Home Is Burning

by Dan Marshall

  We rolled into Pocatello with ease. It was a simple drive. I think my dad only needed to piss once, which wasn’t a big deal since we had the urinal with us. The big thing was that he didn’t shit. What a blessing!

  Though I was looking forward to seeing my grandma, aunts, and uncles, I could tell my dad was sad. I didn’t know if it was because he was upset about seeing his mom for the last time or if he was worried about showing his family exactly how much damage his disease had already done to his body. Though there was nothing he could do about it, he felt guilty for the way the disease made other people feel, especially his family. It was an interruption to their life-is-a-vacation mentality. They wanted nothing to do with it.

  We arrived at Grandma Barbie’s and sat in the car looking at the house. It was a single-level residence to make getting around simpler. Apparently, stairs suck for old people. When we’re born, life is really simple. It’s all about keeping the stress to a minimum. As we grow into adulthood, we just complicate our lives with junk: kids, mortgages, marriages, cars, insurance, jobs, drugs, stairs. As we start heading for death, it’s all about making things simple again. No more stairs. Big, safe, easy-to-drive cars. We only engage in a few simple, mindless activities that relax the brain. No jobs. No sex. No problems.

  “You ready for this?” I asked my dad.

  My dad took the deepest breath he could muster and said, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

  Greg and I got out first. Greg was in charge of carrying things like the BiPAP machine and the urinal. I was in charge of moving the communication device and the old sack of dying bones that was our father.

  “Why’d you bring that stupid thing?” Greg asked about the communication device.

  “I don’t know. Jokes. Plus, I think they’d like to know that Dad will still be able to communicate with them even after shit gets really bad,” I said.

  I got him out of the car and we started the long walk into the house. Every walk is long when you have Lou Gehrig’s disease, but this one seemed especially lengthy. I rang the doorbell.

  “Just open the door,” my dad said.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot you could do that with family,” I said. We opened the door and went in.

  All my aunts and uncles carry that drinker’s weight and have faces that seem to be permanently stained red. Sure, we were walking into my grandma’s living room, but we could’ve very well been walking into a frat party where everyone was thirty years older than they should be. Right in the middle of it all was Grandma Barbie, the Queen B.

  She looked pretty good. She had a few nurses caring for her, so she was dressed and put together. She even wore makeup, which almost made me cry. Here she was about to die, but she couldn’t let go of that pressure to always look her best. And she did look her best. In fact, she looked beautiful. My grandma had a lot of good and love in her—even if my mom couldn’t see it. She had, for example, paid for all of her grandkids’ educations, which were not cheap.

  “Hello, everyone,” we said, forcing smiles.

  They all lifted their drinks to say hi. I set my dad up right next to my grandma so they could talk and hold each other’s hands. My dad had always been my grandma’s favorite, so they shared that warmth and togetherness that only a favorite son and a mother could.

  “You look really good, Mom,” my dad said.

  “So do you,” my grandma lied. My dad looked way worse than her. We weren’t taking as good of care of him as my grandma’s nurses were taking of her. She rubbed her old hand over the top of my dad’s bony hand. His fingers were starting to sort of coil up. She managed to uncoil her boy’s fingers and run her motherly hands up and down them, probably something she used to do when my dad was a child.

  “You’re very brave and a very strong woman,” my dad said.

  “No, you’re the brave one, Bobby,” she said. She always called him Bobby. That was his childhood name.

  “This all sucks, doesn’t it?” my dad said.

  “Yes, yes it does, but let’s have a drink,” my grandma said, fighting back the tears. My grandma’s boyfriend, Walter, made my grandma a strong gin and tonic. Her favorite. She grabbed it with her liver-spotted hands and took down a gulp big enough to kill her. She probably shouldn’t have been drinking, what with the kidney, but oh well. Fuck it. My dad didn’t have a drink. He couldn’t.

  Everyone else refilled their glasses. I let my dad and grandma chat it up and share their last moments together while I talked to some of my aunts and uncles. They said they were grateful that Greg and I had taken some time off from our lives to help with my dad. In some ways, it meant that they didn’t have to. My aunts Sarah and Ellen, in particular, were very sweet about it, thanking us repeatedly and telling us what good sons we were. That’s always nice to hear.

  My dad needed to go on the BiPAP for a little bit, so I laid him down for a nap. Then Greg and I went and sat down next to our grandmother.

  “Well, Grandma, sorry you’re dying and all. It’s hard to see,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said, with a little hint of bullshit in her voice. She wanted to die, after all. All these extra good-byes were just extra pain for her.

  “Thanks for paying for my college. It led to a pretty good job out of school. Though I had to leave it because of Bobby Boy’s Lou Gehrig’s shenanigans…” I said.

  “I’m glad you got a good education,” she said. She took a big sip of her gin and tonic and looked me over. “We never really got to know each other, did we?”

  “Yeah, if only my mom and you weren’t in a bitch fight my whole life,” I wanted to say.

  “No, we didn’t, really,” I really said. “It’s too bad. I think we could’ve been pals.”

  “Well, maybe there’s still some time,” she said. But we both knew there wasn’t. We’d never have a relationship. “Let’s have another drink,” she said, draining everything in her glass but the ice. She motioned to Walter to get her another round. Everyone else refilled, too. I guess dying with dignity involves a lot of drinking.

  * * *

  I didn’t really know what to do once the conversations ran out. I couldn’t get drunk because I had to drive home. Driving drunk in the dark would most certainly elevate our chances of dying. I wanted us to live. I wanted to see how all of this played out. I was curious. So, instead of drinking, I just wandered around my grandma’s house. Greg was chatting with my aunts, so I started to explore. It wasn’t their family home, so it didn’t quite have the history I was hoping for. I couldn’t go sit in my dad’s childhood room and smell his old clothes, or anything creepy like that. But my grandma had a lot of photos up. I looked at a few. Since we were the outcasts of the family, there weren’t many of us; just a few of me in my old basketball uniform, or Greg dressed as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, or Chelsea in her dance leotards, or Jessica with her lacrosse stick, or Tiffany holding her snowboard.

  Then I wandered into my grandma’s room. On the wall closest to her bed—presumably the one she looked at the most—were her most prized pictures. There was one with her mom and sisters. One of my grandpa Wendell and her in Sun City, where they had a second home. The rest were of my dad and his siblings. I was drawn to the pictures of my dad. I looked at one of him as a high schooler. He had gigantic ears, a chipped front tooth, and was going through a shaggy-hair phase. He looked like the type of guy you’d want to be your friend: not a jock, but not a complete nerd. Just a good guy. Strange to think that this good guy was destined to get Lou Gehrig’s disease later in life. I sort of wanted to take out a stamp and stamp TERMINALLY ILL across my dad’s boyish face. I wondered if they sold stamps like that.

  There was another photo of my grandma and my dad hanging out at my grandma’s house on Camano Island in northern Washington. It was the house where my grandma had grown up, but it had turned into a vacation home later in life. My dad must have been in his teens then, and my grandma in her forties. Every summer, my grandma would take her kids up there. They’d read, they’d
swim, they’d lie out in the sun, they’d pick blackberries. My dad and his brother Jack would stay up late talking on the front porch, where they also slept. My dad had his first kiss along Camano’s rocky shores with one of the neighbor girls he had a crush on. It was a special place for him.

  I found a picture of my parents’ wedding. It was back when they weren’t terminally ill. They looked like a couple ready to take on the world. There’s nothing more beautiful than youth—the feeling that anything is possible, that your life is an exciting mystery full of hope. Here these two were, having just teamed up, a look of invincibility in their eyes.

  I found another picture of my grandma and dad, now much older, sitting with Chelsea on the back porch of the Camano house. My dad was now a man—a proud father—trying to pass along his love for his favorite childhood place to his daughter. He had always been our compass, directing us through life.

  Another picture featured my dad as he crossed the finish line of the Salt Lake Marathon, his arms triumphantly raised—a healthy and capable athlete, but also a man who had mastered his hobby.

  All the pictures were like a quick tour of my dad’s journey through childhood, into adulthood, into parenthood, and then into midlife. I knew there was never going to be a picture of him in old age. His life was going to be cut short. There would never be a photo of him holding a grandchild, or one of him buying a home in a retirement community. But it helped to know that he had lived a very full life, achieving all these milestones with a smile on his face. It made the Lou Gehrig’s disease seem slightly less tragic.

  Seeing all the pictures of the good times my dad had had and knowing there would be no pictures of good times ahead made me depressed. Living in the past makes you sad; looking to the future makes you happy. It always seemed to me that depressed people are depressed because they can’t move on from the past. Happy people are happy because they’re excited about something in the future. I needed to stop this trip down memory lane, live in the now, have some fucking fun. So I walked out of my grandma’s bedroom and straight to the communication device. I decided that I’d show everyone the ECO-14 to lighten the mood. After everyone refilled their glasses, I gathered them around and hit a few of the buttons.

  “If you loved me, you would put three shots of gin into my feeding tube,” the ECO said. Everyone laughed and raised their drinks. Heavy drinkers love jokes about drinking alcohol. Makes them feel like it’s okay to drink so much.

  “Please give me five dollars. I have Lou Gehrig’s disease and you can still do all the things you love,” the ECO joked. Everyone laughed again. It was as though the communication device was doing stand-up comedy—and killing. Maybe I should take this thing to some open mics. Even my grandma was chuckling. Maybe the ECO’s jokes would help my grandma and me quickly become the best friends in the world, and make up for all the lost moments we had missed out on over the years.

  Just then, my uncle Jack noticed the icon with the penis on it. “What’s that one do?” asked my uncle.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that one,” I said as I grabbed for the device. But it was too late. My uncle hit it.

  “Boy, I could use a blow job,” said the ECO.

  Everyone was stunned to silence. They all lifted their drinks for a big sip. “Oh, my,” my disappointed, dying grandma said. Guess blow job jokes aren’t what your rich grandma wants to hear on her deathbed. Guess I wasn’t going to turn around our relationship. Oh, well. You can’t be close with everyone you meet in this life. Guess you should just appreciate and cherish the people you are close with. I missed my mom and my sisters. At least they thought this was funny. I hit the blow job button again. “Boy, I could use a blow job.” Nothing.

  * * *

  My dad woke from his nap and I sat him down next to his mom again. They didn’t say much. It was getting late and we still had to get back home, as I’d promised my mom that we’d have our dad back alive by bedtime. I gave my dad that we-better-get-going look. He got teary eyed.

  “Well, Mom, I’ve got to go, but keep on fighting,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  “You keep on fighting, too, Bobby. I love you very, very, very much,” she said.

  “I’m glad you were my mom,” he said.

  “I’m glad you were my son,” she said.

  They both cried and held hands for a couple more minutes, taking in their last moments together, wishing they were both young and healthy again, sitting on the porch at their house on Camano Island back when life had seemed endless. Everyone else cried, too. No mother wants to see her son die. Shit, maybe that’s why she wanted to die so bad. Maybe she couldn’t bear the thought of watching her little Bobby go before her.

  After all the tears were dried, they gave their last smiles to each other. I helped my dad up. We walked to the car with the ECO-14 tucked beneath my arm.

  “Maybe I’ll see her again,” he said, looking back at the house and tearing up.

  “Yeah, well, maybe. Maybe not. Miracles can happen, even if they’ve never happened to us,” I said.

  Greg and I put my dad in the car. I popped some sunflower seeds into my mouth and took one last look at my grandma’s house. “You know what would be a true miracle? If you didn’t shit your pants on the drive home.”

  “Let’s not ask for too much,” he said, smiling at last.

  My grandma passed away one week later.

  THE AMBULANCE, BRO

  It started as a typical Friday in our household. I had been drinking more lately and having no sex, so I woke up hungover with a boner. Everything smelled of cat piss. My dad still had Lou Gehrig’s disease. My mom still had cancer and was always sleeping—waking only to down yogurts and ask silly questions like “Do you want dinner?” at eleven in the morning. My sisters were MIA. Greg was planning on either running on the treadmill or riding the stationary bike between shifts of Daddy Duty. The usual shit.

  My dad was supposed to have a tracheotomy and go on a respirator a few days earlier, but we canceled the surgery because my grandma’s funeral had been the weekend before. My dad just wasn’t feeling up to it, so we pushed it back one week. It had been a big fight. My mom insisted that my dad get the surgery as soon as possible and seemed convinced that he was going to die if he didn’t. But he didn’t want to do it yet. It was a big decision. Being on the respirator meant that he’d be hooked to a breathing machine for the rest of his life. It meant that he’d probably lose his voice. It meant that he would basically be immobile. It also meant that he’d need twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock care. He thought he could hold off a little longer.

  We had all just returned from the funeral, where my siblings and I all cried a lot—not necessarily because we’d lost our grandma, but because of the whole shitty situation. We’d take any chance we got to cry these days. Greg cried for an hour straight—one of those really gross cries where you have snot and tears all over your face. It got so bad that an uncle told him to get his shit together. I said, “Wow, Greg, I didn’t know you loved Grandma Barbie so much.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I’m crying for Dad. Look at the poor bastard.” I looked at the poor bastard staring at a photo of himself and his mom when he was a teenager, when times were happier, when life was bright. Our dad was too skinny for his suit. It looked like he was a young kid playing dress-up. He was really wearing down. He didn’t stand a chance against this fucking disease. Poor guy.

  My mom had a slight smirk on her face throughout the funeral, proud of herself for outliving the Queen B. Since she was supposed to die years ago from the cancer, anytime she lasted longer than someone she didn’t like, she saw it as a giant victory.

  With the canceled surgery, the day was shaping up to be chill and relaxing compared to what it could have been had the trach operation gone down. The weekend was approaching—the time when young adults celebrate their youth by consuming alcohol and fantasizing about connecting genitals with strangers. I wanted to focus primarily on the “consuming of a
lcohol” part, since I still had a girlfriend I loved, even though she wouldn’t visit me out in Salt Lake. I understood why she didn’t want to come. Shit was depressing. I didn’t want to be here either. Why should I subject anyone else to this?

  My social life since moving home had been basically nonexistent. I was spending all my time taking care of my family’s bullshit. I figured it was why I was home—that I hadn’t come back to Utah to fuck around and party with pals, like all the times before. But I was beginning to realize that I needed the occasional break to protect my sanity.

  I’d started watching football and drinking beers with my friends Henry, Aria, Mike, Tigg, and Bob. I’d also been hanging out with my party animal friend Dominic. Dom has a dead dad, so we loved getting drunk and talking about how unfair life could be. I found I could form an instant bond with anyone who had lost a parent. We were suddenly in a weird, fucked-up club. Dom and I called it the Dead Dad Club, though I wasn’t officially a member since mine was still hanging on. I actually liked telling old friends why I was home. In high school, I had a reputation for being an asshole—for a stretch my nickname was Dickhead Dan. I wasn’t a full-on bully, but I was prone to saying really blunt and offensive things. Now that I was back taking care of my dying parents, people started to treat me like I was a tragic figure with a heart of gold, instead of a dickhead. I loved feeling like a good person for once. Maybe I was losing my dad, but I was gaining a heart.

  Everything was running as smoothly as it could, so it was looking like I could sneak away from home for a little bit. I called Dom. Plans were made. We would be going out on the town. Alcohol would be consumed. Fun times would be had.