Home Is Burning

by Dan Marshall

  “Tell him not to go. Tell him that we’ll continue to take care of him. Tell him that everything will get better,” my mom cried.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, it’s his decision, and he’s made it. So I think we’ve got to accept it. We’ve fought this disease long enough,” I said, getting a little weepy. “Fuck, that was a great moment. We really should have gotten it on camera. Can we reshoot that?” I asked.

  “I’ll have no one,” my mom said, ignoring my question.

  “You’ll have us kids. We’re not Dad, but we’ll help you out,” I said, while giving a reassuring nod toward my dad, finally feeling like the man of the house for once. I walked over and wrapped my arms around them both. I pulled out of it. “I’ll leave you two to it. Just wanted to grab the camera.”

  * * *

  After my parents had done whatever it was that they did in their time alone, the whole family went on a walk through our neighborhood. When we got home, we read some letters from friends and loved ones to my dad. He loved listening to those. The letters combined with all the good-byes made him feel like the most loved person on earth.

  As night hit, we were all in my dad’s room, not really saying much, just enjoying the comfort of being a complete family for one last night. I read my dad some of my writing. I was expecting him to laugh and cry and love it, but he just noted that he didn’t know I masturbated so much. “I do,” I reassured him.

  It was finally time for bed. Jessica, my mom, Tiffany, and Chelsea were all sleeping in Dad’s room, so there was no room for Greg or me. Oh well. We got to spend a lot of time with him over the last year, more than the rest. I felt fulfilled.

  I said good night to my dad for the last time and headed out. As I was about out of the room, my mom yelled after me. “Wait!” I was half expecting to turn back and see my dad standing up, smiling, not having Lou Gehrig’s disease, holding my laughing mom. “We just played the most epic prank of all time on you. We’re fine. We just wanted to see if you truly cared about us. It was a test, a way for us to get you to become an adult and experience some real-life shit. You passed. You proved your love. Everything will go back to normal starting now,” I expected them to say as everything faded back to normal. A WELCOME HOME DAN THE MAN sign would drop from the ceiling. My dad would hand me a glass of wine. My mom’s hair would shoot out of her head, growing into the beautiful, curly delight it had been before cancer got to her. We’d dance around the room and laugh and sing and promise to be happy forever.

  Instead, my mom shot out of bed, fumbled around for the CD player remote, and said, “We’ve got to listen to the song one last time.” My dad rolled his eyes as “I’ll Follow the Sun” started to play.

  I finally got to bed. The sheets still smelled like cat piss.

  THE DAY OF

  My dad picked September 22 as the last day of his life because it was the first official day of autumn, his favorite time of the year. When fall hits in Utah, the leaves begin to change, making the mountainside as colorful as a box of crayons. The weather hangs around the seventies—never too hot, never too cold. It’s the last warm gasp of fresh air before the snowplows and salt cover our icy roads.

  Just as the season began to change, so, too, would our lives. We were about to lose our leader, our teacher, our father, our friend. The suffering would be over, but the mourning would begin. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. Sure, my dad wouldn’t be in pain anymore, and I’d get my life back. But my dad, my pal, wouldn’t be around.

  On the day of, I woke up around seven and lay in bed thinking about how I wanted today to be the perfect send-off for my dad. I wanted it to be a magical day full of love, heartfelt good-byes, and reminders of what a great guy he was. I wanted him to feel good about his decision to end this. I wanted him to realize that he lived a meaningful and complete life, even if it was cut short by a shitty disease. I wanted him to know how much he meant to me, to us all.

  I got out of bed and did my whole showering, dressing, brushing my teeth, judging myself in the mirror for getting so fat routine, then started the last day of my dad’s life.

  I timed my steps with the audible in/out air pumping from the rhythmic respirator as I ascended the stairs to his room. I had grown to love the sound of the respirator, even though I’d initially hated it. Sure, it would beep, and it was heavy, and I would occasionally bare-knuckle-punch it and talk shit to it. But its noises had come to be the heartbeat of the whole household. In a few hours, we would no longer hear its sounds, and that scared the shit out of me. A silence would fall over this house as though it was Pompeii after the volcano. Would we all be left covered in ashes and blackened until someone dug us out? Would we be frozen in this moment and become a tragic tourist destination?

  “Dad, wake up. Wake up,” I said as I wiggled his big toe dangling off the end of his home hospital bed. He was still asleep, amazingly. He looked as peaceful as I’d ever seen him. He even had a little smirk on his face. He was content.

  My mom was curled up in bed with him, a frown on her face. She was not content. She didn’t want him to go. She was clinging to him so hard that it looked as if she wanted to follow him to the grave. Maybe that’d be for the best: the two of them going at once. Maybe we could get a discount on the funerals, some sort of fucked-up two-for-one deal.

  “Wake up, Dad,” I said again. “I made you a big breakfast.”

  My dad slowly blinked awake. Last day on earth and he had to wake up to his fat son hovering over him, rubbing in the fact that he couldn’t eat real food. “Made you eggs Benedict with a side of extra-greasy bacon and a big glass of freshly squeezed OJ,” I joked as I grabbed some cans of Promote and set them bedside for his last meal.

  Tiffany, who had slept on the floor of her old room, appeared with her morning Starbucks. Jessica and Chelsea had slept in the bed next to my dad’s. Greg wandered into the room in his morning robe. We were all there.

  My mom slowly woke up as well. She had been completely knocked out by the Klonopin. The short hair that had managed to grow back in after the chemo was standing straight up. Her face was glossy from her body trying to sweat out all the toxins. She looked like the Grinch.

  “You look like the Grinch,” I told her. “The Chemo Grinch.”

  “Did you really make him breakfast?” asked the Chemo Grinch.

  “No, it was just a stupid joke because he can’t eat,” I explained.

  “Well, I’m just going to have yogurt for breakfast,” she said.

  “Changing it up a little. I like it,” I said.

  I looked outside for the first time. It was rainy and gray. “Oh, perfect,” I muttered to myself. We had planned on taking my dad up Millcreek Canyon for one last family stroll alongside the river. But, with the rain, that plan was ruined.

  “Fuck, I lost my rosary,” the Chemo Grinch said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I need that goddamn thing if I’m going to get through this.” The rosary was my grandpa Joe’s, one of his only possessions through several years in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. She figured if it could get him through that, it could get her through this. She shot out of bed. “Quick, everyone look for my rosary. I need it. How am I going to get through all this without it? There is no way.”

  “Well, there is no God, if that helps at all,” I callously said.

  “Danny, I need that fucking rosary,” the Chemo Grinch said as she dropped to the ground to look for it.

  As usual, I was being a real asshole. And my poor dad had to watch my awful display of behavior. But I was upset with my mom. Sure, I felt sorry for her, but I was angry that she had spent the last few weeks completely numbed out by drugs. I understood how hard it was, but still, I wished she would put her own needs aside for just today so that we could all focus on my dad.

  “We’ll find it. It’s here somewhere,” Tiffany said. She wasn’t in the mood to joke around. She got on the floor and started to look for the rosary with my mom. Tiff was always the leader—the on
e who took things seriously while Greg and I dicked around and made stupid jokes.

  “Oh, here it is,” I said.

  “Where?” my frantic mom said.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “Oh, wait, here it is.”

  “You found it?” said my mom.

  “Just kidding,” I said, really racking up my asshole points for the day. What’s the matter with me? Fucking with my mom on my dad’s last day. We were supposed to have a very peaceful day that left my dad thinking that we’d be all right after he left us.

  “Please. Stop that. This is very serious. I can’t deal with today if I don’t have some comfort,” she explained.

  “Okay, I won’t fuck with you anymore,” I said. “Oh, here it is. I’m not kidding this time.”

  “Really,” she said.

  “Just kidding,” I said.

  Tiffany finally found my mom’s rosary beneath my dad’s hospital bed. My mom started to calm down instantly. I guess religion can provide some comfort, if nothing else. I told her to go take a shower and chase down a Klonopin with some yogurt to relax, so we could proceed with my dad’s last day. She agreed.

  * * *

  Today wasn’t all fun and games. Sunny from hospice was due to arrive at our house around 1 p.m. She would start my dad on a low morphine drip that would slowly leave him unconscious and unable to feel pain, or anything for that matter. Dr. Bromberg would arrive around two thirty. He would start turning down the respirator when my dad was officially deemed unconscious via the morphine. He would gradually die via loss of oxygen to the body, around four o’clock. Then we’d run to the window and we’d signal to the neighborhood kids to release the balloons. Creepy Todd had that all organized. That was his job.

  The other people who were going to be in the room would arrive around noon. However, we got some bad news from Sam. He was supposed to spend the day with us, but, in an extra hard slap to the face by God’s callused hand, Sam’s father had passed away the previous Wednesday. So he was in Florida laying his dad to rest as we prepared to do the same back at home. He left a nice message on my phone that I played for my dad:

  Hi, Dan. This is Sam calling from Florida. I know this is going to be really hard for you all the next couple of days. Tell your dad that I really wish I could be there. I’m so sorry that it didn’t work out. Let him know that I’m thinking about him. I love him so dearly. I probably have two really close friends in the world and today I’m losing one of them. I’ll miss him greatly. He’ll always be with me. Yesterday I had a great run on Clearwater Beach. I thought about him. I don’t think I’ll have a run in the future without thinking about him.

  It would have been great for Sam to have been there. It would have, at least, made my dad feel better about everything he was going through. Sam had been everything you could ask a best friend to be. The two ran six marathons together, and when my dad got ALS, instead of running the other way, Sam stood by his side. They didn’t finish every race together—there was the occasional cramp or pulled muscle or bathroom break that separated the two—but I wish my dad had been able to finish this one with Sam by his side.

  “You know I slept with Sam’s daughter, Becca, right?” I asked.

  My dad smiled and nodded. “You’ve told me several times.”

  My mom came back in with a smile on her Grinch face.

  “You take that Klonopin?” I asked.

  “I did,” she said, forcing a high five on me. She looked really out of it. She clearly wasn’t going to remember anything from today. She spoke in a soft voice that could hardly be heard, her speech now muddled by the drugs. Her eyes could barely stay open. “Could you read me the will? I’m not sure I trust it,” she asked.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “Yes, please. I don’t want Dad’s family fucking me out of money. It’ll make me feel better,” she said, handing me the will.

  She thought that there was some trick in my dad’s will that would give all his money away to people she didn’t like. I opened it up and read it aloud to put her mind at ease. She was too out of it to hear a word I was saying, but I read it anyway while she spooned yogurt into her mouth, her eyes closed. She looked like a child being lulled to sleep by a bedtime story.

  * * *

  The rain stopped and the clouds began to clear, letting the sun suck up all the fallen precipitation like a giant invisible straw. The sky turned a perfect blue to match my dad’s eyes. Things were looking up.

  Regina arrived and helped get my dad ready as my mom dozed off in the chair next to his bed. He looked great: clean-shaven, his graying hair slicked from left to right, the way he always wore it. He wanted to wear his marathon-running gear on his last day. So we slipped the orange hat on his head and the blue shirt over his bony shoulders. We needed some sun to gleam off my dad’s still-alive face one more time, so we decided to head outside for a walk around the neighborhood.

  “No man should die without a sunburn,” I said to him, taking off his hat and ruffling up his combed hair. “Come on, let’s load this fucker into his wheelchair,” I said to Regina and Greg.

  Meanwhile, my mom shot back awake with a sudden burst of energy. She looked at Regina, Greg, and me as we started to transfer my dad to his chair.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” she asked.

  “We’re going outside,” Greg said.

  “Well, I have some questions to ask your dad,” she said.

  She opened up her red notebook. She was trying to learn everything that she had to do once my dad died. She wasn’t in the state of mind to really absorb anything, but she fired off a set of questions:

  “How do I change the filters in the furnace?”

  “How do I balance a checkbook?”

  “Should we sell the van?”

  “How do I fix the pool cover if it breaks?”

  “What do I do if we need to cut down some trees in the yard?”

  “Are your siblings going to fuck us out of money?”

  “Can we read the will again?”

  I interrupted, ignoring my frantic mother. “We’re going outside now.”

  We all swarmed around my dad as if he were some sort of celebrity. We argued over who was going to drive him to the nearby elevator. As everyone pleaded their case, I grabbed the wheelchair controls and drove away.

  “Fuck you all. I’m driving him,” I said, middle finger raised. I had been the first in the family to learn how to run his stupid respirator. I had programmed his stupid communication device and helped him learn how to use his stupid wheelchair. I was the first to change his stupid diapers while he remained in his stupid hospital bed. I was the last to walk him up a stupid flight of stairs and the first to call his stupid suction machine a bad word. I had his neurologist’s stupid phone number memorized and knew more about stupid Lou Gehrig’s disease than stupid Lou Gehrig himself. I had earned the opportunity to drive him to the stupid elevator.

  I got my dad into the elevator. We had had very few moments alone lately. Someone was always around. The elevator only fits him and one other person, so we got a lot of our intimate, one-on-one conversations done during these short rides. The last day of Dad’s life was no exception.

  “Can you believe today is the day?” I asked.

  “No, I really can’t,” he managed to say.

  “Seems like I was heading back from California just yesterday,” I said. I had, in fact, been home for exactly 366 days.

  “I know. I could walk back then,” he said.

  “What a wild, fucked-up year,” I said.

  “Thanks for being here for it,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it. I love you, Dad,” I said.

  “I love you, too, DJ,” he said.

  The accordion elevator door swooshed open before we could get too emotional and sappy. Greg was standing in the garage with a bottle of water in his hand. It was just him. Everyone else had disappeared.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “
I don’t know. She’s worrying about something pointless,” Greg replied.

  “So she’s not coming on the walk?” I asked. “Jesus, we really need her around. This is the worst day in the world for her to pull her wacko shit.”

  Greg took a big pull from his water. “I know this is fucked up to say, but I feel like we’re losing the wrong parent. I mean, we’re stuck with her now? Things would be so much better if she were the one dying and you were the one living,” Greg said, while gently stroking my dad’s hair to one side.

  Tiffany, Regina, Jessica, Chelsea, and Creepy Todd finally came out the front door. We all stood on our cracked driveway in front of our tired home. My mom was still inside. We waited for a minute, all our eyes trained on the front door, hoping that she would emerge.

  I finally said, “Let’s go. She can catch up if she wants to do this.” We all turned our backs to the door and walked away, like disappointed children realizing that their parents didn’t love them anymore, realizing that there was no one left to help them fight their fights, realizing that they were all alone.

  We began our push down Briarcreek Drive, our street for nearly eighteen years. Just as our backs were good and turned, we heard our mom’s familiar voice. “Sorry.” We all excitedly turned toward her. She was running out of the front door. She caught up with us. “I thought I was going to shit my pants,” she explained.

  “Glad you decided to come,” I said as I smacked her on her back.

  “Not so hard. I just put on a fresh Fentanyl patch,” she said with a coy smile and an attempted wink.

  As we began to walk—our mom with a fresh dose of pain medication being sucked into her back—things started to sink in. This was it. This was actually the last walk with my dad. This was actually the last time the neighbors had the chance to look out the windows, look at my dad, and say, “That poor, poor man. To be stuck with both that awful disease and that awful family. My lord.” This quiet, physically disabled man was the life vest that held this family afloat, even as Lou Gehrig’s washed over the person he once was. We only had him for another hour. We needed to take advantage of this and ask all of life’s important questions.