gift of courageous stories in exchange for our compassion and action.

We all know someone who has been affected by HIV/AIDS. . .even if we don’t know who they are.  My hope is this is the day we choose to be the eyes and ears of compassion in all our encounters, to those whose wounds are obvious, and to those whose wounds we can’t see.  After all, we are all walking wounded.

 

What’s in a name?

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The radio host was giving the latest update on the BP oil spill in the gulf.  He reviewed the numbers…of gallons of oil, dollars lost, estimates of damage, benefits owed to those affected, and the lives lost.  Then the show took an unexpected turn.  The host began to list the names of the men who died while working on the Deep Water Horizon.

He spoke about each man, painting a brief, personal portrait of his life.  He talked about wives and fiancés, children, unborn to young adults.  He told about interests and hobbies.  He gave witness to each life and the tremendous void left by each death.  I felt the weight of each loss as it spread beyond family to friends, to communities, to a nation, and to me.

I realized that in spite of the months of “late breaking news” about the BP catastrophe, I had only heard these men mentioned a handful of times since the day they died, and only as a group of 11 dead.  This was the first time I knew them individually, by name, with a life story.  I was embarrassed and ashamed by the lack of attention given to this loss.

Numbers are important.  They tell us the size of impact, whether we’re talking about the casualties of war, the rise in poverty, the dead after Katrina, or how many victims of domestic violence are housed in shelters.  Numbers tell us something must be done.  But numbers don’t speak to our heart.

Names are different than numbers.  I’ve known since April 20, 2010, that 11 workers died in the BP explosion.  But it wasn’t until I heard their names and stories that they stepped off the news page and became real.  These men who had lived, worked, loved, and died are now my loss too.

If numbers tell us something must be done, names tell us we must do something.  Names tell us that each number represents a person, a history, a story not unlike our own.  We are not separate in our moments of joy, not isolated in moments of loss. Ernest Hemingway knew it when he wrote:

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

On April 20, 2010, eleven men died while working on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  Their names are listed below.  Their loss calls us to care and to act, for their deaths are our loss too.

 

 

Jason Anderson, 35, Bay City, TX, father of two.
Aaron Dale “Bubba” Burkeen, 37, Neshoba Co, MS, survived by his wife Rhonda and two children.
Donald Clark, 48, Newellton, LA, survived by his wife Sheila, two sons, and two daughters.
Stephen Ray Curtis, 40,  Georgetown, LA, survived by his wife and two teenage children.
Gordon Jones, 28, Baton Rouge, LA, left wife, Michelle, who was three weeks from delivery of a daughter.
Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, survived by his wife Courtney, and two children.
Karl Keppinger, Jr., 38, Natchez, MS, veteran of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, father of one child.
Keith Blair Manuel, 56, Gonzales, LA, father of three daughters, avid LSU fan.
Dewey Revette, 48, State Line, MS, 29 years experience drilling.
Shane Roshto, 22, Franklin Co, MS, survived by his wife, Natalie, and a toddler son.
Adam Weise, 24, Yorktown, TX, youngest of four children, started working offshore after graduating from high school.