Lost Summer

I moved home that spring of ’93. Didn’t leave much behind in Minneapolis. Friends, of course and a few lost-cause dating disasters. I’d floundered for months, searching for who I wanted to be. Teacher? Activist? Health care worker?

But on a visit home at Easter, reality hit, like a gut punch, sucking the air from my lungs.

I stood by his hospital bed, stunned. How had they neglected to tell me the dire state of things?

The human body is a mystery. Muscle and sinew, bone and breath… connected and somehow disconnected.

My thoughts blistered… red and angry, pustulant and weeping.

I gazed out the window, of my childhood home, searching for a salve. A cardinal, just an ordinary bird. I witnessed him singing on the wires outside our kitchen window, dressed opulently – cardinal red, the stuff of bishops and shades of lipstick. He sang like it was just another day.

It wasn’t.

A bleak blue sky… cloudless and heavy. Blinding sun… scorched ants as they scrambled across baked concrete. Wisteria blues and salmon pinks of my mother’s hydrangeas dressed our side yard. And the verdant green of a freshly mown lawn.

I see him in ragged cut-offs and work boots, striding with the mower. Flinging hunks of dew-drenched grass, the scent firmly ingrained of northern Ohio summers: picnics and 4th of July parades and fireworks.

How can there be such stark beauty in the same world with unspeakable horror... just in the next room.

Withered and gasping for air… drainage tube invading his lung cavity.

“It’s to release the accumulating fluid.”

Fluid.

Smelled of bile and suffering. I put fluid in my car to keep it from overheating. Fluids are infused to avoid dehydration. They’re supposed to be good. Not noxious and debilitating as they seep from a sickened body.

Skeletal. I counted every rib… practically every bone in his wasted body.

He was my rock and my roll. We’d belly laugh over the silliest of things. Dogs off-leash, intent on sticking their noses up other dogs’ butts. Catching my mother memorizing answers to the Trivial Pursuit game cards so she could whup us when we’d agree to play with her. He liked to hear me strum guitar, singing old camp favorites like In My Mind I’m Going to Carolina or Country Roads.

He liked camping and road trips and walking our half blind, stout beagle, Daisy to the park every evening. This is the man I looked up to… who went to every father-daughter dance, knew how to spin me across the dance floor. I got my love of music from him.

Every summer he’d hop in the sailboat we’d haul to northern Michigan. He spent hours on Glen Lake, never missing a sunrise or a sunset. He was a grill master and made the best Saturday morning cinnamon and lemon-zest spiced pancakes.

To see him in his final hours… final moments reduced to skin and bones and tubes, muttering incoherently… begging for a gin and tonic – something he never drank… but we gave it to him anyway.

His dying seemed to never end. It lasted weeks and months. I should have wanted him around longer. I didn’t. At least, not like that.

Mom couldn’t manage. She stayed clear… devolving into an abyss of vodka and fury. Rich and I remained nearby… wanting to ease his suffering in some way. I hated seeing my sturdy brother carry Dad to and from the bathroom, changing him, cleaning him… attending to the horrible tubes and other atrocities of cancer.

All I could do was sit outside his room with my guitar and sing.

Ironically earlier that same year, I worked as a nurse’s aide – helping an elderly woman who’d contracted polio as a child. She’d been bed-bound since sixteen. I gave her sponge baths and changed her colostomy bag. I fixed her meals as she bossed me around. Judith was fierce and proud. Guess you have to be when at the mercy of others for over sixty years. Working with her didn’t bother me. But Dad… I couldn’t do it. I left the heavy lifting to my brother… my kind, self-less and loving brother.

I wasn’t there the moment he died. I’d gone on a walk. The house was stifling. Life in 1993 Lakewood, Ohio was an unbearable southern summer without air conditioning. I needed to breathe.

I could never get the smell of that room, the stench of hospital tubing and his fluids, out of my everythingness. For week and months, after he’d passed, I couldn’t go into the Study – the room where he convalesced in his final months on a lousy pull-out sofa bed. Why couldn’t my mother allow hospice? Why couldn’t she give him that one small dignity?

Damaged people don’t know any other way to be.

Thankfully time does heal… or at least lessens the agony. When I think of dad, I picture a young man, in a flannel work shirt, sleeves rolled up and full of life: a twinkle in his eye and crooked smile. He had a funny bump on the right side of his forehead. I used to rub it as a child, like it was some kind of good luck lump.

I see him hoisting our blue tent in the backyard so we could have proper camp-outs.

I see him chopping wood for a long winter… his shoulders and arms rippled with muscle… making me marvel at his body’s ability to do so much.

And he did so much…

He was shelter.

He was a comforting meal.

He was hours of work on my 7th grade science class solar system project

He was a shoulder to cry on. Boys might come and go, but he didn’t.

He was present.

But after July 28th – that steaming summer of 1993…

He wasn’t.