Seventeen

On May 31st, the morning of my seventeenth birthday, I felt sexy, despite the sting of a Memorial Day sunburn and the pre-calculus exam I dreaded taking in the afternoon. The celebration plans later involved Danny and I getting stoned and watching the school production of “Seussical,” sealing our mouths shut with either kisses or sticky peanut butter & Nutella sandwiches. We dated for a total of four months, cleverly eluding the hard breakup conversations with his upcoming milestone of starting college across the country. We had fun, stayed present, feeling safe with each other to explore sense and pleasure.

Earlier that spring, I sensed a lack of parental monitoring and mistook it for independence. Dad just wanted to know when I would be home. He stopped volunteering to pick me up at the Flatbush Triangle Junction near Brooklyn College ten minutes away from our two-family brick house in Rockaway. I thought he was finally off my back now that I was older. I thought that the tumor Mom mentioned two weeks ago in between AP U.S. History & AP Chem was a false alarm. No one was saying the word “cancer” yet.

***

According to Mom, one day as “Jeopardy!” was ending and syndicated “Seinfeld” was starting, Dad leaned over his seat like he was about to share a secret and said to her, “You know, Diana, we’re in such a good place right now that pretty soon one of us is gonna get a terminal illness and die.” She shot down the cynic - “Yeah? I hope it’s you, Rick.”

On June 1st, the day after my seventeenth birthday, Mom called me from the doctor’s office. I was at Broad Channel with Danny, waiting for the shuttle to take us over Jamaica Bay to Rockaway, where we were supposed to meet Mom at our neighborhood Thai place for a birthday dinner. Stage four pancreatic cancer. A death sentence. “Daddy is gonna start chemo in a month.”

I thought about all the times Dad cheated death before. I thought about our neighbor Renee, who passed away the previous February of cervical cancer. And she was so healthy too – a vegan like I was at the time, a nonsmoker too. But despite her healthy lifestyle, her cancer was genetic. She opted out of chemo, much to everyone’s dismay. Mom wondered aloud to Dad, “Why would anyone risk their life like that? She has two little boys she’s leaving behind.”

“Maybe she was scared.”

Dad may have known about his cancer well before the doctors had. When the doctors confirmed with my parents, Dad announced that he had lived a good life. There was no point in fighting something that could kill even Steve Jobs – who had the best treatment imaginable and the money to pay for it. But he knew better than to give up in front of Mom.

Danny hugged me after I told him about Dad. I whispered into his shoulder about how much I hated doctors.

***

Dad began chemo in July 2012. I was too busy with my first summer job to let this bother me. Mom encouraged normalcy. She became his primary caregiver, dealing with everything cancer-related. She wanted to shield me and Nick from the process like we were never exposed to death before. Death was merely the Big Sleep, a dead person was never bothered, they just felt a bit stiff about the whole situation. But Nick and I couldn’t be part of our own family without knowing loss at a young age. Mom’s parents spent their childhoods under Salazar’s rule motherless. Cystic fibrosis took our paternal half-brother Buddy at twenty-four, months before I was born. Dad’s brother Woody died of a heart attack when I was ten. His body was the first body I saw that wasn’t on TV; it helped that it didn’t look like him at all. Their dad died three months later mourning his firstborn. Eight months after Grandpa Halvey, my twenty-five-year-old cousin Ryan was killed in a freak tractor trailer accident. There was no body. Nick told me that he saw the pictures the police sent my Aunt Irene, Ryan’s mom. I knew he was just trying to shock. Nick has always been full of shit.

Nick and I understood grief by seeing the older members of our family mourn. I cried at all the funerals because other family members cried and I absorbed their grief without experiencing my own. I thought my emotional distance for these first three funerals meant that something was wrong with me, like I was incapable of intimacy. My dysphoria leadened my heart and choked my throat with tears turned inward. Arbitrary guilt manifested in my gut – literally, in the form of stomach aches and loss of appetite – between Grandpa Halvey and Ryan’s deaths. I overanalyzed bad actions, bad thoughts, bad religion and lack of religion in my life.

I couldn’t understand Mom’s rationale for treating her adolescent children like they didn’t know that death was inescapable. Mom was the one who thought early exposure to death would be good for us. Maybe she just wanted us to be her children – adolescent or not – for as long as possible, in a futile effort to freeze time, and therefore the malignancy.

***

But Dad still worried about me. As late as September there was this feeling of hypernormalization – the mundane calm of routine pushed back my inevitable loss. Dad still picked me up when he had the energy to do so, silently acknowledging the smell of tequila on my breath. He continued to pick me up from concerts on weekday nights, and his voicemails upon arrival at the agreed meeting spot were still full of impatience and irritation. He refused to be taken care of by someone who still needed care. The end was too far away to grasp, and the desire to slow down time was stronger than ever.

***

We all thought Hurricane Sandy would be as big a deal as Hurricane Irene the year before, when we evacuated to Aunt Irene’s in South Jersey after Hurricane Irene promised serious flooding all weekend. After two days of Irene, the power barely went out in our house. The subway line worked by the end of the weekend.

Sandy was different. The boardwalk, ordinarily a two-minute walk from my stoop, made its way to the front of my lawn. If the telephone pole wasn’t positioned where it was, the boardwalk would’ve broken through the first-floor windows like it did two houses down from us. The overstuffed basement was flooded and the memories of my parents’ time together turned into sludge – the impressive vinyl collection, Mom’s wedding dress, Dad’s book collection. Mom vanished for twelve hours the day after the storm, finding a ride to any pharmacy that would refill Dad’s morphine prescription. I silenced his wails of withdrawal from the living room couch with the hazy comfort of weed from my bedroom in the back of the house, waiting for sleep to consume my troubles and sort the chaos from outside. For the first few nights after the storm, the glow of ash in my bowl became the one source of light in my bedroom.

Two weeks prior to the storm, Dad emerged from the basement with a worn stack of papers that were bound with a metal spine. They were his high school poems that his mother typed up, complete with a short biography of Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan. At sixty-one, he was still Holden Caulfield. For a second, I was the daughter of a writer, genetically predisposed to poetry - not to tumors - in the presence and absence of addictions.

***

I spent the Sunday before Thanksgiving travelling to Uncle John’s to see how Dad was doing. Mom and Nick were spending the day at a family friend’s a few blocks away. I could see how Dad’s condition was affecting himself without being distracted with how his condition was affecting everyone else. I can’t remember what we talked about. Any movement Dad made hurt his stiffened, unnourished body. I didn’t see the reason for me to stay at my uncle’s for very long if all I was good for was watching television. I felt myself becoming more of a burden on Mom and Uncle John – they shouldn’t have to care for me while they’re caring for Dad. Deciding to go to Aunt Irene’s Thanksgiving dinner in New Jersey was more for Uncle John to have one less mouth to feed in his overcrowded house that day. I made sure it was okay with Mom, but I’ve always wondered if Dad was upset that I decided to spend his last Thanksgiving with Mom’s family. He never expressed how he felt about it, but he rarely expressed how he felt with other people. He was good at picking his battles – he watched a lot of History Channel and Military Channel when Nick and I were growing up.

***

Mom told me and Nick about Hospice in February, right before she dropped me off at the subway station on her way to work. I spent the commute trying to study for a statistics exam, but I couldn’t think about anything other than Nick’s face in the car - hopeless & dejected. Concentration was replaced by panic. I skipped my afternoon classes and told my guidance counselor the news. As I began to express the relief of no more suffering and the guilt that immediately follows, she undermines my musings by advising me “think of it this way. You had your dad for seventeen years, Kayla. There are some kids that lose their parents when they’re younger. Some kids don’t have parents at all.”

Dad’s quality of life had an approximate three-week period of improvement in the last few weeks of winter as Hospice made him comfortable. We spent a few of those days talking a lot, watching television. It seemed like Dad wanted to be alone most of the time, and that wasn’t unusual, so it was hard to catch him on a good day. He never wanted me to be in a position where I would have to take care of him, like when I saved his life years before. I was home with him once when Mom was at work, the only person able to walk him to the bathroom, his shame about this inverted dynamic of care - kid to parent - weighing on my shoulders. He refused further help. He would yell when his sleeves betrayed his private condition. I felt like a pig in front of my emaciated father.

***

Dad died on April 22nd. The night before, I felt the urge to go to my Gilda’s Club support group the next afternoon instead of my school tennis match. I’d had this sudden bout of anxiety the Saturday before, when Mom had to hold joints up to Dad’s mouth. I felt like I had to say thank you to him before his time, for every wonderful thing he’s done for me and Nick as our dad, but I didn’t know how to say thank you. Mom left a vague voicemail in the middle of Group telling me to come home with no further details. I called Nick next and forced him to spit it out.

“Dad’s gone.”

The hipsters on W Houston street heard my wail, and I forgot to end the call. I was walking with Adora, a girl my age from Gilda’s whose mother had breast cancer. She told me the same thing my guidance counselor had told me, that I at least had a dad, and that Dad loved me. I couldn’t disagree but Adora’s words weren’t bringing him back either. Mom and Uncle John waited for me to come home first to say goodbye to him, but I wasn’t around to say goodbye. At around 3:45 that afternoon, Dad was complaining to Mom that his hands were hurting. Mom put on his winter gloves as his grip slipped from hers. “I’m going,” he whispered.

Dad died at home, on his own terms, in a bed he spent his whole life making and laying in, and now finally gets to rest in. His passing forever reflected in “Brokedown Palace,” his beloved Dead:

Gonna leave this broke down palace

On my hands and my knees, I will roll, roll, roll

Make myself a bed by the waterside

In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll

In a bed, in a bed

By the waterside, I will lay my head

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul

River gonna take me

Sing me sweet and sleepy

Sing me sweet and sleepy

All the way back home

It's a far-gone lullaby

Sung many years ago

Mama, mama, many worlds I've come

Since I first left home

Going home, going home

By the waterside, I will rest my bones

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul

For the next couple of days, family members visited with enough food donated by neighbors to last two weeks; my friends Jamie & Emily even traveled all the way to Rockaway from the city after school to bring me my favorite foods from the Whole Foods hot bar. There was the obligatory change in Facebook profile picture to subtly indicate what has happened – mine was of me, Mom, and Dad during a Girl Scout father-daughter dance, captioned “He’s free, that’s all that matters;” Mom uploaded their wedding photo. It felt cheap telling the world about our loss in this matter – Dad didn’t exist on social media.

It was hard to stay asleep that entire week – too many thoughts rushing through our minds, too many unsaid things. Our eyes stung as they hung out to dry; our stomachs had trouble welcoming the cuisine of mourning. Eating became the one thing I could concentrate on, repetitive chewing becoming the soundtrack to my early stages of grieving. Other things had to have mattered more, but they didn’t provide the immediate satisfaction food provided. And that took priority for a while – life was too short to think otherwise. I couldn’t go on how I was going the past few years, moving forward and ignoring big feelings, invalidating myself so that other people wouldn't beat me to it. None of that mattered.

When I attended Uncle Woody’s funeral at ten, his daughter Jenna wrote an elegantly honest eulogy that Mom still says to this day was one of the best eulogies she has ever heard somebody present. I felt a pressure to give Dad a similar goodbye. I called him a rapper due to the flow in his speech, and about the time he took me to see Green Day , and about how he owned a shirt that said, “Only the good die young, I’m gonna live forever.”