“No, I don’t.”
“Forgive me if I’ve forgotten something I should know. Are you and Danielle married?”
It wasn’t the question of a man who had forgotten things. It was the query of a father who had not talked deeply with his daughter in a long while, perhaps ever.
“No,” I said.
“How long ago did you meet?”
“We’ve been together for a good few years.”
“A good few? As in the years have been good, or they have been plentiful?”
He might have had good days and bad days, but on this day at least, his mind was as sharp as ever.
“Both, I suppose.”
“You don’t want a family?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer the question because I didn’t know if I had an answer at all. Fact was, I wasn’t even sure what the question was. I once had a family, but they were gone. And then I moved to Florida and found a new family. Not a family in any legal sense of the word, and as I had come to learn, even Danielle didn’t fit that bill according to the state of Florida. But by another definition, perhaps a moral definition, or simply a definition of the heart, I already had a family. Danielle, Ron, Cassandra. Lucas, Mick, Muriel. I was blessed with good people. But I also knew I was avoiding the question that he was really asking. Now he was being imprecise with the language. Because he didn’t mean family. He meant children.
“I don’t honestly know.”
“That’s a fair answer,” he said. “I think that’s something too few people think about, until it’s too late.”
“I guess I like what I’ve got already.”
“I can understand that. Just don’t be like me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some people miss all the good stuff in life because they don’t think enough, and other people miss all the good stuff because they think too much. But either way, you have to know that it’s all going to happen quicker than you think it will. We’re not a separate species, you know—people who are ill, people who are dying. We’re just like you, only further along. It’s the same with all people. When we’re young, we look at old people as if they’re something other than us, as if we could never be that. And I understand that, the value of the ignorance of youth. Perhaps we wouldn’t be as bold or try to do the things we do if we were overly consumed by our own mortality. But you will be consumed by it soon enough. And the thing is, when you get old, it’s not the same. It’s not simply that you become old, so you think like an old person. When you get old, you don’t forget being young. You don’t forget those chances you took and the ones you didn’t. And before you know it, your body and your mind can betray you, and you end up not knowing or remembering anything at all.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I had known people for whom physical strength had been everything. When you play pro sports, you meet a lot of people like that. Some guys moved on from the sport—whether it was straight out of college or after a professional career. But some guys didn’t. Those guys—the ones who put all their stocks in their physical fitness—found themselves lost on the backend of the bell curve, when their strength started to ebb away, and they began to run slower, lift less, see less clearly. I knew guys who had had their minds taken away from them by CTE, the result of repeated head contacts on the football field, leaving them with a brain like tapioca pudding and nothing but a scared family and an angry heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For what’s happening to you.”
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. It is what it is. Eventually our time comes. Something goes, the body or the brain. Or in my case . . .”
“Which is worse?” I felt the bluntness of the question the moment it left my lips, but he didn’t seem fazed by it.
“For me?” he said. “The brain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m angry that I can’t get around the way I used to do. But I was never like you. I didn’t play sports. That wasn’t my domain. But I know now there are times I can’t remember. It’s not like they get filed in a different cabinet to be retrieved some other way. It’s not a split personality. I know I can’t remember because some days, mornings inexplicably become evenings, rain becomes sunshine and then becomes rain again. The days tick over and I don’t even know. They don’t tend to tell me much around here about it, because I suppose there’s not a lot of upside to it, but I suspect those times are becoming more frequent, and the thing is, I’m over the anger. I’m not sad about it. The times I don’t remember are simply blank, like a period of nonexistence. And when I do remember, I’m happy that I can see another sunrise and read another book. Have another conversation.” He drifted away for a moment, as if deep in thought. “It’s Danielle and Jane I feel sorry for.”
He asked for a little more water, and I got the sense that all the talking was drying him out inside. I held up the cup so he could suck some more water through the straw, and when he was done, he continued.
“I’ve always felt a little sorry for them. Because I guess deep down I’ve always known.”
“Known what?”
“That I wasn’t a good father. I know I’m not a bad person. I’ve never killed anyone, never purposely hurt anyone. I’m certainly not evil by any moral measure. But that’s not the same as being a good father. I wasn’t built for it. I spent too much time in my own head because that’s where I was most comfortable. I was always content with my own company. I fell into teaching almost by accident, and after I completed my PhD, teaching at the University of Washington was really the only thing I could do. There aren’t a lot of career choices for people with doctorates in English literature. But don’t get me wrong, I didn’t lie before. I loved it. Engaging in intellectual debate, like some kind of Algonquin roundtable. Yet even then, it wasn’t about the people. It was about the ideas. I was just never a people person, even with my own wife and daughters. This disease—these diseases—is not what makes me sad. What makes me sad is knowing that I let down my wife and children, that I really wasn’t capable of doing better by them. I love them, but that wasn’t enough.”
“You regret getting married and having children?”
“Goodness, no. I’m saying it makes me sad that I let them down. But I can’t bring myself to regret it, because the net result was so wonderful.”
“What result?”
“Two amazing women. Jane and Danielle.”
I had to agree with that.
“So you said you’ve been with Danielle for a good few years?”
“A little over ten.”
“Longer than I was with Anne. But you’re not married?”
“No.”
“Is it a philosophical objection?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. At least I didn’t think so. My grandparents had all been married, and my parents after them, and in the grand scheme of things, their marriages seemed to be good and seemed to make them happy. My dad hadn’t gone downhill because he didn’t want to be married. He lost himself because when my mother died, he lost his north star. So I didn’t think my objection, if I had one, was philosophical. Ron had done it several times and had gone back for more with Cassandra, and he seemed happier than I’d ever seen him. Danielle had also been down that road, and it hadn’t worked out, but I certainly wasn’t sad or regretful about that.
As I pondered Ryan’s question, I wondered why it was that all these people did it in the first place. There were the religious motives, of course. Many religions saw it as some kind of sacred bond. And from that, the societal norm had been created, the recognition that a relationship culminates in marriage, and that recognition filtered down into the relationship with the state. There were even tax benefits in most cases. So it begged the question, why had we been together so long and not gotten married? I told myself I didn’t have an answer, and I wasn’t convinced I did, but something started to gnaw at me—that maybe I was avoiding the whole thing out of fear. Was
I like Ryan? Did I spend too much time in my own head to make it work? Was I not anyone’s idea of husband material?
“I don’t think I have any philosophical objection, per se,” I said.
“So why not?”
“That’s a rather direct question, don’t you think?”
“The basis of all good intellectual discourse is a directly stated question.”
I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to become a devotee of intellectual discourse. I much preferred discussing box scores or chatting with Mick at Longboard Kelly’s about the best ratio of fish to mayonnaise in a fish dip. But Ryan wouldn’t stop looking at me with his daughter’s eyes, and in the same way that I had always felt compelled to come up with an answer when pressed by a teacher at school, so I felt like I had to give Ryan’s query a response.
In school I had skated by using the bold-type method. I just opened every textbook and read the stuff that was written in bold type, or highlighted, or put inside some kind of a shaded box. I figured the rest was waffle. I was usually proven correct, except under the gaze of the more insistent teachers who wanted the dreaded deeper answer.
“I guess I’m afraid of change,” I said. “I like what I have. I don’t see how changing it could possibly make it better.”
“Is your relationship the same today as it was when you met?”
“No.”
“Everything changes, right?”
“Yes.”
“But your relationship is still good today, despite the change?”
“Better than ever.”
“There you go. You could argue that change is necessary to keep the status quo, or that sometimes it makes things better. You could argue sometimes not. But you can’t argue that change will not happen. Change is outside your control. Change is a constant. The question is how you deal with that change.”
I had seen plenty of change; we all did. Change was the bell curve, young and growing, and then the middle, and then old and decaying. I thought about when I was in school and I got selected for a Connecticut state little league team, my first representative team. We were competing in the preliminaries of the Little League World Series. We didn’t get very far, nowhere near the finals, but I remember feeling different, having made the team at all. It was a good feeling.
And then my mother got cancer. I remembered the same good feeling when I got accepted on a scholarship to the University of Miami. I had wanted to escape everything that was New England, to get as far away from Connecticut as possible, both metaphorically and physically. Miami had been like a dream destination. To be accepted into such storied baseball and football programs was a dream come true. I had walked ten feet tall for weeks on my arrival, and I had worn no clothing that wasn’t supplied by the school and emblazoned with its logo. It was, in fact, how I ended up with the nickname that I wore to this day. I was like a walking, talking billboard for the school. My dream come true.
Then my father went out drinking and drove home and killed himself and the girl that he ran into. I never really connected any of these events in any conscious way, but as I sat here with Ryan Castle, I started to consider the karma of things, the notion that solidifying my relationship with Danielle would somehow offset the balance, that something bad would happen.
“Miami,” he said, bringing my attention back to him. “True liberty is an illusion. You must find contentment within the paradigm in which you find yourself.”
I waited for him to close out his sentence by calling me Grasshopper, and I wanted to say, Thank you, master, but when he didn’t I went with, “Meaning?”
“Meaning, don’t worry, be happy.”
He gave me a wry smile, and I offered him one in return. I wasn’t sure if he was messing with me or if he was the Zen-like mentor that I needed for the times. He wriggled his shoulders slightly, and a look of mild discomfort flashed across his face.
“More water?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Could you hit that button for me?”
There was a small trigger with a red button at the end of it, the sort of thing I imagined being worn by a suicide bomber. I hit the button, and within a few moments Nurse Gabriela came back into the room. Without words and in a well-choreographed sequence, she plumped Ryan’s pillows, lowered his bed, and told him what he appeared to already know, which was that he needed some rest. She looked over at me with a grin.
“All this jibber jabber tires him out.”
I stood to leave, and Ryan lifted his hand slightly off the bed. I took it and turned to him.
“Miami, thank you.”
“Thank you, Ryan.”
“I enjoyed chatting with you immensely. I hope we can do it again sometime.”
“Me, too.”
He offered me his crooked smile that extended all the way into the eyes that I knew so well, and then before I had the time to register what it was I was saying, I spoke.
“Ryan, if it comes to it, I would like your permission to marry your daughter.”
Ryan nodded, closed his eyes, and let out a long, slow breath. He let my hand go, and I felt him drifting away toward sleep.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I would love to see that.”
Chapter Seven
Nurse Gabriela followed me out of the room. As we wandered down the corridor, I noted she wore her easy smile, the one she usually saved for conversations with patients and their relatives.
“You okay?” I asked.
“That was a nice thing to say, what you asked back there. It’ll mean a lot to him.”
I shrugged.
“I didn’t think people asked for permission like that anymore,” she said.
“I’m not sure they do,” I replied. “And it might be best if you don’t mention it to Danielle. I’m not sure she’d take kindly to being horse traded.”
“I think Danielle can look after herself,” said Nurse Gabriela.
I had to agree with that. “You didn’t find Danielle and Jane?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “They got a chance to talk with their father yesterday, and he was doing okay. But today, with you? That was something different.”
“How so?”
“The things you were talking about? His books and such. I get the feeling that those were the things that really made him who he was. The things he lived for.”
“I got the same impression.”
“I think he needed to spend some time talking with another man, to be honest. He doesn’t get much of that around here.”
“How is he doing, really?”
“What we do here is try to make people’s final days as comfortable as possible. More often than not, that’s about pain management. But in the case of Dr. Castle, it’s also about providing those last few moments of joy. When he’s gone, they won’t matter much to him. But they do matter, in my experience, to the people left behind.”
“So the dementia is that bad?”
“The times he is lucid are shorter now, and the periods between them are getting longer. You never know when it might be the last time he ever comes back.”
“Danielle said he seemed angry before. I didn’t get that today.”
“You’ve heard of the seven stages of grief?”
“Sort of.”
“Denial and acceptance and anger, that sort of thing. Here we find that they don’t generally happen in any preset order, not like in a textbook. But certainly Dr. Castle went through the anger. I suspect he’d been through denial before he even got here.”
“And he was angry at the disease?”
“In most cases that’s where the anger gets directed. At the disease, and at loved ones. He gave the impression that he didn’t want anybody to see him, as the sclerosis caused his body to shrink the way it has. But the truth is I think he’s a man who spent a lot of time in his life thinking and talking, and he realized that he spent a lot of that time thinking and talking to the wrong people.”
“Is he suffering?”
“On one level it’s impossible to say. He doesn’t have the pain that many of our patients have. Most of his distress is inside his head, and like I say, the times when he’s able to consider it are getting fewer.”
“So once the dementia takes over, he won’t suffer like that anymore?”
“I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that. The science provides a path, but what truly happens within the human mind at a time like that? I suspect your guess is as good as any doctor’s. But in Dr. Castle’s case, it doesn’t really matter. His time is short.”
“But not because of the dementia?”
“No, that’s just added a cruel twist. As I’m sure Dr. Maxwell explained, his real ailment is the ALS. He struggling to breathe, more and more, and with a no-intubation order, one day soon he’ll stop altogether.”
“So he hasn’t got long?”
“No.”
“How long?”
“I really shouldn’t speculate.”
“I’m not his family, not really. Not like Jane and Danielle. Just give it to me straight.”
“In my experience, he might hang on for a month or two. But more likely, I think we’re talking weeks. Maybe less.”
We reached the foyer and stopped. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, and I got the sense that Nurse Gabriela’s next task lay in the direction from which we had just come. She gave me the easy smile but said nothing more.
“I need your help with something,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll help any way I can.”
We spoke for a moment more, then I saw Danielle and Jane coming from the administration side of the hospice. Nurse Gabriela put her hand on my chest and nodded knowingly, then turned and walked back down the antiseptic corridor. I turned to Danielle and Jane.
Danielle glanced down the corridor and then back at me. “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Your dad was awake.”
“Alert?” asked Jane.
“Yes. And in good form.”
“You spoke with him?” asked Danielle.
“I did. Nurse Gabriela introduced me.”
The Ninth Inning Page 5