There was never a sense when I was growing up that the adults I saw would ever go away … ever become sick, die, or just plain move. And up until third grade, by and large the adults in my life were static. They were there every day, just as they ought to be. I saw my parents every day, I saw my teachers every day, and I saw my grandparents as often as was practical given their distance from me (given that one set lived a few miles away, I usually saw them several times a week).
And then a funny thing happened. In third grade, our teacher started coming to work less. She claimed it was because we made her tired. I remember working extra hard that year (though I’m fairly sure, in the end, it didn’t matter what I did at all) to make life easier for her, and I also remember (though it may just be hindsight’s vision) my classmates did not share in this venture. I also remember despising myself for my part in her frequent (though planned) absence.
We, her class, were told at the end of the year that she’d had cancer for most of the school year. I remember thinking to myself, and asking my mother when I found out, “Why didn’t anyone tell us the truth?”
“Because we didn’t think you’d understand,” she replied, and I could swear I saw some regret in her eyes. I was young, but I was also educated about some things my classmates just didn’t know about. I knew cancer was a bad thing most people died from. I know now that, had I been told, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut for a day, if that. But at the time all I could think was “They lied to me.” I told my mother that our teacher had said it was because we made her tired.
Her funeral was to be in South Carolina. When I asked why, surprised that she wouldn’t have it where her class and her school could attend, my mother, again, told me that her family was based there. To a 9-year-old kid that wasn’t acceptable. She was a part of my family too, damnit. I have never really gotten the chance to mourn her. At the time I don’t think I could; I was too wrapped up in the injustices I felt had been committed against me, and to a child of 9 those are at times at least as important as anything else.
At the end of the school year there was a garden dedicated to her; far too small, I felt, but it was not mine to decide. Every time I went back to it, it seemed like it had shrunk. At times it seemed like no more than a glorified corner of weeds with a little commemorative stone in the middle. Given that school’s current administration, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d sold the naming rights to the highest bidder.
The next blow to my “requirement” that all adults I care about stay healthy and close to me was during my 7th grade year (I graduated in 8th grade). My grandfather had contracted cancer at 83 years old. I had wanted him to live to be 100 (I felt it an important age, for some reason), and there didn’t seem to be anything in the way of that.
And then he was absent one day for a poetry reading he was going to do. I don’t remember the reason given by the headmaster (who usually gave the closing address), but I do remember being told by my father that he had stomach cancer and was going to have surgery to have it removed. Immediately I was all over both him (my father) and the encyclopedia, trying to figure out other parts of the body that could be transplanted into his stomach so he could still eat. The surgery, they said, would leave him with a stomach the size of a few of his thumbs.
My grandfather’s illness sidelined our summer vacation plans as my father was one of the primary caregivers for his father, and as such we needed to be around for whatever they needed. But I figured as long as it meant he would live through it and get to be a hundred, it was okay.
The cancer surgery left my grandfather mostly unscathed. The biggest differences I saw were that his beard was shorter (it’d been shaved for surgery) and he had a sort of spiderman-like-scar on his chest. There was a central point in the middle around his solar plexus and scar lines went out in four different directions on both sides of the front of his body. Looked really cool.
The cancer was not so impressed with his attempt to cheat it. It came back and took up residence first in his kidneys, then in his blood and finally in his brain. The death notice says he died at 9:30 AM Friday, January 30, but the only thing not dead about him the night before was his heart. His brain was shooting off randomly; a man who had been so eloquent for so long was reduced to sentences that weren’t.
We were summoned, my four siblings and I, around ten the morning of his death, to the administration office. I thought I was being summoned for an entirely different reason, and my siblings, as we looked at each other in utter bewilderment, had as much of a clue as I did. We got inside the building and were greeted by my mother, whose face was indicative of the news to come.
“It’s Grandaddy”, she said, barely holding back tears (as I succumb to them for the umpteenth time today).
And still the four of us–13, 11, 8 and 6–had no idea. Or at least I didn’t. I thought "Okay, so something else has happened. He fell or something.
“He’s dead,” she finished, and let go of herself into us. With the amount of stress she had been under (she had to have been awake when my father was), she was dead spent.
I’d like to think we helped her start to recuperate from a very long, very stressful, bumpy 18-month ride. I think we did. And I know I let go of myself then, too. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve cried that hard.
The rest of that day was fairly uneventful. We “got” the rest of the schoolday off, though I think it would have been nigh-impossible for any teacher to make us focus on the material at hand. “My grandaddy, whom you have met, just died” has a way of silencing that sort of thing. If it’s a perk it’s the only one I can think of, because it sure as hell sucked for us.
I was a junior in high school when the next blow to my desire to see those adults who were constants in my life remain such. My Nana (a widow then) had been slowly deteriorating. Slowly. As in, for the past 20 years. For the past few she had not been able to dress herself or cook her own meals, yet she steadfastly refused to move out of a house that was slowly choking the life out of her. I’m convinced, and I am far from alone in this, that she wanted to go out as her mother had; being tended to by her entire family. And in the end she nearly succeeded. She was in her hospital bed with several of her ten children in the room (big friggin’ room, from what I hear) and several of their 50-some children there as well. My mother, who was standing near some sort of apparatus (I was still at school; the way my Nana had been fighting the past 20 years, nobody had a clue if she’d last another minute or another six months), sensed that she was fighting because she wanted her other two children there.
“It’s such a pity that Rosamond and Nicky can’t be here”, she said, loudly enough that she hoped her mother-in-law could hear, yet not to disturb the room.
And Nana’s breathing slowed for a few seconds and then stopped. She had as much of her dream as she was going to get (and really, to have eight of ten children, some of their spouses, and many of their children there makes for one hell of a going-out party).
I got the call soon after. I was in another dorm watching Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein when a friend came in to tell me there was a call for me. Family emergency.
I was pretty sure what it was.
A minute later I was dead sure.
The fun didn’t end there, though. There was to be no peaceful burial. Evidently she’d wanted her body donated to science (a noble cause, I know, but at this point I think most of us just wanted it to be OVER with so we could go on with our lives). So we would have to wait first for Georgetown to use the body, and then for it to cremate the remains and send them back to us.
That took three years.
Before that happened, however, yet another of those childhood icons we all have took his final resting place in history’s annals. My maternal grandfather had been sick for an even longer time. Doctors were amazed beyond amazement that he was still alive and mobile given his health (asthma, decent weight problem, still smoked, still drank, still made fairly long excursions). And then his immune system started to decline. Cuts became purulent areas right under his skin. A scratch became a puffy, purulent spot five or six inches wide … not terribly deep, but not the way a body is supposed to react. He did nothing to combat this … in part, perhaps, because he knew his time was coming. His teeth were in such bad shape that he was reduced to eating tomatoes and similar soft foods; he couldn’t handle oranges, even.
For years he had refused to give up his regimen of smoking and drinking (the former of which contributed to my mother’s still-present asthma). For years he had been with mediocre physicians who somehow associated “Brigadier General [name], US Army, Ret.” with “Dr. [name], PhD.” Maybe they learned some alternate spelling, I don’t know.
His immune system shut down one day, or one week, or something. He contracted pneumonia and died maybe a week later. I had been granted a few days off school to attend his memorial service in Arlington, and I slept through my alarm clock. I think that’s all of that particular day that I’d care to remember right now amidst the returning memories of death and complete lack of control.
My gradaddy (paternal, not the army guy) had always been such a hero to me. He seemed like the perfect grandfather growing up, and in many ways I think he was. After his death (and especially the death of his wife), so many things started to surface from so many of his children, painting a picture of the man I did not think was possible. It’s ironic…I asked my mother one day if he had ever had an affair. Her response?
“Oh, honey, I don’t think he had time for one … not while he was married to your Nana, at least.” She didn’t know at the time, but what a saving throw that last bit was.
Had I known all the evil he had been, he would have been dead to me long before his heart stopped beating. But of all the horrid things he did, two stick out in my mind as totally contradictory to everything he otherwise lived for:
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He cheated on his fiancée with another woman, and never publicly acknowledged the son that affair had produced. He did provide some child support (in a time when that was not nearly regulated as it is now, and especially considering she was a “woman of color”). He molested all ten of the children he had with his wife.
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He lied. Compulsively. But he could never look you straight in the face and lie. He was a very clever liar, but he didn’t have the spine to lie well, so he hid it around changes-of-subject, laughing, and outright leaving the room. And he had enablers all over the place, oh yes.
I learned about the man I saw when I was a child.
I learned about the man he was (and, more importantly, the man he could never be) when I was a teenager.
I am learning about the man he wasn’t as I watch my father, lo these 21 years, strive to be everything his father was not. It is almost as though he kept a mental list of things not to do.
He has checked that list with vigor that would make Santa Clause blush.
My father is not perfect, and he would be the first to admit it. He did not hide this fact growing up. But he did one thing many times which I cannot and will not forget:
“And if there is anything we ever did to you that we shouldn’t, and you realize it, tell us. I hope we will be able to make it up to you.”
I never for a moment thought cancer would get my Grandaddy. Until it did. I thought my Nana would live to be old and senile and unable to care for herself … but I thought she would live. I thought my Grandfather would defy modern medicine … and he did, until his body could take no more. I knew my father would be fine after the back surgery he had a few years back. He’d survived two knee surgeries before … and, more indicative of his resilience, he’d survived years of four kids in one house. He ought to have a gold medal just for keeping us all alive and break-free (yeah, no kidding about that. He’s the only one in the entire family who’s broken a bone, and it was his thumb getting caught in a car door when he was a teenager).
And now he goes in for five hours of “find it and fix it” back surgery on March 13. Two weeks from now. No, not even that. Thirteen days.
Five hours.
I am scared silly. He’s strong, I know that. He’s strong in every way I can think of to conceive of him. If he hadn’t been taking care of his kids (or had the drive to be a daddy) or had such messed-up knees and back, I’m quite confident he could have toured on a bodybuilding circuit. He was benchpressing 325 pounds mere months after back surgery. Hell, he was walking two days after it. He was strong enough to tell me, after he had been rather uncompassionately rebuffed by his “we don’t want to hear about that icky stuff” daughters to tell me in the car, on the way to grocery shopping, that he had been molested by his father, among other people. That the man I had trusted so completely had violated trust long before I was anything on earth. For years he has been strong enough to know there is no shame in crying, and he has shown that many times. He was strong enough to accept the help he was given when he felt at his lowest (near suicidal), and strong enough to take pills to help him feel better. He was strong enough to let me make my own mistakes when I got to college and strong enough to know that he had raised someone who, as much as he messed up his own life, would not put that on someone else. He knew bloody well what kind of mess I could make.
He trusted that I would not. He knew that I could not. And he was strong enough in that belief that he didn’t gloat when he was right.
He knew Bailie was the one almost before I did (but I think I’ll let him, for now, have the “satisfaction” of knowing “before me”;)). He told me as much.
He is, in ways I will never be able to express to anyone, my strength. I look at any part of my life and just when I think “Well, it’s official, God hates me” I think back to so many places in his life where he could have simply quit.
He didn’t, and he didn’t raise me to, either. I have, on occasion. There’s a difference between not quitting and being stubborn to your own detriment, after all:)
They’re going to put him on his back for the surgery, I am told. They’re going to open him up from the front, shove/place his internal organs neatly aside, and fix his back. That’s the current plan. My mother tells me (because he’s so out of it he can barely type, let alone think long enough to write all this down to me in email) they’re going to fuse/replace with metal or plastic … 4 of his vertebrae. That’s just what they plan to do now. He could be a bionic man before terribly long if this keeps up. It’s only a matter of time before his knees decide they’d rather be something other than bone.
I know surgery always has risks. I didn’t think “being tired” would leave my teacher dead. It was not conceivable to me that my Grandaddy would suffer ill effects from his surgery, but it seemed to slow him down just enough for the cancer to slow him down permanently. I didn’t see why my parents were so worried some years ago (1996) when I went in for testicular surgery. I didn’t see why anyone was worried about my father a year later when his other knee decided it was time to get it operated on. And I didn’t see any issue with him having back surgery a few years ago.
And I’m very aware of his mortality now.
