by John Grogan
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fects would also increase exponentially, the doctor warned, but that was the cost of admission. “I guess I’m not going to be feeling too great for a while,” Dad said. But six weeks and it would be behind him.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he said.
“Well, I have some news,” I said, pausing to consider how to transition from life-threatening disease to a development that was the highlight of my career. “You know that book I’ve been working on?” I asked.
“The one about you and Marley?” he said.
“Well, guess what? I sold it over the weekend. To a publisher in New York.”
“No kidding,” Dad said, his voice brightening. “Give me all the details.”
Over the months, I had sketched out the basic premise for him in our weekly phone calls. Marley & Me was my own story, the story of starting out with Jenny as newlyweds and the incorrigible Labrador retriever that crashed into our lives and changed the family we would become.
Almost from the first day we brought him home, Marley had proved himself to be unlike any pet we had ever owned. He lived life in a big way, with verve and insouciance and a boundless joy seldom seen in this world. Quite early on, I discovered he was a good source of story fodder. At dinner parties or around the watercooler at work, and later in my newspaper column, I began recounting Marley’s over-the-top antics and misdeeds, and I found they made people laugh. But Marley was more than just a punch line; he had grown to become an important member of our family, shaping us even as we tried to bend him to our will.
Like most journalists, I had dreamed for years of one day writing a book, but I always searched for a topic from other people’s lives—something suitably important to merit a book-length examination. Only gradually did I begin to realize that the book I was meant to write was quite literally lying at my feet. And so, in
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early 2004, not long after saying good-bye to Marley for the last time, I sat down and began to write.
While I was working on the book in the early morning hours before my regular job, my conviction at times faltered. Some days I honestly could not imagine anyone other than friends and family wanting to read it. Dad’s confidence, however, had never waned. He was always my biggest cheerleader.
“Six publishing houses bid on it, Dad,” I said.
“I’ll be doggoned,” he said.
How ironic, I thought, that I would receive some of the most exciting news of my life within hours of my father receiving some of the worst of his. My insides were a scramble of mixed emotions.
“That’s great, John,” he said before signing off. “That’s really, really great.”
We talked by phone every day. I filled him in on the most recent book developments and he gave me the latest medical update.
The first round of chemo, he reported, had gone fine and he was feeling no side effects. “It was no big deal,” he said. The steroids, on the other hand, were making him agitated, animated—and uninhibited in sharing his opinions. He spent his days in his hospital room reading the papers, watching CNN, and growing more and more worked up about the impending presidential election.
As far as I knew, Dad never voted for a Democrat in his life, but he mostly kept his political views to himself. This election was different. He loathed his fellow Catholic John Kerry, seeing him as the manifestation of secular godlessness and liberalism that was ruining this country. Dad began firing off emotional letters to all four of his kids. He knew we all leaned liberal and that we considered George W. Bush’s first term a disastrous mix of mind-boggling incompetence and blustery hubris. But the election, he had convinced himself, was not about ideology or competence but
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rather good and evil, faith and cynicism. In a letter dated October 26, he wrote, “This is a fight for the soul of America! Morality and spiritual values versus our decadent culture. If Kerry wins, our nation will be following the path of the Roman Empire to destruction.”
He asked Michael to mail copies to each of us. My brother added a note of his own: “He’s been sitting in his hospital bed with nothing to do but watch the news, and his blood has been boiling.
I think it’s quite a good sign that he has summoned the energy to write this note that expresses the passion of his convictions—all while waiting for news on his personal fate. Please take these comments in that light.” I did, and so did Marijo and Tim.
As children we grew up with our parents’ conservative views as a given, the uncompromising fixed prism through which we viewed the world. Abortion was murder; birth control insulted God’s will; sexuality was a sacred procreative duty reserved solely for the sacrament of marriage; homosexuality was an abomi-nation. As adults, each of us, to varying degrees, had rejected those tenets. The terrain was so emotionally fraught that we had learned years earlier to simply dance around it. If Dad needed to vent about the election, that was fine with us. It all seemed so immaterial to what really mattered in our family. Bush or Kerry, who cared? We just wanted our father to get better and get home.
When Dad was not raving about politics and the decline of Western civilization, he was working through a checklist of personal business that had suddenly taken on new importance. From his hospital bed, he talked to his lawyer, updated his will, and named Michael the executor of his estate and his medical guardian in case he became incapacitated and could no longer make his own decisions. He also filed a document with the hospital giving clear instructions about the topic none of us was prepared to discuss: end-of-life decisions. True to his Catholic faith, he wanted nothing that would unnaturally shorten his life. But he was also
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clear that when his time came, when all hope was gone, he did not want heroic or extraordinary measures to keep him alive. He would fight this thing with all he had, but nothing more. He was certain in his conviction of heaven and hell, and he had done his best to lead a good and moral life. When the call came to leave this life for an eternity in heaven, he was not about to say, “Sorry, Lord, not quite ready yet.”
There was one last piece of unfinished business: Ruthie. Dad was figuring out that even if he were allowed to return home, he would be in no shape to care for himself, let alone his wife.
After less than a week in the hospital, he could already see Michael becoming overwhelmed as Mom’s full-time caregiver. It was just too much for him—the pills, the meals, the linen changes, and pull-up diapers. That was one aspect of my mother’s care he just could not bring himself to do: help with her bathroom needs.
In the past, she had stubbornly rejected the idea of visits from nursing aides. Her mind might be drifting, but her modesty was firmly intact, and she was not going to allow a stranger to see her naked. Marijo, who lived more than an hour away, was driving out regularly around her job as a social worker to take care of Mom’s hygiene needs. It was not sustainable. Dad knew this; we all did.
From his hospital bed, Dad finally did the one thing he had fiercely resisted for so many years as Mom declined: he requested an application to Lourdes Nursing Home. It was a lovely nursing home, or as lovely as these places get, run by Catholic nuns and situated on a bluff overlooking Watkins Lake outside Pontiac, less than a mile from the original homestead where the first of our Grogans had settled after arriving from County Limerick, Ireland, in 1850. Lourdes was where his mother had spent her last few years, and Dad was so grateful for the respectful care she received that he became a generous donor of both his money and time.
The truth was my mother should have been in a nursing home,
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or at least an assisted-living facility, five years earlier, as her mind and vigor and continence left her. And no doubt she would have been if not for my father’s energetic outpouring of care. He feared nursing homes like a deer fears fire.
They were the last stop on life’s trolley line, an admission that you were ready to relinquish all you had worked to build. Now he was seeing his options running out, at least for the short term. Independent living, that thing he cherished most, had been predicated on his ability to stay healthy and vigorous, able to mind all the details. He was the knight guarding the queen’s castle, and now the invaders had robbed him of his sword and shield.
While he recovered from the debilitations of chemotherapy, he would need a place with full-time nursing care, not just for himself but for Mom, too. Lourdes, he told me, had one suite designed for married couples. It consisted of two small bedrooms, a sitting room, and a bathroom. A retired priest celebrated Mass in the chapel down the hall two mornings a week. “That would be ideal,” he said. He portrayed it as a short-term solution until they could move back home. “Just until I’m back on my feet again,” he said, but there was something in his voice that told me he knew what I knew: that nursing homes are rarely short-term.
A nursing home might be the solution, but admission could take months. Michael, still struggling with his chronic fatigue symptoms, clearly needed help with Mom. Tim was in New York, and I in Pennsylvania, both holding down full-time jobs. Marijo was self-employed with a full roster of clients. We exchanged nervous phone calls and e-mails, all with the same underlying question: what about Mom?
Over the years, from adolescence into adulthood, Tim was always more my friend than my brother. We traveled and camped together, hung out at each other’s homes, played clunker rock ’n’
roll together on our electric guitars, swigged beer, confided in
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each other about most everything, and over the years helped each other out of various scrapes. Even when he was a teenager trying desperately to assume the mantle of cool, he let me, the chubby, bespectacled brother six years his junior, tag along with him and his friends. My very first trip away from home without my parents was with him. I was a freshman in high school, he was a college student—and our favorite band of all time, The Kinks, was coming to Toronto. It was a five-hour drive, but we didn’t care. We jumped in the family’s green Chevrolet Nova and set off despite Dad’s protests: “Doggone it all anyway! You can’t just go driving halfway around the country to see a rock concert.” We bought tickets from a scalper on the street and after the concert joined the surging scene on Yonge Street. That night, Tim secured us beds at the YMCA, and when an old man with a creepy glint in his eye began hovering around me, Tim swooped in and that was the last I saw of him.
I always assumed my brother would be a lifelong bachelor.
After a couple of long relationships that had not worked out, he had settled into the single life in New York City, working long hours at his magazine and living in a series of small apartments.
He marched through much of his forties and into his fifties alone.
But the year before Dad got sick, Tim found himself seated on a commuter train beside a young woman from the Philippines en route to her job as a nanny. They struck up a conversation, then met the next day for coffee at Penn Station. A romance bloomed, and when Dad learned that Elizabeth had somehow convinced Tim to attend Easter Sunday Mass with her at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, he knew his prayers had been answered.
In August 2004, two months before he was hospitalized, Dad walked Elizabeth down the aisle of Our Lady of Refuge and gave her hand in matrimony to his eldest son. Father Vin officiated, and Michael and I shared best-man duties. Marijo was Elizabeth’s maid of honor. Mom was in the front row, beaming, alongside Jenny and our kids. It was a happy day. Our whole family
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was together, something that had become a rarity as the years passed. Tim, the perennial bachelor, the one the family worried most about, had found a good woman, and they were off on their new life together.
My father adored Elizabeth. Unlike his own children, she was an unquestioning Catholic who accepted the Church’s teachings and edicts just as he did, without reservation or parsing. Her traditional values were in lockstep with his, and he was convinced that God had brought her into his fallen-away Catholic son’s life for a purpose. “This is no coincidence,” he said after the first time he met her.
Now with him hospitalized and the question of Mom’s care looming larger by the hour, it was Elizabeth who stepped forward. On November 3, 2004, less than three months after her wedding day and two weeks after Dad was admitted to the hospital, Elizabeth flew to Detroit to take over Mom’s care. We were all grateful, but Dad saw it as more than simply the generous act of a good-hearted person. The Lord, he was convinced, had sent a guardian angel not only into Tim’s life, but into his as well.
Chapter 28
o
Jenny had watched my hand-wringing mostly from the
sidelines. This was my father, not hers, and she didn’t want to interfere, but I could tell she was growing impatient with my dithering. Dad was entering his third week in the hospital, and still I procrastinated about flying home to see him. I kept waiting for the right opportunity, the best window.
Maybe late November would be good. Maybe right after Christmas; wouldn’t that cheer him up? Maybe after the New Year once we had the holidays behind us. Jenny couldn’t hide her frustration. It was obvious what she would do if it were her father—she would have been on a plane weeks earlier.
Finally, one morning over coffee, she spilled out, “Will you wake up? What are you waiting for? Do you want to put it off until he’s gone and then spend the rest of your life with regrets? God, open your eyes, John.” Her voice softened. “Look, I know you’re hoping he beats this. We all are. But c’mon. What if he can’t?”
She was right. I had lulled myself into believing my father
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would live forever. He always managed to beat back adversity. I had convinced myself he’d pull through this crisis, too. But she raised a legitimate question: What was I waiting for? A bedside visit did not constitute an admission of defeat, did it?
I left for work and spent the drive into Philadelphia mulling over the question, when suddenly I remembered a moment from long ago, in the winter of 1987. I was still single then and had just arrived in Florida to begin my new job at the newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. Jenny would land her own job in the area and follow a few weeks later, but for that moment I was alone and had no idea what our future held. It was my first time living so far from home, and I knew no one. Always the loyal parents, Mom and Dad soon arrived in their recreational vehicle. They had driven hundreds of miles to help their youngest son—the one Mom reminded me had been so hopelessly homesick during his first year at sleepaway camp—get settled. For two weeks they stayed, camping at an RV park a few miles from my new apartment. Every evening after work I would drive directly there to sit in the dinette of their motor home with them, eating Mom’s meat-loaf and telling them every detail of my new job. I had been hired to cover the world’s most boring beat: transportation. But they hung on every word as if I’d just arrived from a fascinating adventure abroad. Mom pasted each of my articles in a scrapbook, and Dad read and reread every one, peppering me with questions about the inner workings of road construction, toll structures, and traffic flow in Palm Beach County.
It would be our last great visit, the final one in which they could claim me as all their own. For those two weeks, I was still their youngest son, faithfully caught in the orbit of their gravity and happy to be their satellite. Soon enough, Jenny and I would be living together, and then married and parents, and everything would change forever. I missed the parents I had then as I knew they missed that son.
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When I arrived home from work that evening, I said, “So I was thinking of flying to Detroit and spending a few days.”
“I think that would be good,” Jenny said.
The chemotherapy was doing a job on Dad
. In our daily phone calls, he continued to keep up a good game. The hospital room was like a resort, the nurses were spoiling him, the food really wasn’t too bad. But I could hear it in his voice, which had grown somehow smaller and weaker, slightly higher and reedier. The booming confidence was gone. He told me the treatments were not making him too nauseated, but they had sapped his strength.
His limbs felt like deadweights, and sometimes the simple act of reading exhausted him. One day he confessed to being so enervated he couldn’t pull himself out of bed to walk to the bathroom.
He had to ring for a nurse to help him up. Never in his life had he felt so helpless.
When I told him I had booked my ticket, his voice brightened.
“I’m glad you’re coming home, John,” he said.
“I’m glad, too, Dad.”
A week before I was scheduled to arrive, Dad received a happy surprise. He was getting discharged. His platelet counts were still not great, but with the chemotherapy, transfusions, and steroids, they had steadily risen, and Dr. Franklin was satisfied Dad could rest just as well at home as in the hospital. Any bleeding at all and he was to return immediately. And he was to avoid public places and contact with strangers. The chemo had compromised his immune system, and Dr. Franklin did not want him exposed to germs he might not be able to fight off. Once a week for the remaining three weeks he would come to the hospital for his chemo treatment and blood work. Other than that, he was home free.