by John Grogan
Life moves irrevocably forward.
Like garden plants, the four Grogan children had taken root in various ways and places. Marijo had become a social worker
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outside Ann Arbor and spent her days helping hard-luck families piece together broken lives. Tim was an economist working for a business magazine in New York City. After earning an MBA and working for a time as a financial analyst, Michael had become incapacitated with a bevy of ill-defined and energy-sapping symptoms that doctors eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. He quit his job in Southern California and moved back in with Mom and Dad to begin a long, slow recuperation.
I was the only one of the four to have married. Marijo, like me, had drawn our parents’ disapproval when she moved in with her longtime partner and soul mate, a British psychologist named Kent, forgoing marriage and instead opting for an informal commitment ceremony in the woods behind their home. Tim, too, had lived with a woman for several years before the relationship soured. He and Michael remained unattached, and the four of us joked about the amount of prayer energy Mom and Dad burned imploring God to find them good Catholic girls to settle down with.
The chasm religion had cleaved between my parents and me brought competing emotions: the heady feeling of liberation tempered by the dull, aching sadness—sometimes palpable, sometimes barely registered, but present every day—of knowing I had caused my parents so much heartache. In their own ways, I suspected, Marijo, Tim, and Michael had each struggled with a similar conflict, but it was something none of us talked much about. Our parents’ expectations were difficult to meet, and we all knew how much it meant to them that we follow in their very Catholic footsteps.
As I moved through my forties and watched my children grow from toddlers into lanky preteens, life seemed to finally find its equilibrium. Mom had survived open-heart surgery and a hip replacement. Dad had beaten prostate cancer, and appeared to have struck a truce with the leukemia discovered lurking in his
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bloodstream the previous year. Every four months he submit-ted a blood sample, and every four months the doctors returned the same report: status quo. My parents chugged on, day to day, finding comfort and joy in their faith and learning to accept that their children, to varying degrees, had not and would not. We were all thankful that Mom, with her memory and physical vigor waning, had Dad to care for her, which allowed them to stay in their home, living the independent life they so cherished. Neither of them could bear to consider a retirement community or, worse, assisted-living facility. With his abundant energy and sharp mind, Dad continued to astound all of us. Despite the sleeping leukemia within him, his only apparent concession to age was half an aspirin and a thirty-minute nap each afternoon.
In addition to all his other duties, he took on one other role that had traditionally been my mother’s—the family’s worrier-in-chief. As Mom’s mind gradually let go, drifting like clouds across a wind-whipped sky, so did her matriarchal willpower and seemingly superhuman capacity for fretting about those she loved.
That job was now Dad’s alone.
Our lives, connected by blood yet now so clearly separate and distinct, marched on. Some days, the good ones, I could believe they would continue this way forever.
Chapter 26
o
Not long after Dad got his new garden planted, he
called, but it was not to talk about plants. “Say, John,”
he began, “I wanted to give you a little update on my leukemia.”
I could hear something in his voice, buried beneath the calm and confidence. Something that sounded like fear.
“Everything’s still holding steady, right?” I asked.
“That’s just it,” Dad said. “The last blood test has the doctor concerned. My platelets seem to be dropping. Just a little, but he doesn’t want to see that.”
I had only the vaguest notion of platelets, and he explained to me what the oncologist had explained to him, that they were the blood’s clotting agents, produced in vast quantities by cells in the bone marrow. Platelets coursed through the blood like microscopic masons with buckets of cement, ready to rush to the site of any injury and quickly mortar the wound. They are what save all of us from bleeding to death. In a healthy adult, 150,000 to 450,000 platelets swim in a tiny microliter of blood.
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If those levels drop to 20,000 or below, the patient is at serious risk of bleeding uncontrollably from even a minor bruise or cut.
“But I’m not anywhere near that,” Dad said. “I’m just a little on the low side of normal.” He said the doctor wanted to see him every two months instead of every four. “He just wants to watch it more closely, that’s all.”
We danced around the topic a little more, both advancing the fiction that the dropping platelets were really no cause for alarm.
Dad wasn’t even going to tell Mom. He was fiercely protective of her, and with her mind drifting as it was, he was afraid she would have a hard time grasping anything but the word cancer.
One thing she knew from experience—from her father, several siblings, and countless friends—was that cancer seldom carried a happy ending. He didn’t want to worry her.
That’s when I asked, “Dad, do you want me to come home?”
“Oh heavens no,” he answered without hesitation, as if I had just proposed sending him on a transatlantic cruise or some other indulgence of mind-boggling extravagance. “You have your own family to worry about, and your job. You’ve got your hands full.
Jenny needs you there. Besides, there’s nothing to do here. I feel fine. I’m keeping up on everything. We’re just going to watch this thing a little more closely.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you’ll call me if you need me, right?”
He assured me he would.
“You’ll be in all of our thoughts, Dad,” I said, groping for the right words.
“John?”
A moment of silence hung on the phone line.
“And maybe your prayers, too?”
“My thoughts and prayers, Dad,” I said. “My thoughts and prayers.”
• • •
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For the next six months, Dad maintained his routine, even as his platelet counts trickled in the wrong direction with each new blood test. His oncologist told him about a newly approved chemotherapy regimen that had shown some early promise against Dad’s form of leukemia. He asked my father to consider the treatment as a preemptive move while the leukemia was still largely inactive, but when the doctor described the debilitating side effects and told my father he would be laid up for several weeks, too weak to take care of himself or my mother, Dad recoiled. The decision to submit to the treatment was a huge one because it would mean crossing the line for the first time from independent living to a life totally reliant on others. For Dad, that would be like voluntarily stepping off a cliff.
“I think it makes more sense to just keep watching it,” he said. “As long as it’s still in check, I don’t see the sense in trying anything that drastic.”
Then on October 25, 2004, a Sunday morning, came another phone call. This time it was my brother Michael. “I’m calling from the hospital,” he said. “It’s Dad.”
With his training as a financial analyst, Michael tended to see the world as numbers guys do—in binary code, absolutes without shadings of gray. He had been living at home for more than a decade as he slowly recovered from his maddening case of chronic fatigue syndrome, my parents nursing him for years just as they did when he was their baby. Now he was stronger, though still easily fatigued, and it was his turn to be there for them. Michael’s nature was to get right to the point.
“Dad’s been admitted,” he said. “They’re afraid if they send him home he could bleed to death.”
Bleed to death? I struggled to process the words. “Start at
the beginning,” I said.
The night before, Michael had come home from a play to find my father in the bathroom hemorrhaging blood from his rectum.
“Buckets of blood,” my brother said. Dad had packed towels
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around himself to try to stanch the gush, but the towels just became sodden. The blood kept coming. At the emergency room, a test showed that my father’s platelet count had nose-dived. I remembered the magic number of 20,000. Anything below that and you were at risk of spontaneously erupting into uncontrolled, potentially fatal bleeding. My father’s count, Michael reported, was down to 1,500.
“Fifteen thousand, you mean,” I corrected.
“No,” Michael said. “Fifteen hundred.”
The bleeding had erupted at the site of an old injury—a tissue burn caused by the radiation Dad received to treat his prostate cancer a decade earlier. “The doctors cauterized it and got the bleeding to stop,” Michael said. “But they can’t let him go home.
If the bleeding starts again, they’re afraid we couldn’t get him back here in time.”
“So they’ll give him more platelets, right?” I asked.
“That’s the plan,” he said. “Until they get the platelet count up to twenty thousand, he’s not coming home.”
My mind bounced from one thought to the next, the consequences, immediate and distant, cascading around me. Dad’s alarming drop of platelets meant he could begin hemorrhaging at any moment. But equally grave, it also meant the sleeping dragon that was his leukemia was awake now. Even if doctors pumped him up with a steady transfusion of platelets, wouldn’t these new recruits, too, eventually meet the same fate? I felt a slow, sickening hollow spread through my stomach.
And then there was Mom. Mom, who could no longer care for herself. Mom with medications so complex they required an engineer’s flowchart. Mom, who would forget to eat without my father gently badgering her. Mom, who was utterly helpless without him.
“So, Mike,” I asked, “has Dad said anything about Mom?”
“Not yet,” he said. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”
Michael, as it turned out, had dropped my father at the emer-
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gency room and, at Dad’s insistence, returned home to be with Mom. My father did not like to leave her alone in the house for even a half hour, worried that she could tumble down the stairs or fall in the bathroom or turn on a stove burner and walk away.
My brother was now doing his best to shuttle between house and hospital, trying to take care of my mother and be there for my father. It had only been a few hours, and already it was clear how impossible it would be for him to sustain.
Thanks to my father’s stamina, my parents had managed to live independently into their late eighties, still in the same house.
Now, that independent lifestyle was in jeopardy. I had known for years that all it would take to bring their house of cards crashing down was one small mishap—a broken hip, a chronic illness, even a bum knee that would knock my father out of commission. It appeared that day had arrived. And yet I am an optimist by nature, and denial, in the face of a harsh reality, can be a sweet narcotic.
I kept telling myself that the platelet transfusions would stick, that the dragon would return to hibernation, that in a best-case scenario, Dad could return to normal and hold things together for another year. Another year might be all he needed.
On my last visit home, I had found a card on my mother’s bed table from the previous Christmas. Inside it was my father’s handwriting. “Dearest Ruth,” it read. “I thank the Lord every day for giving you to me, and for watching over us all these years. My prayer now is that He will bless you with peace, happiness, and healing, and that I will always be able to take care of you. I love you, Ruthie. Richard.”
As a child, I thought my father was invincible, a sort of humble superhero whom nothing could hurt and no one could take from me. I grew up convinced he would live forever. That fantasy was long past, but I wanted him to have a shot at his last wish. I wanted him to be able to be there for the only true love of his life as long as she needed him. Like Dad, I didn’t want her to have to experience a life without him.
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• • •
Michael and I stayed in touch throughout the day, and by midafternoon my father had been admitted to a private room in a brand-new wing of the hospital. The switchboard patched me through, and Dad picked up.
“Hey there,” I said. “What’s the big idea getting sick on us?”
Dad laughed. “I guess I didn’t have enough on my plate,” he said. “I needed something else to keep life interesting.”
“Well, you sure did that,” I said.
His voice sounded as strong as ever, and he assured me he was feeling fine, no worse at all for the tremendous blood loss of the previous sixteen hours. He felt so good, in fact, he said it was like he was on vacation. “You should see the room,” he gushed. “I feel like I’m at a resort! It’s just like a hotel. The docs just want to keep an eye on me. This will be my excuse to get a good rest and catch up on my reading.”
He didn’t want me to worry. He never wanted any of us to worry. In his eyes, it was the father’s job to worry, not to be worried over. “I really couldn’t feel better,” he repeated. “I almost feel guilty taking up this big, beautiful room when there are so many sick people who could really use it.”
“Dad,” I said, feeling my way carefully, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll come home for a few days.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” he said. “Heck, I hope to be back home in a couple days. Mike said he’ll keep an eye on Mom until I get back, and until then I’m just going to lie here and relax. We’ve got everything under control. You don’t need to come home for me. Really.”
“Okay, but you’ll let me know, won’t you?” I said. “You’ll let me know when you need me there.”
The next day on the phone, Dad told me his leukemia special-ist had visited him and planned to start him on the newly approved chemotherapy course that Dad had earlier rejected. The
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time for procrastinating was over. The treatments would last for six weeks and would be coupled with a strong course of steroids, which he said would help his platelets rebuild. “The doctor says it’ll knock me back a good bit,” Dad said, “but he’s hoping it will send the leukemia into remission so I can get out of here.”
The chance for a preemptive attack on the sleeping monster had passed. Now it was awake and on its feet—and ready for a good fight.
Chapter 27
o
My father’s stay in the tastefully decorated private
room at Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital in Pontiac
would not be quite the luxury getaway he had at
first imagined. He had been in the room only a day when his spe-cialist, an oncology hematologist named Dr. Franklin, ordered a spinal tap, a procedure Dad described in his understated way as
“not the most pleasant experience of my life.” The purpose of the procedure was to extract a sample of bone marrow to better learn how aggressively the leukemia was advancing. The marrow was where the leukemia’s secrets lurked. The worst part was not the tap itself, but what came after: the waiting. Dr. Franklin promised he would be back in touch by midafternoon, and Dad lay in his room alone, watching the clock, summoning the emotional strength to receive whatever prognosis awaited him. I called midafternoon, and he told me, “I’m just sitting here waiting to hear back. Now they’re saying it won’t be till the end of the day.”
Dad regrouped and braced himself for the dinner hour. But his meal arrived and with it a message that Dr. Franklin had
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gone home for the night. A nurse assured him the doctor would drop by on his rounds first thing in the morning, and Dad spent a mostly slee
pless night waiting for the sun to rise. Dawn came, but not the doctor. Another nervous day of waiting. The string of delays for a man whose life was on the line came close to feeling like criminal torture, the kind of psychological abuse banned by civilized societies. With each phone call Dad sounded slightly more desperate. “They’re not telling me anything,” he said. “I’m just sitting here.” He was hoping the results would show the leukemia holding steady and the steroids and transfusions working together to boost his platelet count so he could go home. “I’m ready to get out of here,” he said.
When Dr. Franklin finally showed up, it was not with the report my father had hoped. First he delivered the brighter news: Dad’s platelet counts were indeed creeping up, from 1,500 to 4,000, still dangerously low but moving in the right direction. No longer was the doctor setting a specific threshold before he would release my father; now he simply said he wanted to see “continued significant improvement” before he’d consider letting Dad out of the hospital. The second half of his report, we later learned, was what had caused the delays. Dr. Franklin had sought a second opinion to be certain of his findings: the leukemia was spreading aggressively, rampaging unchallenged through my father’s bloodstream. That new chemotherapy regimen, the one he had broached with my father months earlier, was still Dad’s best shot at bringing the disease to its knees, he said, and they would begin immediately. Later that day, as Dad described it to me on the phone, we both agreed it sounded straightforward enough. Six quick, painless treatments one week apart. And if his platelet count continued to rise, he could go home and receive them as an outpatient. Other than that, he just needed to rest and let the powerful meds do their job. The chemo, the doctor had explained, would have a cumulative effect and each week would grow more powerful in its counterattacks on the cancer cells. The side ef-