September 13, 2008

On September 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas. Its 120 mph winds and rain reached 275 miles from its center. It ripped roofs off of houses, knocked down trees and power lines, blew the windows out of skyscrapers and exploded a giant hole in my heart.

On September 11, 2008, my dad called me from Conroe, Texas to tell me that the trip he and my mother had planned to come out and see us would have to be postponed, the airports were closed. I was confused because of the date. Was it because of terrorists? "No," my dad laughed, "I don't think the terrorists have figured out how to control the weather yet. It's because they're expecting Ike to touch down. They're extra careful about these things since Katrina." My parents lived on a flood plain and I begged them to consider going to stay with friends. "We'll be fine," said my dad. "I want to be here to move the sand bags if I need to. Don't worry about us. We'll catch a flight out when this blows over." We talked a while longer, a rare treat. My dad didn't like chatting on the phone. We talked about a passage in the Gospel of John. I don't remember which verse, specifically. I just remember it was John because we both loved that book with its non-linear perspective, its mystery and its poetic leaning. "Give my babies a kiss from me, and we'll see you soon," he said. "My babies." That's what he called his grandchildren. It irritated me irrationally. I hung up a little relieved that the mad cleaning frenzy could wait a few days before they came to see us in our tiny house.

I checked the weather throughout the night Friday and into Saturday morning. Ike made landfall around 2:00 Saturday morning. I tried to call my parents, knowing I wouldn't be able to get through. Everyone was trying to call their parents. Jammed phone lines, phone lines down, no cellular service. Not that my parents had cell phones. I prayed and assumed they were all right. Saturday afternoon with my babies in the back seat, I drove downtown to pick up my husband from work. We chattered about replacing our fence, I'd found someone giving away old fence boards. My husband answered my phone when it rang because I was driving.

It was my sister. I listened to his end of the conversation: "Oh.... oh... OK... well where are they now? ...  All right... she's driving, I'll have her call you."
I was pissed. I had assumed that my parents had jumped a plane somewhere and were on their way to our house. They sometimes had a habit of arriving unannounced. I thought about the toddler mess and un-dusted shelves and panicked. "Where are they? Don't tell me they're here!"
"No, they're not here. Just drive home."
"Then where are they? Are they OK?"
"Just get home."
"No, tell me now. What's going on?" My panic had shifted. I didn't like how calmly my husband was speaking. I didn't like that he wasn't telling me anything.
"I don't want to tell you while you're driving."
"I'm fine. Tell me."
"Your dad had a heart attack."
I don't remember the rest of the drive home. Only fighting the urge to throw up and the hot, pounding, ringing of disbelief in my head.

I sat in the garage and called my sister. We wept together and tried to figure out what to do. The airports were closed. My mother had no cell phone. All my sister had was the front desk phone number of the intensive care unit of the hospital where they were. I called over and over and over, trying to reach my mom. Phone lines still jammed. All I could think of was my mother, afraid and alone in a hospital waiting room with nothing to eat, nowhere to turn and her family stuck thousands of miles away. Her worst nightmare come true.

Later that evening, I finally did get through to her. Dad had been out in the hurricane, shoring up some things in their yard, moving some debris. He could never sit still in a crisis. A tree had fallen across their driveway, hitting their car. He came inside and told my mom he thought he was having a heart attack. The car was ruined, the driveway was blocked, the roads to their subdivision were impassable, so they started out on foot to the hospital. A stranger in a pick-up truck stopped for them, picked them up and got them as far as he could before his truck got stuck in the flooded streets. They walked some more in the wind and rain until another stranger picked them up, a doctor as it would happen, who took them to the hospital.

My phone rang Sunday morning during church. My mom had no idea what time or what day it was, just that the doctors had discovered a hole in the septum of my dad's heart. They would have to operate and repair it. Sunday night, instead of boarding a flight to visit me in Seattle, my dad boarded a life flight on a stretcher, heavily sedated and in critical condition. The hospital chartered an emergency flight to get him to San Antonio for open heart surgery. The hurricane had knocked out the power in the hospital, too. The generators were too overtaxed to be reliable during surgery. The airports were closed. I sat all night on the couch, nursing my baby, watching mindless TV, knitting a useless shawl, uttering wordless prayers from that place where anguish and fear live deep beneath the ability to verbalize.

Early in the morning I got the call. He made it. He was too unstable to operate. Congestive heart failure, wait and see. I took my kids to the park and sat on a stump. "My dad is dying," I wanted to tell the other moms as they chatted about shoes for pre-walkers and the best baby food mills. "There's a hole in his heart," I wanted to tell the birds that chirped obliviously around me. "He can't breathe on his own," I wanted to tell the sun that twinkled in the beautiful fall sky. "I can't get to him, the airports are closed," I wanted to tell the leaves that were just starting to change their colors. I said nothing and stared at my phone and let the kids play in the sandbox.

The airports finally opened. My sister went first because she didn't have any children. My brother went next because his wife would take care of his children. Then it was my turn and I would bring my children with me. We stayed in a hotel near the hospital and ran errands for my mom. Dad was stronger by then, but not yet ready for surgery. They released him to the hotel. FEMA vouchers paid for them to stay there. My dad fell in the lobby when he came down for breakfast. My daughter cried, the hotel employees scurried to find a wheelchair, hotel guests looked on with morbid curiosity, I watched as if from above myself. This was someone else's life. My mom sent us home. FEMA wasn't covering our stay, we were useless, they didn't need our help. My son called hotels "hospitals" for a year.

The morning Dad went in for surgery, my brother and sister thought to call and speak to him before he went in. I didn't. I didn't know I could do such a thing. It was so early. He made it through the surgery. One of the best heart surgeons in the country patched the hole in his heart. Two days later, on a Saturday afternoon, my mom called and told me that the doctors thought he was making good progress and they were going to take him off the ventilator the next day. She sounded a little more rested, hopeful, excited even. "I held his hand and sang to him. I told him I loved him. He's non-responsive, but I know he heard me. I'm almost positive he heard me. He moved a little." I passed on the good news to people who called to check, I went to sleep that night on the couch, lighter than I'd felt in weeks. I slept so hard I didn't hear the phone in the wee hours the next morning.

At about 4:00 AM on Sunday, October 5, 2008, the hurricane made landfall again. I missed the call because I was asleep. It woke me up but I didn't get there in time. I had to call her back. She was crying so hard I didn't recognize her voice. "He's gone. He didn't make it. He's gone." I hung up the phone and called a friend to go pick her up. I sat in the dark with my baby on my lap and the phone in my hand and I didn't know what to do. I threw up. I wondered if I should go back to sleep. I wondered if there was some kind of mistake. I sat for an hour, not wanting to wake up my husband or my daughter. Numb and empty, nursing my baby back to sleep. It finally occurred to me that my husband might want to know. I would have to say it out loud. I went up to the bedroom where they were sleeping and nudged my husband. "He's dead," was all I could say.

Four years later, I can't help but remember the hurricane. The sun shines today, the leaves are thinking about changing, the birds are hopping around the trees. My baby and toddler are full-fledged kids now. My son knows the difference between a hotel and a hospital. My daughter doesn't cry over her Papa any more. My mom is on a train tour of the Rockies with friends right now. None of us live on a flood plain any more. It sometimes seems unreal that we weathered that particular storm. But we did. The waters have receded, the power has been restored, the debris has been cleared and repairs have been made, the airports have been reopened and we can fly again. I always think of my dad on this day and tell him silently: "Don't worry about me. I'll catch a flight out when all this blows over."

Little Girl

Today is my dad's birthday. He would have been 66. I mark the day every year because it is almost impossible for me to forget dates. Unless they are happening in the future, and then it's almost impossible for me to remember them.

I resembled my dad physically when he was alive, and our personalities were very similar in a lot of important ways. The kind of ways that enabled us to enjoy an amiable relationship and not push each other's buttons too much. One time when I was getting in very bad trouble for some indiscretion in high school, he sent my mom out of the room and he said, "A father isn't supposed to have favorites, and I don't. But I think you and I understand each other, we think alike in some ways." I've always been his little girl.

My dad and me when I was a little girl.

I think about him every day. Before he died, I used to hear people say things like that and think "Oh, how morbid." It's because I didn't really understand. I didn't understand how you can miss someone, but not be sad all the time about it. For the first year after he died, I didn't understand how anyone could miss someone and not feel like they'd been punched in the stomach. For a year I saved up most of my tears all day and then cried them into the sink as I washed the dishes after dinner. I don't really do that any more.

I was thinking about his hands today. He had big, broad hands - full of scars. They were the hands of a much younger man. My sister said she would never marry someone who didn't have strong hands. She didn't either. The last time I saw him was in a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas. He was sick. He was waiting for open heart surgery. He was going to die. I think we both knew it, but we wouldn't say it. I sat with him on the bed and he held hands with my jBird. Her tiny white hand in his big brown one. Even sick, he was tanned from working in the yard. She sat and she petted the curly red hair on his arms. Sometimes he would slip and call her by my name. He sometimes had a hard time relating to me as an adult. I was always his little girl. It drove me nuts because I'm not a little girl.

"We never talked to you kids about dying," he said. "It's nothing to be afraid of."
"I know," I said.
"Papa, will you die?" jBird asked.
"Everybody dies, baby. It's part of life. It's why you live your life well today, so the dying is all right," he said. I'm not sure if he was talking to her or to me. I could only sit and listen. I had no words. I didn't want to lie or say something ridiculous and comforting.
"I want you to know I'm not afraid to die," he said. "I want you to know that whatever happens, it's all right. I should have talked to you more about this while you were a kid. Then you wouldn't be afraid."
"I'm not afraid," I said. "You did talk to us about this. It's just hard to know how to think about it until it happens. I'm OK. I want you to focus on getting better. You and Mom can move out West. You need to be near us."
"Yeah, Papa! You can come live with us!" jBird piped up.
He laughed. He always had a marvelous laugh. "I'd love that."

The Hooligan wasn't quite two yet and he was rolling around on the bed with my mom, showing how he could count backwards from 10. We watched them play for a while, because his big old pumpkin grin is somewhat irresistible. He looks so much like my dad. We didn't talk about this dying business any more. I sat and held his hand and I could almost believe that everything would be all right.

You know, everything is all right. He died. Three days after his surgery, just as the doctors said he was getting better. I'm not angry with them. They did their best. They were surprised and grief-stricken as well. But everything is all right. Sure, I miss him. I think of him every day. I think of him at milestones. I remember his birthday. I think of him today, his birthday. Tomorrow we go and get our new house inspected. It is our first house. We will be moving to someplace my dad has never seen. He would have been out of control with excitement. He would have driven me nuts. He would have had all sorts of advice about things I already know. He would have double checked that my husband knew what he was doing and it would have infuriated us. He would have had to have been restrained by my mother from coming immediately and painting every room and digging flower beds and fixing every loose screw in the place. He would have pestered my mom to look at the pictures of it over and over. I would have been irritable and flattered and I would have known that he was like a kid when he was excited about something and that he didn't really mean to intrude.

So I think of him especially today. I'm not very sad, though. I laugh at the silly things I remember about him. I laugh at how he would have been so excited to see this next step in my life. I wonder if where he is, he can. I don't wonder about it too much, though. Because he is where he is supposed to be and I am where I am supposed to be. And because he told me not to be afraid. Because I knew he was ready to go. Because he told me it's part of life. Because he told me to live the best I can now.  He told me everything would be all right. And I believed him. Because I've always been his little girl. And because I'm not a little girl.

Guest Post: "Will You Trash My Vibrator?" and Other Secret Pre-Mortem Pacts With Friends

OK folks, I have left the planet. For the next few days you will be treated to a parade of creative talent from some of my dear, patient, talented readers. The Grand Marshall of this parade is Red Dirt Kelly and this beautiful, brave piece. Thanks so much Kelly for all you do!

 The last time I visited my comrade Cathy’s dying friend in the hospital, we talked about angels. “Cathy” was also the dying friend’s name which made for some confusing conversations in the ICU unit.

The dying Cathy looked very much like Susan Sarandon. She rested her head on the hospital pillow and toyed with the IV entry area on her arm while she whispered that she believed an angel had visited her on an Indian Reservation in New Mexico to deliver the message that she was ill. Her arm was hard to look at, having turned approximately half purple by that point.

In my mind, the warm sunlight streaming through the window lighting up her auburn hair was the Light, and the disease turning her arm…and the rest of her body purple…was the Dark. But the Light won when she breathed her last breath because the dying Cathy finally smiled and the tension left her face. She could rest now.

But my friend Cathy was a different story. That night she got drunk and I sat in her living room listening to her repeat stories about their friendship over and over. At one point, I found some rollers in her bathroom, brought them into the living room and begin putting them in my hair as a painfully weak way to cause laughter and break the sadness.

Needing to walk around at some point, we picked up a second bottle of wine and crossed the street, knocking on the door of a female Methodist minister who had a labyrinth in her back yard. We all three laughed when she answered the door with rollers in her hair. The three of us, rollers dangling at all angles from our hair and clothed in our bathrobes and slippers, began to walk through the labyrinth in her back yard, singing drinking songs. The minister and I watched our grieving Cathy as her sadness gushed forth well into the morning hours.

I thought about that night and my undone friend for three days. I was riveted by her ability to announce her utter unraveling in front of the two of us.

Had I ever openly wailed and shown my soft underbelly and pain so plainly to another human being? Even before I finished articulating that question to myself in my head, I knew the answer was: I have not.

The answer was still rolling around in the soul-space of my brain like an echo around canyon walls when my phone rang. It was my grieving friend and she needed help clearing out the house of the deceased.

So I helped her in this task, all the while observing her lingering hesitation over every object with some degree of meaning attached. I was in the middle of observing her decide which of the fifty potted plants to keep when she said, “Can we go get dinner? I need an emotional break.”

Once again, she had exposed her humanity by telling me she was at the limit of her “feeling” capacity, brought on by the process of sorting her dead friend’s belongings. And for the record, vulnerability does indeed breed vulnerability. Each time my friend opened her soul to me, I felt more like I could open mine to her.

So there we were, see, sitting across from each other at a restaurant table spread with heavy cream and butter pasta, grappling with the pieces of our lives which were floating in the air around us. Somewhere around my head “my own thoughts about death” drifted by, close to my speech center. It was being levitated by my growing trust toward my dinner mate.

So I blurted, “If my husband and I die simultaneously, will you PLEASE trash my vibrator? Cathy, I can’t let anyone find our vibrator when they’re cleaning out our ‘death things.’”

Her expression was a classic double take followed by a grandiose belly laugh.

“Oh my stars, yes!!” she replied.

“Okay, you HAVE to remember this…it’s in the bottom center drawer in his dresser, behind the socks. Will you please remember??” I was intensely ensuring that the entire pact would indeed be managed.

“Yes…” she started. “Got it. Bottom center drawer, behind the socks…” Her face was cracked with a full-blown smile and her eyes danced mischievously. “And will you PLEASE come into the funeral home when they’re preparing my body and pluck ALL the fuckwit hairs growing from my chin? I hate my chin hairs and would be SO mortified if they were sticking out of my face when people viewed my body!!”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “I. Am. IN. I will pluck your chin hairs. Happy to do it.” I felt better because I now also had a post-mortem task to contribute to the dignity of my own friend’s future death.

The conversation took a hairpin curve and by the time we walked out of the restaurant, we had talked about how body fat could be disguised in caskets, how to manage crazy family members in the funeral audience and what to make sure our children knew should they falter from time to time after we died.

In other words, we managed all of our personal anxieties about dignity and death over pasta, wine and the essence of our dead friend’s memory floating about in the restaurant air.

The bits and pieces of emotional processing still remaining around our table – buoyed by our own insecurities, were slowly descending to the floor when we left. They did not follow us. Rather, they were swept up with the bread crumbs by the wait staff after closing that night. We were finished with them. For now.

That particular dinner conversation happened three years ago. I still update her on any geographical change in “the location” of the vibrator. And, she’s sent me no less than two pair of excellent quality tweezers… “in case I’m without a pair should she kick the bucket.”

Our promises are intact, as is now our posthumous dignity.

Or, at least the pieces that about which we are most concerned.

My Veteran's Day

Married in his USAF dress blues
December 20, 1965

He was a Viet Nam vet. He didn't let that fact dictate the way he lived, but it ended up dictating the way he died. He was a conscientious objector. He didn't want to go. He was so young. His conscience won out over his objections and he enlisted in the Air Force because he was told it was the right thing to do. He was one of the lucky ones. He came home.

I flew across the country with my baby boy on the day he died to be with my mom. That night we three lay in her bed, sleepless, in shock. There in the bed they'd so recently shared, with my son who was born with my dad's smile quietly nursing between us, my mom told me all about the first time he went away from her. That year he spent at war. Her voice was quiet and small in the darkness, almost childlike.

She was barely 21, they'd only been married a year. He'd been told he wouldn't have to go. He'd been told his conscience would be considered. He'd been told he'd have a desk job, away from combat. Then he was told his first tour was Viet Nam. In the year he was gone, my mom made do with her circumstances the same as she had her whole young life. She just put her shoulder into it and moved on. She learned to drive, got her ears pierced, moved to a new state, taught school, made friends and tried not to think the unthinkable. The year he was gone, he... I don't know. He never really talked about it and whatever he had confided in my mom when he got back, has stayed with her. He left his uniforms in the airport parking lot when he was discharged and walked away. All I have of him from that time are a few faded pictures of a young man with my face, grinning in fatigues, the jungle in the background, a Vietnamese child on his hip.

He kept his medals in a bottom desk drawer. I played with them as a child, running my fingers over the colorful ribbons, looking at the patterns they made, feeling their weight but not really understanding the weightiness of those colorful bits of metal and ribbon shoved in the back of his drawer. The family joke is that I was a liberal at a young age. We lived in the D.C. area when I was a toddler. On a trip to the Capitol Building, I wandered off and got separated from my parents. They found me in the rotunda, tugging on Ted Kennedy's pants leg, no doubt mistaking one pair of dark men's pants for another. My mom says it must have rubbed off on me then. I threw my dad's medals in the garbage one day. They were long gone before anyone noticed.

There was a full military graveside service. Some extremely sharp young servicemen and women folded the flag from his casket, saluted and presented it to my mom. They played taps and each firing of the rifles jarred me more than just the mere sudden sound in a somber setting. This was a part of him I didn't know. In life, he never traded on his status as veteran. He declined membership in local VFWs, he eschewed any celebration or recognition of his having served. He was a patriot, loved his country, appreciated its freedoms and blessings; but his allegiance was first to God, then to his family. Toward the end of his life, when we were at unwinnable wars again, he was disheartened and discouraged by the capricious disposal of human life. His time served was not a defining characteristic in his life, its acknowledgement in his death was disconcerting to me.

He noticed the first tremor in the thumb of his right hand when he was 44 years old. He ignored it as a mild annoyance for the first year. When it spread to his index finger and part of his hand, he had it checked out. Early onset Parkinson's Disease. This man who had lived with such vigor and such interest his whole life, spent 20 years with his muscles steadily betraying him a little more each year. Right fingers turned into hand turned into arm turned into his whole right side. He slowly lost things like facial expression, comfortable speech, the ability to play his guitar; the wide grin he bequeathed to me and my son slowly became tighter, more rigid, more difficult to summon or maintain. For 20 years he continued to garden, sculpt, preach, paint, grow bonsai trees, travel and teach. All without complaint. He learned to manage his steadily more rebellious muscles through a sheer force of will so that he could continue in his pursuits. I can still see him sweating in the Houston summer sun, toting a wheelbarrow of gravel for the new front path he was building for my mom. Watching his slow progress from the window, the distinctive Parkinsonian gait, the occasional stumble, stopping to straighten up and let his diaphragm relax enough for a full breath of the humid, sticky air; then pushing on. He was always just pushing on.

On October 5, 2008, he lost the battle with his unruly muscles when that most important muscle just stopped. As I was helping my mom with the endless paperwork of death, I found his final hospital bill. The minute by minute list of charges for an hour and a half in the wee hours that Sunday morning as the nurses and doctor on call tried to start that muscle again. "Like wet Kleenex" was the phrase the autopsy doctor used to describe the condition of his heart. He'd never even had high cholesterol.

This, from the US Department of Veterans Affairs website:

VA presumes Veterans' Parkinson’s disease is related to their exposure to Agent Orange or other herbicides during military service. VA's final regulation* recognizing this association took effect on October 30, 2010. Veterans exposed to herbicides do not have to prove a connection between their Parkinson’s disease and military service to be eligible to receive VA benefits.

Two years too late for my dad, the VA says "Whoops! Our bad." My dad's story isn't the only or the worst. The casualties of war are not always on the battlefield, they're not always immediate. War is never good. No one wins. I'm sorry if I don't feel like waving flags today. I'm sorry if it conjures the image of my mother's freckled hands worrying the edge of that perfectly folded triangle in her lap; the same as the thousands of other flags that have been clutched by tens of thousands of other mothers, daughters, husbands, sons, wives, fathers, brothers, sisters. I just can't do it today, I respect that flag too much. I honor the people who have served, who are currently serving. I oppose the wars. It has been popular recently to call people who oppose the wars "unpatriotic". The most important veteran in my life taught me that what's popular isn't always what's right.