Men, liquor, punk and pregnancy
Longtime readers have heard it all before. First I shared it, then I shaped it. Now I continually reinterpret, run my fingers over the words, trace the abandonment, part of the story that led me to where I am now. I've gone from openness to control to anger twice removed.
My fabulous writing group met on Monday night. I finally passed Reconciliation on to them, the story of the end of Kevin's life, how we supposedly reconciled through his long last hospitalization. Kevin was my mother's boyfriend from 1984 until his death in 2002. He was a mixed bag, more rotten than good, and his presence in my life led to the troubles, continued and expanded my narrative of never-good enough, of self-blame, the dance of convincing and wheedling, of proving my worth to the unworthy and congenitally reluctant.
I passed the story on to the group, but I didn't want to go there. Life has been emotional enough lately without retracing the days of ventilators and morphine. But there I sat with these wonderful supportive women, who had kind words and useful feedback, including the desire to hear more of my story with Kevin, to have the payoff, to understand why reconciliation was required in the first place and what led to it in the end.
I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It's complicated, of course. Unfortunately, the upshot of what I am thinking is that there was no reconciliation. What went on for those six and half months of Kevin's final hospitalization, of all those hours I spent next to him in the hospital, was another one of my attempts at healing, at proving how good I was, at trying to remake the old story in a different way. The guy was a bastard who didn't deserve my goodness, but I was -- and remain -- too fucking kind to have treated him any other way. It's the same kind of empathy that keeps me from being able to direct too much anger at my mother (with her own troubles) or at a person who recently did me wrong, who hasn't manned up and never will (poor kid: it's hard to be strong when you're an emotional mess).
I started this post yesterday, kept on typing and erasing with the usual worries about pulling up the past on a thick narrative rope. I don't write this to keep the past alive, I write it to interpret it and my interpretation keeps changing. Conveying the depth of my abandonment -- my abandonment "issues," as cliched as they are, as typical, as shared with the masses -- without resorting to maudlin description is almost impossible and yet I am compelled to write about it, to share it, to neutralize it.
We could take my history with Kevin scene by scene, ugly fight by nasty canard, that first dinner where Kevin tore into 14-year-old me for being quiet and sullen followed by my mother having dinner at his house every night followed by her telling me that Kevin said I was evil and she agreed followed by my move to the Little House, the stillbirth, the continued life in bad circumstances. I could add in the confusing bits: his sit down with me and my boyfriend D after the pregnancy, lecturing D about our relationship "because her father isn't doing it;" his confidence in my intellectual abilities and advice to get a library degree; his funny stories that left the impression of uproarious laughter long after the plots were forgotten.
My child's mind fit the pieces together, they already were set in place, but the neglect of my teen years cemented the image: I was the catalyst for the bad things that happened to me. I caused it all. I was a bad person. I deserved what I got. I was a liar and a cheat, irresponsible and evil, too quiet or not quiet enough. Because of the evil within me, the evil I spread with my bad words and dark looks, I was left behind. I was to blame for my own neglect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the history. I know it's bullshit. And I know that writing it out in such bald language doesn't really help. It does get me angry, which isn't such a bad thing -- though the anger remains directionless and sometimes turns on me. Lately, with the help of my therapist, I've been feeling the feelings -- the sadness, the need that once had no end, the anger -- with the understanding that they won't destroy me. That they are totally appropriate. It's the only way I know to heal at this point, letting them out in fits and starts when they need it, giving them a voice, that and being brave, knowing I'm not a child anymore.
It's less about the history now, it's about the effect, the acceptance, the march forward. The feelings are with me in the room, they know why I've called them here, and we're going to hash it out together. We will gut and rebuild my psyche without looking back.
Enough about this. You were expecting stories about men (the gropings), liquor (siphoned gin leaking out of jars on the bus from Wilmington to Newark), punk (fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat), and pregnancy (pushing out silence). But I'm sure you have some of your own stories of love and the bottle and the music that saved you, that kept you from smashing something, that tapped into your anger before your head exploded.
I will leave you with a bit of punk, Riot by the Dead Kennedys, something I listened to on my headphones as I walked through the Wilmington night, lit cigarette resting between my fingers. I was a little unsteadily from the gin, from the vodka, from the amaretto, but I kept on going, turned the anger in on itself, gave myself another scene for future narrative.
Image: Legs, Little House, 1985ish, one of three in the "Legs" series, probably taken when I was up late and liquored, waiting for a man.
Title comes from a comment on my essay from the writers' group. I tacked on the last word.
Adding it up
My mother and I have always been good at taking bad situations and making them funny, using dark humor to get through dark times. When Emmet the crazy black cat, a nice bit of fluff and bones and wild eyes, sneaked into my room and killed my dwarf rabbit, we joked that we could use the bunny’s corpse for a Halloween decoration, maybe tie it to some sort of noose and hang it on the front porch. When it came time to sell the house we had shared with my stepfather, we traced our outlines on the walls of his weight room, shaky portraits of us in victorious poses, leaping into the air, laughing at what he would think when he saw them.
I remember Christmas season 2001 in the hospital, a thin Kevin draped on the bed, the tubes and wires tying him down, the dark mucous that spewed from his trach when he coughed, our discussion of Christmas TV specials and Burl Ives. He was coherent for much of that month, almost like the old Kevin. “Have a hol –ly jol – ly Christ-mas,” he wheezed in a particularly ludicrous way, flopping his hands back and forth. We all laughed.
Kevin died nine years ago today. It’s raining here, raining very hard and as I type the rain drums along, not in any sort of rhythmic way. It’s never-ending and relentless. You couldn’t write music to it or make any pattern out of the falling. During Kevin’s funeral, a ceremony jammed in right before Easter, the priest made a reference to Kevin’s “elderly” dog, Woody. I don’t know what it was about that – Woody seemed in the prime of life, though he got lymphoma and died less than two years later – but Kevin’s son and I just started to laugh. The silent giggles enveloped us as we thought of solid sweet Woody, young and energetic, being characterized as something he wasn’t to make a eulogist's point.
Kevin, I’m sorry that I was so reluctant to read at your funeral, that I didn’t volunteer quickly. I don’t even remember what I read, but I do remember thinking that we were a pathetic crew, letting history and your too-strong personality influence how we said goodbye. You were the last of my mother’s husbands, though you never were an actual husband, and I hear the rain and wish I could make a sick joke, wish I could hear you laugh. But I know the ambiguity between us would have lasted until the end, that it's still here, stronger than death.
Dear Carol,
Today, riding my bike, I remembered a dream:
It was a cool, bright morning in mid-October.
We were bicycling through the part of town
where the past and the future are one.
We came to the little rowhouse
where I lived when I first met you.
An old woman who looked like my grandmother
sat in a rocking chair on the porch.
There was an empty chair next to her.
Beside her, on the floor, lay a big grey collie.
"Carol, Daniel," I said. "Wait. It's Barney!"
But you kept going.
"Here Barney," I said.
He got up and came over to the edge of the yard,
but not close enough so that I could touch him.
I started to get off my bike,
but my grandmother said,
"You can't come here now.
You have to go with them."
I looked up the street.
You and Daniel had stopped
and were looking back in my direction,
but I could see that you could not see me.
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, published in Slow Dancer (North American edition), No. 29, Spring 1993
Image: Kevin at 38. This was taken at Hoopes Reservoir in 1984 around the time that my mother met him.
I'm pretty sure he wrote this poem right before his diagnosis of myelofibrosis.
From today's prompt: Count them.
Reconciliation
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
Kevin’s last day started with a predawn pantomime, a fluttering and flapping of his thin-boned arms, his blue eyes serious as he gestured to his throat and chest: I can’t breathe.
My boyfriend Stephen and I were keeping vigil in his hospice room, taking over that night for my mother and Kevin’s 24-year-old son Ian. The cots were rigid, thin, like subpar stretchers but low to the floor. We would periodically awaken to the creak of the door as the night nurse checked on Kevin, the widening wedge of light from the hallway prying our eyes open.
Hospitals and hospices are yellow-tinged at night, their lights low, the rectangles of frosted glass over the bed or ceiling fluorescents dimmed just enough to give the nurses light to pierce a vein. The effect is barroom dingy and sordid, the supine patients the barflies, the nurses cocktail waitresses plying pharmaceuticals and sympathy. Still, in the dim glow of the light over the bed Kevin looked at least a decade younger than his 55 years. His skin retained its tanned, smooth quality and his hair was still chestnut brown without a trace of grey. It was his weight that gave him away, that and the tubes, the hissing oxygen tank. After nine years with the terminal bone marrow disease myelofibrosis, after almost seven months in and out of the critical care unit at Georgetown University Hospital, Kevin’s five foot ten frame had melted down to 86 pounds.
With his tracheostomy speaking valve removed, Kevin could not talk, but his distress was clear. I groggily rushed to get help. Kevin again fluttered his arms, too earthbound to be wings, too light to be useful, at the nurse. Thinking a change of position would take the pressure off his fluid-filled lungs, she and I turned him on his side. She administered a bolus of morphine through his IV.
Kevin’s body slumped. His eyes closed and his breathing took on an autonomic quality. It was as though she had flipped a switch. Kevin’s panicked pantomime was his last conscious act.
“You’d better call your mother,” the nurse told me. “There’s been a change.” It was 4:15 a.m., March 24, 2002. Kevin was dying of untreated pneumonia.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1984
Kevin Sheehan, poet, philosopher, carpenter, moved down the street from my mother and me in late March. Pale pink cherry blossoms feathered the tree out front. April’s candy-colored tulips foretold of May’s riotous azaleas. My mother invited our attractive new neighbor over for dinner, plied him with Szechuan chicken, coarse red wine, and talk of the Romantic poets. I was fourteen, a high school freshman, a volleyball cheerleader and devotee of German class, obsessed with the pop groups Duran Duran, Wham!, and Haircut 100.
He entered our lives like an explosion, tossed our world this way and that. That first dinner led to more. Kevin objected to my teen angst, my silence at the table, so my mother started cooking meals in our kitchen to bring to his house every night, always leaving me a plate. Most weekends I abandoned Wilmington to go to my grandfather’s place in Maryland, where I stayed in the Little House, an adjacent summer cottage that had no heat, plumbing, or phone line. My grandfather removed his prosthetic foot and hearing aids at night, leaving me completely unsupervised. I embraced the blurrying effects of alcohol, raided my grandfather’s liquor cabinet (the Johnny Walker Red, the sour Paul Masson wine) or siphoned my mother’s gin into a jar to bring with me.
That summer I met a 20-year-old college student who liked to visit after midnight. I learned to anticipate his knocks on the door as I watched Kung Fu reruns in the dark and yearned for his kisses with their heady taste of Budweiser and pot.
By September, my wardrobe darkened to black with fluorescent accents, safety pins dangling from my ears, I had discovered the saving power of punk music. At Kevin’s house he and my mother ate by candlelight, drank bottles of Sangre de Toro or gin and tonics, light on the ice. They talked Keats or Nietzsche over homemade French fries and garlicky chicken. At home I poured slugs of amaretto, made bitter screwdrivers, the orange juice bleached pale by vodka. I walked the streets in the dark, smoking clove cigarettes, my Walkman blasting the Dead Kennedys.
Washington, DC, March 21, 2002
“But I’m only 55 years old,” he cried out. “I’m not ready to die!”
Kevin spoke from his bed in the critical care unit, a thin thing, all stretched skin and solid bone, solid from the myelofibrosis.
With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow fills in with scar tissue, becoming fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in the body’s last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. The blood these organs make is inefficient, practically useless, the cells misshapen and immature. Already overloaded with the task of filtering out the extra white blood cells the body produces as part of the disease, gorged with their own blood-making, the liver and spleen swell dramatically.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage the disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant, which are both dicey bets. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work.
Myelofibrosis was killing Kevin in its indirect way. It dodged the blame, pointed its finger at the hospital, the pneumonia, the fact that Kevin’s body had stopped digesting the food that was coming to his stomach via a surgically-installed tube.
Delaware and Maryland, 1984-2002
This is what happened during my mother and Kevin’s 18-year relationship: Thirteen moves, three mortgages, one bankruptcy and foreclosure. Scores of fights. My move to the Little House at fifteen when my mother bought a one-bedroom house down the street. My labor in the Little House at sixteen which resulted in one stillborn child. My return to the Little House a week after the stillbirth. Four lousy cars. One new car totaled. One new car driven into the ground. Four dogs come and gone. A summer of no communication between me and them. One (empty) refusal to attend my first wedding. One spleen out. At least three breakups. One Ph.D. completed by Kevin at the midpoint of his illness. Dozens of philosophical conversations between the three of us over red wine, candlelit, intense, perfect. Laughter – at Kevin’s jokes or our shared ones -- the biting wit, the piercing eye. Seven hospitalizations.
Maryland and Delaware, 1992
The biggest fight I remember took place right before I left the East Coast for graduate school in Illinois, only months before Kevin was diagnosed. It was a fight that stretched out over a day, with deceptive lulls, lacunae of calm. There was a truck ride along a ribbon of asphalt, the tall green corn of an Eastern Shore August tunneling us in, and the yelling, about what I no longer remember. “Get out!” Kevin screamed at my mother as he pulled off the road. She slipped out the door, squawking all the while. As I slipped along after her, Kevin said, “You don’t have to go, Jen.”
“Why would she want to stay here? You’re not her father!” my mother screamed, a moment that clicked a switch inside of me: like I needed a father? Had she been looking for one?
I followed my loyalty out of the truck.
That night, back in Wilmington, my mother and I ordered a black olive pizza. Kevin, who was not planning on eating pizza, walked into the kitchen as we were opening the box. He hated black olives. Our choice was a choice against him (you were either for or against Kevin: there were no other interpretations). Spit flew. He flung a plain yogurt container across the kitchen where it exploded, heavy and white, against the oak cabinets. More screaming, my mother’s hysterical rush into the night, the dog chasing after her.
Kevin looked at me icily over the banister as he walked upstairs, his belly swollen, his spleen secretly filtering out excess white blood cells, heavy with blood-making.
“This only happens when you’re here. You cause these things.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
I was defiant. I knew he spoke lies. But a lifetime of blame comes home to roost at some point.
Washington, DC 2001 - 2002
In early September 2001, almost nine years after his diagnosis, Kevin checked into Georgetown University Hospital for shortness of breath. His pleural cavity, the space that houses the lungs, was filling with fluid.
I imagined the sharp straw they used to drain the fluid out, thin, metallic, pointed like a quill at one end, the flow of a liquid as viscous as a milkshake, as red as blood. One of the effects of end-stage myelofibrosis is a low platelet count, which can cause difficulty clotting. The internal puncture wound from the drain kept bleeding. Blood drizzled and oozed. It pooled in his pleural cavity before finally solidifying into a gelatinous mass. The mass interfered with his ability to breathe. It had to come out.
September that year was all clear blue skies and fluffy clouds, superior, deceptive mornings of pure sunshine. On September 11th, after being belatedly evacuated from the U.S. Senate office building where I worked as a librarian (the march home with other federal and nonprofit workers, the quiet skies and scary rumors, the unreality of it all), I took my unexpected afternoon off to visit Kevin in his hospital room. Stephen and I walked from our Adams Morgan apartment to Georgetown, a walk I would repeat countless times over the next several months. It was a liminal moment, the time of change. It was one of Kevin’s last afternoons of relative normalcy.
This is what happened to Kevin in seven months of hospitalization: Three thoracic surgeries to remove blood clots. One unnecessary hernia operation that landed him on a ventilator (aka respirator) for the first time. Several emergency intubations, a procedure that takes place when one’s oxygen levels fall precipitously and medical personnel force a breathing tube hooked to a ventilator into one’s lungs. One intubation-scarred epiglottis that let food and liquid enter his compromised lungs, making them more prone to infection. Two failed swallowing tests. Installation of a tube that went directly from his stomach through his abdomen to a drip bag of nutrient-rich sludge, Kevin’s “food.” Ten days of almost-fatal bleeding. Two expensive doses of blood Factor VII to stop the bleeding. Three tracheostomies. Numerous bouts of pneumonia. One nasty bedsore that went down to his tailbone. Endless bags of fentanyl, of hardcore antibiotics, of morphine. Several triumphant February walks around the critical care unit, Kevin gripping a walker, all 86 pounds of him getting along on pure will.
We watched over him, my mother and me, were at the hospital together almost every day for six and a half months. When she got the flu, when she moved from her apartment to a condominium, when she had to complete something on deadline, I took on her role at the sickbed. After Kevin emerged from a drug-induced coma, when the bleeding had stopped, he talked of angels and devils, the murk of being subdued by drugs, by the ventilator, how my mother and I appeared as saviors in the darkness.
He apologized.
I continued to keep watch. I listened. Sometimes I read to him. One afternoon a favorite nurse talked about an unnamed patient who didn’t get visitors: “That’s what happens when you’re not nice to people in your life.” If you only knew, I thought.
I was there because I cared. I was there because I wanted to help. But I was also there to redeem myself, to erase my own sins, for being the kind of person parents abandon and people are cruel to, for not being able to love the baby I gave birth to when I was sixteen.
Here, with Kevin trapped in the hospital, I could show my goodness. I could show him his goodness, that even those who do bad things deserve to be treated as human beings. It was absolution for both of us, hope in life, in the power of human beings to forgive and be made new.
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
My mother woke quickly to my call, roused Ian with a shoulder tap. They rushed without panic in the manner of people used to medical emergencies, pulled on yesterday’s clothes in the dark and splashed cold water on their faces. Casey House Hospice was in Rockville, Maryland, about 15 miles away from my mother’s Takoma Park condominium, a journey from one set of desperate concrete strip malls to another, up Georgia Avenue past the bodegas and Chinese grocers to the rolling greenery of the distant Washington, DC suburbs. In good traffic the trip took about 40 minutes, a buffer zone between my mother’s life and what remained of Kevin’s.
The morning was cool. Optimistic. Spring coaxed green out of brown earth and black branches. Forsythia bushes flamed across the landscape and daffodils sprung from dampened ground. A few hours after my mother and Ian arrived, Joe, Kevin’s closest brother, drove in from his hotel. We began our death watch.
The day before, the hospice minister, an Episcopalian, had visited Kevin. Stephen, Ian and I were there, sitting in the dusty afternoon, quiet under the oxygen hiss. Kevin had something to confess and he wanted us to witness it. He told of something bad he had done, bad enough to send him to hell. The minister was sympathetic and kind, told Kevin that he was not damned.
“Does that sound ok, guys?” Kevin turned his head to face us, without irony, sincere. We reassured him.
Each of us dies an individual. Some people go on the off flutter of the heart, the sudden starburst in the brain. Others may slip into a coma and then just stop breathing. Kevin went out slowly. Six of us – me, my mother, Stephen, Ian, and Joe, sat in the room. Woody, Kevin’s golden retriever, panted on the slick floor. We watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall, rhythmic, machine-like. His jaw was slack, the mossy tombstones of his teeth showing just under the lips, and with each intake of breath his mouth opened, only to drop again on the exhale.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The hiss of the oxygen tank. Sickness has a smell, a kind of fecundity, the triumph of bacteria, rich and thick. The room smelled of mucus and rubbing alcohol, of pneumonia and plastic. We sat and watched Kevin breathe. We wondered how long dying could take. We looked out the window at the incongruous spring-in-the-country scene. We excused ourselves to escape into life, to go for a walk, to read a magazine in the mauve and grey common room.
You might imagine that hospices are full of ancient people, wrinkled sickly husks, people who have had opportunities to live full and hopefully happy lives. The only other patient I remember was a woman who couldn’t have been past her thirties. She sat in her room with the door open, watching television in her hospital gown, the remote in her pale hand. A layer of fuzz covered her scalp, the aftereffects, I assumed, of a failed chemotherapy regime. Most people went to Casey House Hospice because they required serious medical attention to be comfortable: pumped-in oxygen, help in being turned, an IV, a catheter. Kevin, who could barely move and was dependent on oxygen and constant pain relief, fit into this category. This woman must have as well. But she looked so young, so alive and alone, free of tubes, with the enviable ability to move on her own power.
Back in the room. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The slack jaw, the shock of brown hair, the fluttering of Kevin’s heart underneath his solid thin bones. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Outside, robins tore into earthworms, tulips inched towards the sun. A spring breeze, hopeful, but with a touch of winter, pulled through the soft green new leaves. We didn’t speak. We watched. We wondered how long it would take. He took another gulp of air, his chest swelling, before he discarded it again.
Midday, Stephen and I escaped to get lunch for the family. We left the hot heavy air of the hospice and leapt into the car. The outskirts of Montgomery County were unfamiliar, the high and wide malls with their box stores, the restaurants with heavy meat and fried food. We drove somewhat randomly, would stop and look at menus and report back, finally bringing back bags laden with fat-crisp food, comforting and rich.
The room hissed. Kevin breathed low and wet through the pneumonia. Each member of the family took a break to eat in the common room, nibbled at the French fries or the fried chicken or the veggie burgers with cheese. We ate without tasting, ate because we had to, because that’s what the living do. Back in the room, the rhythm slowed, but the pattern remained the same.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The fluttering was fainter, Kevin’s heart still hard at work, the lungs doing their duty, slower now. Slower.
At 3:00 p.m., I went outside to call Martha, an old college friend, someone who knew the stories about Kevin, knew his effect on my life. The expansiveness of Kevin’s last hospitalization was almost impossible to convey. How could I explain the deathbed, his relentless heart and lungs? Typically, Martha kept on talking and talking. I could have left the phone on the path and gone back in, I could have just hung up or claimed a low battery. Instead, I paced. I listened to the swish of car tires on the interstate. I looked back at the window. I stepped on the cracks and watched a line of ants invade the grass. Finally, I cut her off mid-sentence. “I really have to get back to the room.”
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
We were tired with Kevin’s effort, with the winding down, almost bored with it. His body clung to life. The pneumonia had taken over his lungs, it was slowing down his heart, the two organs were working together as always, going out as a pair. The hiss of the oxygen. The rise and fall of his chest. The crazy tappings of his heart. Outside, the sunlight thinned and the bushes shivered with afternoon’s end.
Kevin took a deep breath. His heart gave a feeble beat. He exhaled. My mother gestured to his chest, Woody barked, and we clung to each other, my mother, Ian, Stephen and me, while Joe looked on.
Kevin went out in a flash of light, my mother told us. After the flash, she had a vision of him walking along a riverbank, his old collie Augie by his side.
That night I thought back to the afternoon that I had massaged Kevin’s scalp. His skin was thin as vellum, his hair hadn’t been washed in weeks. Kevin closed his eyes contentedly, like a cat in the sun, as I worked my fingers through his unkempt hair and palpitated his forehead. Why couldn’t I have done more of that? More handholding, more touch? Hospitals are impersonal anonymous places. Most of the touch he received was the medical kind, invasive, bloody, painful. I wished I had massaged him more, had held his hand more. It was all too late now. His body was heading for ashes.
I woke at 2 a.m. to the feeling of Kevin’s hand upon mine, his presence in the room. “You were there for me, and that was enough,” he told me. “Thank you.”
I went back to sleep.
A version of the personal essay I wrote for my creative nonfiction class (edited version added Sunday afternoon). If you got through all 3300 words of it, I thank you.
Riffs on a theme
laundry
thinking about last night's writers' group meeting
cleaning
dishwasher emptying
pondering 80s band names
exercising
music
daydreaming
talking on the phone (a long overdue and good, if a bit unsettling, conversation)
I need to complete my assignment for my creative nonfiction class. I need to take the story of Kevin's death -- the long day, the endless winding down, the surreal quality of it all -- and find a different way in. I've written about 3000 words, most of them the wrong ones. I need to do it, but keep on avoiding the task.
In this week's "lecture," our teacher was talking about finding the theme, the underlying topic that holds a piece of writing together, something that takes it out of a story of a series of events into something larger than itself. This is what is missing from my current draft. It's missing from some of my other work as well. People die. They rush into it, they take their time about it, they go out in an explosion of gunpowder or in the slow drip of blood and breath. This is not a theme, this is a fact, and it's not enough to make Kevin's last day compelling story material.
So what is the theme? Has it revealed itself yet? It finally hit me: forgiveness.
My forgiveness of Kevin through his long slow horrible hospitalization. My self-absolution through being there every day, through every up and down, by being kind to someone who was unable to treat me with kindness. His apology. His forgiveness of himself (the day before he died, three of us in the room during his confession to the hospice minister, the story I already knew but that Kevin's son was hearing for the first time, our role as witnesses, to the story, to Kevin's pre-Vatican II Catholic abused child fear of being bad and going to hell). Fear of what would happen to him after death kept Kevin going for a long time. He confessed and was absolved. And then his body slowly let go, loosened its grip on life.
OK. I have a theme. It's the same theme that runs through almost everything I write. Now I have to figure out how to approach it, in my voice, without going overboard. That last day where we weaved in between his hospice room, where death was taking its time, and the outside world, where spring was everywhere, where we had to eat, where people rushed and lived and acted as if they were immortal? I have to make it real and rich and, ultimately, about something else.
Fingers crossed that I can pull it off by Sunday night.
Boho limbo
So he’s sick and it’s rainy and our days have a very strange flow. It’s like being in another world, half-submerged in water, in the computer’s eerie glow, in SpongeBob, and Dinosaur, in sweaty blankets. My brain softens and my limbs get floppy. But I have so much to do and so much to say.
I wish I could figure out what it was.
Yesterday my husband took kid duty while I attempted to complete some Christmas-related tasks. When my sewing wasn’t working out, I moved on to writing. There’s a lot going on in my mind right now, both above and below the surface, but none of it wants to come out on paper. I spent a few hours trying various approaches, but nothing worked. It was all smoke and posturing. I am hidden from myself and won’t have much of an opportunity over the next two weeks to figure out where I am.
Or I know where I am, but can’t put it on paper. Every time I sit down to write, Kevin, my mother’s dead boyfriend, keeps popping into my head. It’s like he’s here, tugging on my sleeve, wanting me to write about him. But I have nothing good to say. I don’t want to write about his bullying, how my perception of him is changing. I have no desire to focus on his illness and his long death. What I’ve been thinking about are the early days, his first few years in our lives and the whole bohemian nature of his life with my mother. There’s something to admire in an authentic life, lived for art, independent, all about the words and thought, with some tangible stuff tossed in – the ability to make things (he was a carpenter) and to think and write is a heady combination. My adolescence was steeped in conversations about art and what it meant to live authentically, about language and philosophy and the importance of working with one's hands.
Their relationship was tempestuous. Nasty. Shaky, despite its 18-year duration. And it’s fine and all to talk about being authentic when someone else is supporting you financially, as my mother did Kevin for years after he quit carpentry to get his Ph.D (and then got sick). Really, the whole thing gave me a taste for a romantic melodramatic lifestyle while also scaring me away from it. I'm in a sort of bohemian artistic limbo, which results in some conflicted feelings about art and my place in the world.
But I am grateful for the bohemianism, for the fact that I was exposed to a different way of thinking early on. That’s not all Kevin, of course. My mother was the one who read Gertrude Stein to me across the kitchen table when I was seven, who talked to me about description and language, who tossed the television set and the car away at various times (or, more accurately, couldn’t afford the car anyway). She’s the poet, the potter, the maker of jewelry out of broken glass and rusty X-acto blades.
It’s all still percolating. I don’t know what to do with these fragments. Hopefully they will work themselves out, piece themselves together, over the next month or so. Unless I've exorcised them by writing this.
In the meantime, so much to do. Good thing I got up early.
Image: Me and the kid on West Street. The house on the left (with the brick sidewalk) was the one Kevin was renovating when he met my mother. We lived three or four houses down the street. This is the same picture that is on the sidebar.
That yearning
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
Remember part of me is you
Where it takes me:
*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.
*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.
*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.
*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.
But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.
I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.
When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."
Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.
Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."
A virulent strain of grief
I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was living in the Little House with disastrous results and he and my mother were at the thin edge of eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully, though that of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning: The below goes into detail about an illness and a harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well, it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease, though it was probably pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail, to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy. People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work (because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying to write about that time in a way that makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was admitted and how early on we thought he was going to slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax scares and work closures, of mail that came to the federal library where I worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a journey that required great vigilance on my mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they want to do things, think that action is always the best course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all those details of his hospitalization came out, details I have stored away for years: the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations, emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and that eating in front of him when he was getting his food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound frame and a walker and did halting laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month, disguised under a new premise with a much younger protagonist. After the month was over and the first draft off my head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I know next to nothing about the disease I had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And what do I know, really, about parental grief, which is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing research, reading books and looking at websites. There is one blog out there, very detailed and well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling her little boy's fight against cancer. That little boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing this?).
When you are in the middle of a life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all you can think about. Everything becomes medical and you find out all you can. You learn about the strength of nurses and the support system that crops up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you never thought were possible before. You are steeped in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like it will never end. You don’t want it to end with death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this family and the little boy that will never grow up. I hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to all the people who have experienced such prolonged pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore, April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a way to write something that sings and is true and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings it to life and honors those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top image: Kevin at Georgetown University Hospital, January 2002, about three months before he died.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date unknown.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling Stone.
The centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year. Kevin had caught it himself, straight from the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and onion, and there were mashed potatoes, cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans on the side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about politics as usual. I wish I could go back and capture those conversations, remember the deep level jokes and high level discussions. Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin was devoted to real conversation and humor, sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was the closest we ever came to feeling like a family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin got sick, when he was just starting his PhD program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a puppy. I had taken the train from DC to Wilmington to visit and things were unusually smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, garlicky and herby and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin had taken a year off from college in 1966 after being busted for selling marijuana (a setup, he claimed) and he headed off to California, hitchhiked down the coast. He talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones fans. There was talk of high school dances, the moves and the moments. The radio was playing music from that era and he and Mom started to slow dance as I watched from the table.
What do you do when a family culture dies? When a powerful personality disappears? The center did not hold. We’re still trying to create our own gravity.
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old black and white composition books, barely held together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin, half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems that he probably wrote in his senior year of high school. They are short and generally angry, each one typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a page.
If I could explain the importance of the notebook, maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working class intellectual. In the midst of fatal illness, he completed his dissertation and received a PhD. He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I still laugh when we remember his stories and jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often – he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability to see the darkness in himself and others never took into account the overwhelming goodness we each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and black math was caused by a childhood of pain and anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering was also a time to make peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every day, there for both him and my mother, keeping company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show that we all have the ability to be good. Even him. Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched and stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A small group of family gathered in his hospice room and listened to him wind down, heard the silent spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to life again as we sat and waited for death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an image of him walking along a river path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those six months of dying were great? What a wonderful opportunity for me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You were there for me. Thank you.
Then he was gone.
Two Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her in. There were stories of other dogs that had cracked after hearing the tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground, dogs that pushed their way through second story window screens, desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb and munitions tests across the river. The aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s general nervousness, but now when a thunderstorm blew through town, she was absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed her. By the time you got the pill down, the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to the local grocery store. Mom rolled the windows down a safe distance, locked the doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green beans when she heard a little girl’s voice. “Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the beans and continued to the toiletry aisle. The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced past the row of shampoos to the plate glass windows – were those thunderclaps she heard? – when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on the run from one of our favorite check-out guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger and always made friendly conversation. Louise darted for the automatic doors, heading along the sidewalk in the direction of the Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering force. She watched Louise scatter a school of carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant and made a left into the hardware store. Mom followed, pushing past customers, until she found Louise in the back of the store, trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the storm passed, then walked her back to the car and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently, the dog panicked when she heard the approaching thunder, pushed through an open car window and went looking for Mom. We were grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I came home from grad school for a visit. Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She was terrified. If no one was home, she would attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would force her way through a closed window, pictured a return home to bloodied shards of glass and no dog. If someone was home, she would scratch and pace, pant and whine. Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
A Dream of the Snow
By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.
Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)
In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.
A Dream of the Snow
From Knife Gift by Kevin Sheehan
For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.
For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.
Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.
First time in weeks ...
The K story is changing. All of the sudden, there I am, with opinions and experiences and a viewpoint. K's arrival wasn't the first thing to ever happen to us. He stepped into a context, into a scene that needs to be set. And for this, I have to include my mother's second husband and the quirks of our great triumvirate. Without getting into it too much.
What is lost -- a tight, arid focus -- is worth losing. It's funnier, too. And maybe it's really about me anyway, right?
Making it personal
Yesterday, I read through what I've completed of my brick house. I ended up feeling as though I had swallowed a brick (and I now wonder how far I can take this analogy). It is dense stuff, well-crafted paragraphs that describe them, but as a story are somewhat monotonous. It lacks life. My mother is right -- this is about my experience, is my attempt to exculpate them, and to get over the past. So I have to jump back into the story, become the third character.
I also have to add some real life. That's difficult. The fights, well, they kind of blend together in my mind, though there are some very memorable ones. The conversations -- most of them are gone, too. But the past can be conjured, and sometimes impressions are better than facts.
The hospital and hospice: they are still fresh. I'm beginning to wonder how much of my story will be that, the time when I could be there so unconditionally, providing support, showing that I was a good person. That wasn't my intention, to focus on that time. But it was the beginning of forgiveness and understanding.
Enough navel-gazing for tonight.