It’s been a year since you offered anything on your blog. A year since you nearly died. In that time, you’ve done a lot of thinking, and traveling, and adventuring. You swam with sea turtles. You caught some fish. You strode black sand beaches, rode whitewater rapids. You hiked mountains and forests, you leapt from waterfalls. You learned to meditate. You learned to cook. You read books – faster and with more focus than before. You exercised regularly. You grappled with your mortality. You dined with friends, in cities that you visited just because you wanted to dine with those friends. You traveled to Maui, New York, San Francisco, D.C., Chicago, Vegas, Portland, Detroit, Houston, Austin, New Braunfels, and Colorado – and none of it was for work.
And after years of debate with yourself, you finally walked away from your lucrative legal job. Not because the job was awful or even hard to do. Simply because it’s no longer how you want to use your mind or your energy. You’re unchallenged and bored. It’s not what you want to be when you grow up. And when you admit that to yourself – especially with your own mortality staring you in the face – it becomes intolerable to think of spending another minute thinking corporate legal thoughts, or reading corporate emails, or enduring corporate conference calls, or talking to auditors about hypothetical legal challenges that will never materialize, or doing things you can’t even complain about properly because they are subject to the attorney-client privilege. And complaining is your super power!
As you wrestled with this, half-remembered words of a poem return to you. So you scurry to your library and climb up onto the built-in bookshelf so you can reach the dusty volumes near the ceiling. You find the collection by Stephen Dunn, and flip to The Last Hours, and read the final stanza:
. . . On the elevator down
it’s a small knot, I’d like to say, of joy.
That’s how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it’s grown,
it’s outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.
Upon reading these words, something inside you vibrates. It’s the same part of you that responded to these words back in 2000 when you first read them. Back when you and Erin were in debt up to your eyeballs, and you had only recently graduated law school, and the thought of quitting your well-compensated job while Erin was in medical school was impossible to contemplate.
Now things are different. Now it’s time.
But what will say at cocktail parties? You’re retired? Semi-retired? Unemployed? (Or as one of your friends says, “fun-employed”?) Who are you kidding? You don’t get invited to cocktail parties.
Besides, there’s a ready answer that you don’t let yourself say. That you’ve never had the courage to say. It starts with a “w” and rhymes with “brighter.”
So you give notice to the employer you’ve had for fifteen years. And once it’s done, once you’re free of the job and the obligations that came with it, you can’t believe you ever agonized about it at all.
And as a reward for making that leap, as if being admitted early into Valhalla, you get to play with your kids the whole summer. Not in the half-assed, “let me just finish reading this email” kind of way. But in the fully present, “Fuck yes I want to make a pillow fort and play Monopoly!” kind of way. And it is glorious.
And now the dust has settled, and the kids have returned to school. It’s time to become who you are supposed to be, whoever that is. But before you can really do that, before you can live your best life, there’s just one item in the way. A nagging thing – a half-written offering that has stifled your writing voice for four years. You have unfinished business. It festers and prevents you from moving forward. You’ve got to get it out of you. So today, you summon your demon from the depths, and as it writhes in the circle you have drawn for it, you try to bend it to you will:
GRIEF SQUARED
It is December 8, 2015. I’m in the kitchen with my wife when I get the phone call.
I’m making holiday fudge – my mom’s recipe – and Erin is making the candied pecans that we give to our neighbors and the kids’ teachers. We love this time of year. And we’re giddy because it’s noon on a Tuesday and we are alone in the house. The kids are in school for the rest of the week, and my mom – who serves as our nanny most of the time – is on the way back to Houston with my dad for a few weeks. Erin has taken the whole week off to get ready for Christmas, and I work from home, so we get some rare time alone as a couple. Sure, we will spend some time running errands, and finishing the Christmas shopping, and sending holiday cards and whatnot. But a lot of this week will be devoted to civilized lunch dates, and uncivilized sex in the living room.
We are laughing to ourselves at what a great week we have in store – and how great we have it generally – as I reach for the phone. I lick a chocolatey finger as I say “hello.”
It’s my younger brother Patrick. He speaks quickly, in a voice I’ve only heard once. It was back in 1991, after he had just witnessed my mother accidentally run over our dog. He burst into the house and reported to me what he had seen in staccato bursts, keeping his shit together just long enough to get me the information I needed so that I could engage and he could run upstairs and cry.
He’s not making any sense. I don’t comprehend his words. Mom and Dad. Car crash. Lifeflight. It’s gibberish.
I make him repeat it, slowly. He tells me Mom and Dad were in a car accident driving back to Houston from my house, and they have been life-flighted to a hospital in Houston. What? Both of them?
It’s not registering – like he’s speaking another language. This is nonsense. I make him say it a third time.
I have the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder as I continue measuring out two tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of vanilla. Look, someone is trying to scam him. Has he tried to call their cellphones? This is some kind of hoax. In fact, about fifteen minutes ago, some total stranger sent me a Facebook Messenger request asking me to explain my relation to Connie Hamilton. I ignored her. Now she’s trying to scam Patrick.
Even as I’m saying it, I realize that the profile for that total stranger listed an affiliation with Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. But that’s got to be part of the scam.
With my fingers, I spread butter over the dish in which I will pour the fudge, as if this is a totally normal phone call. As if my life is going to remain exactly as I want it to remain.
Beside me, Erin knows this is real before I do. She is no longer preparing pecans.
“How are they? Are they conscious?” I ask. But he repeats: the hospital won’t tell him anything until he arrives down there. Privacy laws.
I tell him to get the Hell down there and call me once he knows more. We hang up.
I pour the fudge into the dish. I stand there, looking at it for long moments. Looking through it. “Looks like I’m going to Houston tonight,” I say, more to myself than to Erin. She nods gravely. “You can manage carpool without me?”
“Of course,” she says, a little surprised that I would ask. It is then that I remember the lady who reached out to me on Facebook Messenger. I message her and give her my number. She does not reply immediately.
Effused with nervous energy, I go upstairs to pack.
At the door of my closet, I falter. “How long am I going to be gone?” I say aloud. Nobody answers. How many shirts should I pack? Fuck it, I can buy more if I run out. Or someone will. Surely someone will go buy me more shirts?
I come back downstairs with my bag and return to the kitchen. The fudge is garbage. Not only did I forget to add butter or the vanilla extract, but in my distraction I didn’t beat it. I’m about to scrape it into the sink when I stop. Didn’t mom always say you could re-boil a bad batch? I scrape it back into the pot, boil it again. This time I follow my mom’s handwritten recipe exactly. As if this act will somehow change what is happening to her in Houston. As if following her instructions will help me make sense of this situation.
When it is done, I pour it into a newly greased dish. It is fantastic.
The lady from the hospital calls me. She confirms that my parents were both in a car accident, and that she can’t tell me anything else until a family member arrives. She asks me questions about their personal information. Full names, birth dates. Do I know their social security numbers? Did they have private insurance, or Medicare?
I answer her questions, dazed by their banality. “Please,” I ask when she is done. “Can you just answer one question? Can you tell me if . . . can you . . . are they still alive?”
“. . . Yes,” she says, in an almost non-committal voice. “They’re alive.”
I’m driving for three and a half hours before I realize the radio isn’t on. I’ve been driving in silence all this time, alone with my dread. Patrick calls me every half hour or so, to report on their status or ask me questions. He has learned that they were hit by an eighteen wheeler, but he doesn’t have details yet. I won’t hear until later, after an investigation and a lawsuit, that a truck was smoking and parked on the shoulder. There was evidence that the truck was poorly maintained and the driver had negligently failed to put out cones, flares or other warning devices for safety (as required by Federal trucking regulations). The smoke covered and obscured the entire highway. My father – who was pulling off to the shoulder himself – collided with the burning truck he could not see, bouncing sideways back onto the highway. Then an eighteen wheeler, negligently traveling at a high rate of speed through zero visibility, plowed directly into the passenger side of my Dad’s car. Directly into my seventy-three-year-old mother.
At his deposition many months later, the eighteen wheeler driver would choke up, relaying how my mother had looked right into his eyes as he emerged from the smoke and – too late – slammed on his brakes.
But I know none of this at the time. All I know is that both of my parents are in surgery and they’re both in bad shape. Mom apparently got the worst of it: torn aorta, torn liver, torn kidney, head injury, multiple breaks in her pelvis, broken vertebrae in her back, and broken ribs (almost all of them). The doctors tell us later that when she was brought in, my mom was “the sickest person in the hospital” and the various chiefs of different departments fought over which life threatening injury needed to be addressed first.
Patrick can’t answer most of my questions, and he has plenty of his own. Who were their primary care providers? What kind of meds did Dad take? Was he on blood thinners? The doctors need to know ASAP. They are assuming he is on blood thinners because of his heart condition, and will treat him as such, but want to confirm what type. I don’t know any of this shit. Mom handled this. Fuck! Why didn’t I pay more attention to these details? I’ve got nothing for him.
Later Patrick calls again. Mom’s jewelry is at the hospital and was returned to Patrick, but Dad’s gold watch is missing. The gold Rolex that never left his arm. Where could it be? A few phone calls reveal that the wrecker service has it. They will keep it in their safe in Huntsville until one of us comes to fetch it.
At some point later, my aunt Beth realizes that whatever meds Dad was taking should be in his overnight bag, which is likely in the wrecked vehicle – also with the wrecker. I will pass Huntsville on the way in. Can I stop and get his meds (and his watch)? Of course.
I get the address: 631 Ryans Ferry Road which is in Huntsville TX. Except I stupidly type it into my smartphone as “Ryan Ferry Road”, which is apparently the name of a street in Pointblank, Texas, a town that is thirty minutes to the east of Hunstville, or an hour round trip out of my way. In my haze, I don’t notice the error, and waste a precious hour following my GPS to the middle of dark nowhere. Another hour that the doctors won’t have information about my father’s medications.
I’m driving a rental Suburban (my own car is in the shop to repair damage from my wife’s collision with a deer over Thanksgiving). It is an impossible tank of a vehicle, and it feels cavernous and stupid for just one man to be driving – especially through backwoods and small towns at night. Cavernous, and dark, and bitterly lonely.
Finally, bewildered and lost, I peck out the phone number of the wrecker service again to clarify where they are. A countrified voice answers the line, and he listens to me explain my surroundings. “I don’t know where you are,” he says, “but it ain’t where I’m at.”
When I realize my error, I make a Dukes of Hazard u-turn and rocket back the way I came, ignoring the speed limit. The phone says I’m thirty minutes away. I make it in fourteen.
There are five wrecker guys standing around in the small building when I arrive. The owner steps forward to greet me. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that this happened to your folks. It’s just awful.”
“Yes. It’s hard to fathom.”
“I had your pa’s watch in my safe, and your mom’s purse. We left it just as it was when the sheriff handed it to us.” He slowly lifts his hands to reveal the purse and the watch, and hands them to me with reverence.
Growing up, my Dad’s gold watch had always seemed so big to me. When it falls into my hand now, it seems small and insignificant. I look down at it. His dried blood is on the face and inside the band. I pause for a heartbeat, then shove it into my front pocket and shoulder mom’s purse. I think better of that, pull it off, and clutch the straps in my right hand.“I need to get into the vehicle to see if I can find my father’s meds.”
“Of course. Follow me.” I walk beside him. The wrecker driver who responded to the call walks behind us. He points to two other trucks. “We got all three trucks what was in the accident.”
“Your dad hit that one first,” the wrecker driver chimes in. “It was smoking on the side of the road and the smoke was all over the road. Your Dad run into it, then bounced. That’s when this one here got him. Run right into your mom’s door.”
My eyes are on the trucks when I realize the other men have stopped walking. I look ahead and we are standing in front of half an SUV. The entire passenger side is crushed inward. Looking at the broken pieces of my mom’s car, it seems like there’s no way she could have survived.
I can’t open either of the crushed passenger side doors or the back hatch. I move around to the driver’s side door. My dad’s jeans – what’s left after the paramedics cut them off – have been tossed in the seat. The wrecker driver is talking to me about details of the accident scene when he arrived, but I don’t really hear his words. I pick up the jeans. Three of the pockets are empty, but the front left holds my dad’s sterling silver Lone Star money clip – the one he got at Stelzig’s. It holds several hundred dollar bills. Without counting the cash, I stuff the money clip into my own pocket, trying to conceal the action from the men beside me. I’m not sure why. I’m aware that I’m not thinking very clearly.
The jeans were cut off of him, but his belt is intact. I pull it off and drape it around my neck. I will wear this belt almost every day for the next few years.
My dad’s shoes are on the floor. I pick them up. They could be the last shoes he ever wore. I don’t know why that matters, but I think I need to get these shoes.
One of the men behind me warns me about the glass. It’s everywhere, and they want me to be careful. “Uh huh” I say.
Dad’s phone is on the floor too, along with a Deepak Chopra book my Mom was reading – Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. I reach for it but stop when I see that its pages are caked in blood.
I shudder, pick up the phone, and move to the back seat.
I find my dad’s overnight back. I will rifle through it back in my car, but for now I set it on the ground at my feet. I wrestle my mom’s suitcase out of the back compartment. I grab some of my mom’s clothes that are on hangers, though I’m not sure why that seemed important. The men are talking about how nothing will happen to the vehicle until the insurance company releases it. Inspections and such will have to happen of course.
I thank them profusely for everything. They help me carry all the stuff to the Suburban. “We’ll be praying for ya’ll” says the owner, as he shuts the back door for me. I thank him, and feel like I need to get the Hell out of this wrecker yard before I do anything else.
I drive a couple of blocks down the road and stop at a gas station. I start filling up the tank and then rifle through my dad’s overnight bag looking for his meds. I find his travel hair dryer with the brush attachment. The man has been blow drying his hair after every shower since the 1970s. Who does that?
I find a 9mm pistol loaded with hollow point rounds. Jesus Dad.
I find his beat up Dopp kit, which is crammed with expired Alka-Seltzer tablets and low dose aspirin. Alka-Seltzer is still a thing? Or is this shit from 1982 and he never took it out of his bag?
Then I find the meds. Flowmax. Diovan. Mucinex. I don’t know what any of these do. I take photos of all of them and text my brother and my aunt Beth.
I am driving again as I call my pharmacist friend Amanda. I rattle off the names of the drugs, and why I need to know. She is deeply shaken by my news, and with faltering words tells me that one is for this, one is for that, and one is for whatever. None are blood thinners. So it’s just the aspirin.
She sympathetically offers help, as of course anyone would. But how can anyone help me? What can anyone possibly do? I thank her and hang up.
My brother calls again. He’s anxious for me to arrive. He is surrounded by friends and family, but I’m the only person he wants to see. “Hold on. I’m coming.” As I hang up, I hear in my head that song by Sam & Dave of the same name. I love that song. I grin stupidly, and then immediately hate myself for grinning at a time like this.
As I drive, I start to try to get my mind around the morbid possibility that we could be having a double funeral. I begin to verbally sketch out a draft what might be my father’s eulogy. I speak out loud to myself in the car, trying different words, but the theme is the same. I even peck out brief notes about parts I like into my iPhone (stupidly, because I am driving while I do it). It will change over the coming two months, but the early versions that I recited aloud in the dark that night went something like this:
“My Dad was a hard man to know. He was the strong and silent type. He was born in 1943 as Jimmie Earl Hamilton, but when he joined the Army, the US Government in its arrogance told him that Jimmie wasn’t his name – that it was a nickname for James. So James he became. He served his country with distinction over two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret Captain, earning the Bronze Star for heroic achievement twice, and a Silver Star for valor.
“He never talked about Vietnam, but one night that was emotional for other reasons, I pressed him for the story of the Silver Star. His platoon was wounded and surrounded, and facing certain death or capture. Neither option worked for my father. His troops were mere boys, in over their heads, scared, and needing an officer to tell them what to do. So he kept his cool, analyzed the situation, and launched a counter offensive. He told each of the men what to do to fight their way out. And he brought every one of them back.
“My Dad rarely talked about his feelings, or many of his thoughts. There are thousands of reasons I call my mom – when I want to feel loved, or validated, or when I want praise, or to complain, or talk about my day, or express whatever pointless thought I may have at the moment that I have it. There’s one reason I call my father . . . when I’m in trouble. When I’m in over my head. When I’m scared, and need an officer to tell me what to do.”
As I repeatedly recite these words aloud, I choke on that last sentence every time. So I leave it alone for a while. Instead, I try to draft my mom’s eulogy. I imagine my Dad on one side of the podium, and my mom on the other, and as I finish my Dad on my right, I will turn to my Mom on the left.
But words don’t come out. I try to say what’s in my head, but I start sobbing uncontrollably instead. The tears gush from my eyes with such intensity that I’m worried I may wreck the car. I wipe my face and choose to remain silent for the rest of the drive.
When I get to the hospital, I am met in the parking lot by Tom, one of my oldest friends. He escorts me to the STICU (Shock and Trauma Intensive Care Unit). The waiting room is like a family reunion, except everyone looks worried and exhausted instead of merely awkward and uncomfortable.
My folks are not back from surgery yet. Instead, there’s a parade of distant relatives and ancient family friends – some of whom I haven’t spoken to in twenty-five years, some longer, that are now in my face, hugging me, catching me up on their stories. I totally respect that they are here, and appreciate why and what they’re trying to do, but I don’t want to talk to any of these people right now. I want silence so I can figure out what has just happened to my life. I want to cry with my brother. I want to stare into space in horror. But they are all here, so what else am I going to do?
When you’re in an ICU waiting room, time passes in some strange quantum manner. Hours can feel like minutes, and days can feel like hours. You forget to eat. You forget to shit. You become dehydrated but don’t know it. Upon arriving, I spent four straight hours talking to cousins and uncles and friends, but I can barely tell you any of it. One cousin cut his thumb off, but it got reattached and even has some sensation (though he can’t give good back rubs anymore because he doesn’t know how hard he’s pressing). Another cousin got engaged. An uncle got a divorce maybe? I dunno.
My dad’s sister hasn’t changed. She is effusive and loving and supportive, but also sometimes says the wrong stuff at the wrong times. For example, we’re all in a waiting room struggling with the possibility that head injuries may prevent one or both of my parents from ever waking up, and she keeps using the regrettable expression “I’m sorry, I’m brain dead.” Horrified, my cousin keeps admonishing her, but it keeps coming out of her mouth anyway. Like she can’t think of anything else. Because none of us can. She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s fine. It’s actually a bit funny, in a morbid way.
As we all chat over the coming hours and days, everyone keeps returning to the question of what the Hell could have happened to cause this crash. We all know that if you rear-end a vehicle, you are usually considered to be at fault. There is an unstated fear that perhaps Dad has somehow screwed up and done this to himself and Mom . . . He didn’t, but of course we don’t know that as we sit for countless hours in the ICU.
Eventually the resident comes out. As much as I want to hear her report, I can’t stop thinking “this chic is hot as balls.” She’s tiny, and vaguely Latina, and she has fingernails that have been trimmed back so much as to be almost infinitesimal. I stare at her fingertips as she tells us about the surgeries. They went well. Now they will let them stabilize and heal for a while, then we will address my mom’s pelvis. She returns to her duties, and we return to worried chit chat.
Hours go by, and our family members slowly drift back to their lives, promising to return tomorrow. My brother and I plan to remain in the waiting room, but a wise nurse explains “this is a marathon, not a sprint. You boys need to get some rest. You ain’t gonna be worth nothing to nobody if you don’t.” Wearily we agree, and we walk out of the ICU at 4:30AM.
I find the nearest hotel with an availability online. We walk up to find the doors to the lobby locked. In our sleep-deprived confusion, this bewilders us. We knock repeatedly, and several minutes later a man appears and opens the door apologetically. “Sorry, I was making copies.” Bullshit. Who makes copies in 2015? This guy has the hangdog sheepishness of a dude who was playing with himself at work. Gross.
We get to our room and sleep for just three hours. I wake, and wonder if I dreamed it all. For a feverish moment my mind aches from the hope that this was all a nightmare. Finding myself in the hotel confirms it was not. We stumble down to the dining area and half-heartedly eat runny scrambled eggs from a buffet of bland garbage. Then we return, zombie-like, to the ICU. My buddy Denis shows up with a bag of Chic-fil-A breakfast biscuits. Denis always comes through in the clutch.
Over the coming days, my mom will be better or worse in a sickening roller coaster of hope and fear. She will suffer mysterious internal bleeding which might require surgery (and therefore increase what the doctors call her “mortality”). Then it will appear to stop. Then she will get pneumonia. Then she will recover, but the mystery bleeding will come back. During all of this time, whenever she is conscious, she will not be herself.
My Dad will remain unconscious continuously. His body is mostly okay after the surgery he underwent to repair a tear in his gut. But his head injury was terrible. We don’t know this yet, but his brain stem is, for lack of a better word, dissolving. He will never wake up.
We delay telling the kids for a few days until I can get a read on the situation. I don’t want to give them false hope, but I also don’t want to tell them really scary shit if it looks like their grandparents are gonna pull through. Eventually, when I’ve been gone for three nights, I get on a speaker phone call with all of them. Riley already knew something because she had seen one of my texts to Erin. I explain that “Wowo” looks like she might pull through, though it’s still a dire situation. I say that it looks worse for “Pawpaw.”
Of my kids, Riley was the closest to my dad, and she is devastated. She will stare at photos of my dad for days, giant tears streaming down her face.
Henry is my introverted rock – things go in and they don’t come out. He’s the one I will worry about, because I can’t ever get a read on what he’s thinking or feeling.
Nori kinda takes it in stride. “We didn’t really know him very well,” she says, and earns a screaming reprimand from Riley. “What? It’s true.”
Beckett is mostly fine. He’s sad only because he sees the others being sad.
Erin pulls the kids out of school for Friday and drives down. They want to see my Mom and Dad. I will let them visit Mom, loopy as she is. I will not let them see Dad – not like this. I want them to remember him as he used to be, not with a shaved head and nasty bruises over half his face.
Once Erin gets there, she is a force of nature. She speaks with doctors, schmoozes nurses. She can translate all the medical mumbo jumbo into English for the rest of us in the waiting room. She can make suggestions, and does so. She asks the neurologist for a particular test to be run for my Dad. And she’s frustrated that a different antibiotic is not being used with my Mom, and eventually – over the course of several days – successfully lobbies for a change when Mom begins to worsen with the current antibiotics.
Accompanied by me or Erin, the kids file in one at a time to see Mom. Every time they go in, they have to pull a sanitary robe thing over their clothes and wear gloves. It’s bizarre and alienating for them to see their “Wowo” this way. Her arms are tied to the rails of the bed to prevent her from pulling at the various tubes in and around her body. This precaution did not stop her from using her yoga skills to bend her face down to her hands and pull the breathing tube out of her mouth repeatedly. That’s bad for many reasons and can damage her trachea. After she did it a third time, they dispensed with the breathing tube altogether and gave her a tracheostomy. Her arm restraints make her miserable, and her inability to communicate is maddening to her and to us. She pleads with her eyes for us to untie her. I find her situation horrible and degrading, so I release her. But then she keeps trying to get out of bed, which she absolutely cannot do! She can’t seem to understand that she has very serious injuries, even though we keep explaining them to her.
At one point during one of my visits, she mouthes a two word phrase to me urgently. I lean down to better read her lips. For long moments she can’t make me understand. Then it dawns on me. “Mom, did you just . . . did you just say ‘my vagina’?” She nods. Oh my God. She is worried that her vagina may have been exposed while the nurse was doing something for her. “No Mom. I did not see your vagina.” She nods, relieved, and closes her eyes to sleep. It is the only time I have ever heard my mom say that word.
Back outside, the neurologist tells us that, after completing the tests Erin requested, he is convinced that Dad will basically never recover. He shows us pictures of the brain that I don’t understand, but Erin does. It’s very bad. There is no brain activity, and evidence of very many brain bleeds. Dad’s body is shutting down, and they are fighting fevers and infections. They’re going to have to do more and more to keep his body alive. We process this, and later the nurses tell us that they are just waiting on us. They don’t spell it out, but it’s clear what they mean.
This decision falls to me and Patrick. Mom is non-sensical, drugged for pain, and still shell-shocked from her head injury. She cannot even understand the situation she is in, let alone make any decisions about my Dad’s care. We’re on our own.
Patrick thinks he remembers hypothetical discussions with Dad about withdrawing care if he were ever in a vegetative state. Or maybe things he’s said. That sounds like him, right? Christ, I think so, but it’s hard to be sure. Mom has definitely said she never wants us to “pull the plug.” She believes in the power of love and healing and maybe voodoo. But Dad wasn’t as talkative. His wishes are harder to divine. But the nurses are working pretty hard on a man who – if he ever did wake up – likely wouldn’t know his own name, let alone ever be able to communicate or feed himself again.
My Dad’s brother and sister are compassionate and supportive of whatever we decide. My Mom’s sister is less deferential, and feels like Mom should be included in the decision about Dad. “They were married for forty years for crying out loud, I think she should be able to have a say! Or at least understand what’s happening before you do it.” But Mom isn’t really Mom right now, nor will she be in the foreseeable future. (Or ever again, as it turned out). And we’re not going to wait around for weeks or months for Mom to come around to a decision while doctors do all kinds of invasive things to Dad’s body to buy us time.
We agree to withdraw care.
They ask us if we wish to donate parts of his body. It seems ghastly to contemplate, but also a terrible waste not to do so. For some reason I am alone when the representative brings the legal forms to sign. She goes through a menu of body parts they will be “harvesting” if usable. I say yes to it all, though I stammer a little bit when she mentions his eyes. Those ice blue eyes. My God, could somebody get to walk around seeing through his magnificent eyes? I don’t know what’s possible, but the thought warms me.
On the day we withdrew care and my Dad passed, he was surrounded by his two sons, his brother, his sister, his brother-in-law, his sister-in-law and my wife Erin. My mom was also wheeled into the room by a meddling nurse who seemed to almost demand that it happen, even though Mom was bleeding internally, mostly unconscious and completely unaware of what the Hell was going on.
Also present was an amazing and compassionate nurse with whom Erin had bonded. She kept providing morphine to ease Dad’s passing. Morphine stops pain of course, but it also interferes with lung function and can hasten death in these cases. I had seen my friend’s father linger in hospice treatment for over a week without food or water. My Dad’s passing was mercifully brief by comparison.
When he is gone, we linger. We each take our turns saying things to him, whispering goodbye in his ear. I take his cold hand in mine, and snap a picture of it. Those hands drew pictures for me at the breakfast table. They built my bunk beds and assembled my Christmas toys. They held my children. Holding his hand, I melt into sobs.
They take his body, harvest his long bones and eyes and a few other parts, and then it will be kept in cold storage at the funeral home while we figure out what to do. The idea of having a funeral without Mom present is a non-starter, so we know we will delay it, but that’s all we know right now. Did he want to be buried? Cremated? Does Mom know? There are too many questions and we have no energy to answer them. It can wait. It must wait.
My mom’s sister is convinced that looters will break into my parents house while it is unoccupied, and even while we’re still in the ICU in those first few days, she will insist steadily that we drive to the house and remove any and all valuables from it. She will also instruct us to lie to the neighbors so they won’t know the house is empty (and therefore available for looting). Who the Hell are these mystery looters? Anyway, we are too dazed and preoccupied with bigger things to question her on these points, and we follow her advice. Regrettably, that will end in an awkward scene where my parents’ black neighbor tells me he heard the truth, and I end up looking like a paranoid (and maybe racist?) asshole.
When we eventually do remove the valuables, my brother and I will confront my father’s massive arsenal of guns. He had at least forty long guns (rifles and shotguns), and no less than twenty pistols of various kinds. It’s absurd, like a scene from an action movie. Add in his four dozen knives of varying sizes and a couple of samurai swords and we’re ready to arm a freaking militia. We load them all into the back of Patrick’s van, and I attempt to somehow hide them under blankets for fear of looking like some kind of gun smuggler. I know that if the cops pull us over – two bearded white guys with an arsenal – they will HAVE to take us in for questioning. Later, when we arrive at Patrick’s house, there is a surreal scene where we have all seven of the kids help us move these guns from the van to the house in a kind of bizarre but deadly serious bucket brigade.
The coming weeks will be an exhausting back and forth between my home in Fort Worth, where we try to maintain something approximating a “normal” life for the kids, and visiting Mom in the ICU in downtown Houston, and later in the rehabilitation facility in The Woodlands. Mom will not be able to remember the nature of her injuries, but will hear then as if anew each time they are mentioned. (“A torn aorta?! My God, how am I even alive?”). Nor can Mom remember that Dad has died. She will casually ask where he is, or that we “make sure he gets something to eat”. At least a dozen times I will have to tell my Mom that Dad died, and she will react as if she is just hearing it each time. After a while, I stop telling her, and just nod and act as if he is alive. It’s not for months that she actually grasps the news. But she never grieves for her husband of forty years. Not one tear. It’s as if the part of her that is capable of grief was surgically removed. And that, in some ways, is the worst part of this whole damn story.
Steadily during this time, the need to eventually deliver my father’s eulogy will weigh on me, and I will begin to recite it in the shower, in the car, in the morning alone with my coffee. I will memorize it, and recite it compulsively over the next two months until the day of his funeral, when I will deliver it flawlessly and then almost immediately forget its contents. As I type this four years later, I mostly just remember part of it centered on the last conversation I had with him, in my kitchen on the day of the crash. We talked of Buck 110 lock blade knives, and how the new ones don’t hold an edge the way the old ones did. As I spoked to him, I held the knife he had given me thirty years earlier. My Dad loved knives, and he had a light in his eyes as we talked. Partly because the subject interested him, but maybe more because his son had raised the topic as an awkward effort to connect and achieve intimacy with an enigmatic and sometimes distant father. He saw what I was doing, and he appreciated it. And then I hugged him and Mom goodbye, and he drove to his death.
Over the next several months, I will wade through more grief than I can possibly process. But there will also be humor. And even glimmers of joy. For example, my relationship with my brother – which had always been fairly good, if a bit distant at times – will be forged by this tragedy into an invincible, ironclad bond. Just try to fuck with either one of us, and see how fast the other one rains fire on your head.
My fraternity brothers and other buddies I haven’t spoken to in years will come out of nowhere in support, and it will feel as if not a day has passed. Some will truly go above and beyond, and touch me deeply. They will pick me up and dust me off. Some will encourage me to write something from this trauma – maybe a screenplay – and will actually schedule brainstorming and remote drafting sessions with me. And some will simply listen. And listen. And listen. Their compassion will be epic, and I will remember it forever.
My daughter will develop aerophagia – a weird condition brought on by her stress and grief that will cause her to unconsciously swallow air and burp a lot. This will be distressing for her, but also hilarious.
As a coping mechanism during the holiday break, my daughter will teach herself to play the guitar. She will bring it to Houston with her, and she will play it and sing to my mom in the hospital. And while it will be a tragic setting, it will also be among the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed.
As Christmas approaches, and our ability to shop for the kids is strained, I will make the half-assed excuse that “I forgot to get your lists to Santa in time”. It’s a lame attempt to prepare them for what might be an underwhelming holiday. But then the nurses who work with Erin arrange to get our keys and secretly decorate our house while we are in Houston. So when we come back, the kids are absolutely delighted by all the work “the elves” have done. And so even in the face of this tragedy, Christmas is magical.
My Mom, still addled from the blow to her head, will say ridiculous and uncharacteristically vulgar things. Like: “Michael that’s a great neck rub, but move to the left just a cunt hair.” Or: “Where’s the shitter? I gotta take a massive crap.” Or “Oh! That bedpan is cold on my pussy!” To which the shocked nurse replies “Did you just say . . . ?” “Did I say pussy? Yeah, I said it. Pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy.”
In February of 2015, my father was cremated and his ashes were interned in the National Cemetery in Houston. My mother was able to attend the funeral as we wished, but even two months after her injury she was still not fully aware and present. During my eulogy – which was fucking awesome if I do say so myself – my brother had to scold our newly impulsive mother to put her phone away. She claimed she was just checking the time.
Because of her traumatic brain injury, we eventually established a legal guardianship over my mother. We sold my parents’ house, and she has alternated living between my house and Patrick’s. Without violating her privacy, I’ll just say that she’s very different from the mother we knew. And it’s not easy. It will never be easy.
During every moment of this epic nightmare, my wife Erin will yet again prove how smart and lucky twenty-one-year-old Mike was to get engaged to a nineteen-year-old from nowhere, Indiana. She will handle each of the many horrors with grace, strength, compassion and wisdom. And I will rely on her, and marvel at her, and grow to love her more than I thought possible.
I’m wiser now. I know what grief is – something you can’t really understand until it lances your heart. I know what loss is. I miss my mom, even though she’s still here. I miss my Dad, and I miss the relationship we could have had. (The relationship I’ve tried to forge with my own kids.) Over the months of trauma, I learned a lot. But one of the surprising things I learned was how much it really does matter when people express their condolences and love at these times. Words have so much more power than I knew. And I was deeply touched by each person who reached out. It mattered. It really did.
I’ve tried to finish writing this so many times. But each time I opened it, it demanded that I reengage with the trauma, that I relive those awful days. And frankly, it was overwhelming. But there was some part of me that couldn’t move on to telling other stories, or to sharing other observations, or to writing at all, when one of the biggest stories of my life was still untold. So I sat in stasis. And somehow four years passed. But there’s something about reaching the one year anniversary of your near death experience that gets you off your ass. It forces you to “get busy living, or get busy dying.” And so, that’s what I’m doing.
As I close this writing, I’m fully aware that it is far too long, and it needs an editor to revise it and hack it down to something more manageable. But I don’t care. I’m not getting paid to do this. Hell, there are probably only a dozen people in the world willing to read this far. I’m just glad that these words are finally on the page instead of lingering unstated inside me. Because words do have power – words stated, but also words unstated. And in writing this, I’m taking the power back from all these previously unstated words. So I’ll resist the urge to edit this endlessly, and simply use the word “finished.” And I’ll turn my attention to new words, new power.
Here goes nothing.