by John Grogan
“I love you, too, Johnny,” he said.
Johnny. He had not called me that since I was a little boy.
Johnny.
I clung to him for a moment longer, then got into the car with Michael. “Keep getting better!” I called out the window as we backed down the driveway. He waved one last time, and we were gone.
Chapter 31
o
When I returned home, Jenny asked, “Just how de-
pressing was it?”
“A little sad,” I said. “Just a little. The clock’s
definitely ticking. Even if Dad makes a full recovery, he’s so weak now. I don’t know how he can keep taking care of Mom and the house and everything. On the brighter side, Mom seems to be holding her own, and Dad was tired but in good spirits. He’s still got a lot of fight left in him.” I told her about the toll the chemotherapy had taken and the mementos he had pulled out of his box to share with me. I described my walks around the neighborhood and the taped interview with him on my last night home. “Whatever happens, I’m so glad I did that,” I said.
“It’s good that you went,” Jenny said. “At their age, you just don’t know.”
As if to prove her point, two weeks later the phone rang. My father was back in the hospital. On December 12, a nurse came to the house to check on him. She took one look at his cracked and oozing ankles and ordered him immediately to the emer-
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gency room, fearing they were infected. But it wasn’t his swollen extremities that kept him there. The doctor who saw him put a stethoscope to his chest and did not like what he heard: the faintest hint of congestion. Infection was the biggest risk of the chemotherapy regimen my father was on. Not only were the powerful drugs that coursed through his bloodstream attacking every cancer cell they encountered, they were attacking every white blood cell as well. And those white blood cells protected him from opportunistic invaders. Without them he was defenseless.
An X-ray confirmed the doctor’s concern. A tiny spot of pneumonia had taken root in one lung. “You can barely see it,” Dad said on the phone from his hospital bed. “But they don’t want to take any chances. So I’m back in again. They’ve got me on an antibiotic IV to nip it in the bud.”
The nurse had been wrong about my father’s ankles, but had she not ordered him to the hospital, the spot of pneumonia could have gone undetected for weeks as it grew silently, filling his lungs with oxygen-robbing mucus. We both agreed her overreac-tion had been a blessing and saved him from a serious setback.
“My guardian angel was looking out for me,” Dad said.
With just one treatment remaining, the doctors suspended his chemotherapy, saying they needed to hold off on the final dose until the lung infection was under control. The chemotherapy was working better than hoped, sending his platelet count to near-normal levels. But the side effects had increased exponentially with each week, rendering him helpless. Two days before entering the hospital, on December 10, my father had celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday in bed, too enervated and nauseated to make it downstairs to eat the salmon dinner Michael had prepared for him, knowing it was a favorite. And now the drugs had compromised his immune system as well. I marveled at how a medication intended to save a life could go so far toward destroy-ing it.
Unlike his earlier hospital stay, this time there was no private
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room that reminded him of a swanky resort. He was in a bare-bones cubicle with a loud, complaining roommate and inattentive nursing staff. When I called the next day, he sounded frazzled, nearly desperate. He was too weak to sit up and feed himself, but the orderlies simply left the food on a tray beside the bed.
“I can’t get the food to my mouth,” he said. “I can’t take a sip of water.”
“Sit tight, Dad,” I said. “We’re going to fix this.” And we did, browbeating the staff to give him the attention he needed and urging them to assign him the next available private room. Michael began to advocate for him more aggressively. In hospitals as elsewhere in life, we were learning, the old bromide proved true: the squeaky wheels really did get the grease. I tried to monitor him as best I could from afar by phone. Each report was more discouraging than the last. The doctors were having no success stamping out the pneumonia. They tried different antibiotics in different combinations without luck. He was now breathing with the help of an oxygen mask to compensate for his lungs’ decreased capacity. During one visit, Michael overheard an attending physician in the hallway tell a colleague, “This thing is mushrooming.
Nothing we throw at it is touching it.”
My father’s immune system was shot, allowing the pneumonia to rampage with impunity. I began to think of it as a violent predator on the loose in a small town where the populace had no sheriff, no posse, not even any pitchforks with which to defend themselves. Dr. Bober, my parents’ longtime family physician, was our liaison with the hospital staff. She briefed Michael, who in turn briefed the rest of us. Dad’s case was proving a medical conundrum, she said. His doctors needed to suspend the chemotherapy if they were to have any hope of reining in the potentially deadly pneumonia. But with the cancer-fighting drugs stopped, his platelet levels had resumed their perilous plummet, erasing most of the progress he had made. The leukemia was back on its feet, stronger than ever. Now there were two predators on
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the loose, both intent on taking him. To treat one served only to enable the other.
“Hang in there, Dad,” I said on his third day of hospitaliza-tion. “They’ve got a new antibiotic they’re going to try tomorrow.
We just need it to kick in. Once the pneumonia is tackled, we can go after the leukemia again.”
“I don’t have any choice but to hang in there,” he said.
On the fourth day, I called from my cell phone as I shopped for Christmas presents. The phone rang a dozen times before my father picked up.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. “Is this an okay time?”
“No, it’s not,” he said, his voice distraught. “It’s not good at all. I need to go now.” He hung up, and a wave of dread washed over me. Only later would I learn that a priest was at his side at that moment, administering the Last Rites, the Catholic sacrament for the dying. That’s why he couldn’t talk. Dad was not done fighting; he hadn’t given up. But he realized the growing gravity of his situation and wanted to be prepared. I was focused on his physical well-being; he was thinking of his spiritual.
As I drove home, I did something I had not done for many, many years. I prayed. I began just as I had started my prayers each night as a young boy. “Dear Jesus, dear God the Father, dear Holy Spirit, all the saints and angels in heaven,” I said aloud.
“Let the new antibiotic work. Please. Let the chemo work. Let Dad get better. Let him get over this hump so he can have another couple years. Or one. That’s all I’m asking. One year. Mom needs him. We all still need him. Amen.”
I made the sign of the cross just as the nuns had taught me to four decades earlier, touching the fingertips of my right hand to my forehead, chest, and each shoulder. Even alone in the car, I felt embarrassed. I had stopped believing in the literal power of prayer many years earlier and came to think of it as a strictly contemplative act whose value lay in self-examination and revelation. How many Jews had prayed in the concentration camps?
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How many murder victims had prayed in the instant before the trigger was pulled? How many sick and dying had sought God’s intervention in vain? And yet here I was. I no longer knew if I believed in the miracle of prayer. At this moment, my father’s life in the balance, I knew with certainty I wanted to.
Later that day, we finally got some good news. A private room had come available. At 4 P.M. Dad was wheeled into his new quarters, and almost instantly he sounded better, more tranquil and at peace. I felt a surge of optimism. Here he could get
the rest he needed, build his strength, fight back. The new antibiotic held promise, and the chemotherapy regimen had already proved its efficacy, if only he could get well enough to tolerate it again. But the new accommodations were short-lived. His doctors had been monitoring both his respiration—the number of breaths he took each minute—and the oxygen in his blood as indicators of how efficiently his lungs were working. The numbers had been gradually slipping all week even as the doctors enriched the oxygen mixture coming through his breathing mask. A healthy adult averages twelve breaths per minute, but Dad was taking as many as thirty. Even as he gasped, the oxygen levels in his blood could not keep up. The numbers had passed a threshold that triggered a hospital protocol: my father was being transferred to the intensive care unit.
“I don’t want to go to the ICU,” he pleaded to Michael. “The ICU is Death Row. People don’t come out of there.” Michael assured him that it was where he could get the best, most advanced treatment. Regardless, there was no choice. At 10 P.M. a team of orderlies wheeled Dad out of his private room and into the ICU.
The next morning I called Tim at his office in New York City.
“We need to get home,” I told him. Tim completely agreed. With Elizabeth still there, he had been planning to drive home to spend Christmas, anyway. Before leaving he just needed to wrap up an assignment or two at his magazine, he said, and take care of a few other work duties. Then he should be clear to head to Michi-
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gan, maybe as early as the middle of the following week, which would get him there for Christmas Eve. It was my brother’s turn to deny reality.
“Next week?” I interrupted. “Tim, don’t you see? We might not have until next week. We need to go now.”
There was a pause on the line, then my brother said, “I’ll be at your place at eight tomorrow morning. We’ll drive in together.
We can get there by dark.”
“I’ll be ready,” I said.
Chapter 32
o
The next morning, Jenny drove me to an exit along In-
terstate 78 to rendezvous with Tim as he headed west
from New York City. We shared the same sense of ur-
gency now, and the half hour saved was a half hour sooner we would be at our father’s side. As I slipped into the passenger seat of my brother’s car, Jenny handed me a bag of sandwiches. “This way you won’t have to stop to eat,” she said. I kissed her good-bye and said, “I’ll keep you posted.”
Tim and I were only a few miles down the road when the stories began. I’m not sure which of us started them, but once we started we went on for hours. Funny stories, embarrassing stories, painful stories. The time-polished gems my mother told at the kitchen table; the tales she had no idea existed. Family stories had always been the thread that stitched together the tapes-try of our lives. They amused us in good times and soothed us in bad. They filled the awkward silences when things were not right and fueled the warmth when they were. Mostly they provided the context that made us something more than six people related by
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blood—the context that made us that messy, imperfect, spectacularly infuriating and confounding and essential entity, a family.
“Remember the time we snuck down to the lake on the way home from church in our Sunday-best dress shoes, and you fell in?” I asked.
“You little shit,” Tim said, grinning. He had sworn me to se-crecy that day, knowing that a spanking with the George-and-Suzie Stick awaited him if Mom found out. Ruining his shoes was bad enough, but sneaking to the lake without permission—
and dragging his baby brother along—were the graver offenses.
His plan was to hide the shoes under his bed until they dried, and Mom would never be the wiser. But as we tiptoed through the kitchen, the euphoria of having my older brother’s fate in my hands was too much to bear. “Mom! Mom!” I exploded. “Timmy fell in the water in his brand-new church shoes!”
“You whopped my ass pretty good for that one,” I said.
“You deserved it,” he answered, and I couldn’t disagree.
I was a tireless troublemaker. One Easter when I was about six, I was hunting for my basket and opened the door to the clothes dryer to find Michael’s basket hidden inside, his name printed in big block letters on a card stuck in the colored grass.
I quietly closed the door, looked both ways, and turned on the dryer. It made a horrible racket as the eggs and chocolates and jelly beans tumbled in the steel drum. I thought it was the funni-est prank I had ever pulled—until Mom led Michael to my basket, plucked out my name card, and replaced it with his. She opened the dryer, tossed in my tag among the broken eggs, linty jelly beans, and melted chocolates and said calmly, “This one’s yours now, Johnny.” Suddenly I was no longer laughing.
“You’ve got to admit,” Tim said, “she had a good sense of justice.”
We recounted the family camping trips to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the frigid winds howling in off Lake Superior forcing us all to wear winter coats in July.
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“Do you remember Mom’s pork and beans over the camp
stove?” Tim asked.
“Oh God, yes,” I said. “Nothing has ever tasted so delicious.”
We laughed about our elaborate schemes for skipping Sunday Mass, and the pranks we played on the nuns. One of my finest moments was the day in sixth grade when the ancient and decrepit Sister Mary Clementia screamed over our voices that she wanted to hear a pin drop. She pulled a large stickpin from her veil, held it in the air, and yelled, “Silence! I’m going to count to three, and I better hear this.” As she began her countdown, I folded over the lid to my milk carton, placed it on the floor, and poised my heel above it. “One . . . two . . . three.” Just as she released the pin, I stomped on the empty carton with everything I had. It exploded with a boom that nearly sent Sister through the ceiling. I had to stay after school every day for a week, writing over and over “I shall not misbehave in school,” but it was worth every minute for that one instant of Hitchcock-worthy terror on her face.
Tim said he could beat that. At Brother Rice, there was the equally ancient and decrepit Brother O’Hara, who each morning like clockwork would enter the classroom and stomp his foot in the trash can to compress the litter. One day Tim and his classmates filled the can with water and sprinkled a layer of crumpled papers across the surface. In came Brother O’Hara and plunged his leg knee-deep in water.
We recounted the family vacations to miracle sites, the Thanksgiving morning family hikes through the woods as the turkey roasted in the oven, and the way Shaun loved to leap into snow-drifts. There were Mom’s aniseed cookies and homemade eggnog at Christmas and Dad’s dramatic manger scene beneath the giant twinkling star he suspended in the upstairs bathroom window with strings of white lights stretching down to the ground.
“Remember the Christmas Dad was in the hospital after his heart attack?” I asked. “And the two of us trying to put up the tree without him?”
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“What a disaster,” Tim said. We were adults by then, and the task was simple enough—we simply needed to drill a hole in the bottom of the trunk to accept the spike in the stand—but together Tim and I broke one drill bit after another, growing more and more hysterical as we did. What made it all the funnier to us at the time was the contrast between our ineptness and Dad’s effortless competence. He had done the same procedure for years without once breaking a bit.
“Dad always made everything look so easy,” I said.
That made me think of a story Tim had not heard: Shortly after I got my driver’s license, Michael called from a party asking for a ride home. I jumped to volunteer, anxious for a chance to drive alone. Mom and Dad were cautious with teens and cars—
forbidding their children to drive without a parent for a full yea
r after becoming licensed—but they agreed to this trip. It was about twenty minutes away, and I’d have my brother with me for the drive home. Dad gave me directions. I whistled for Shaun to join me and set out into the night. Soon I was hopelessly lost, driving up and down back roads without streetlights, drifting deeper into the gritty neighborhoods surrounding Pontiac’s factories. Panic rising in my chest, I pulled into the driveway of a darkened house to turn around, and as I pulled out, I cut the wheel too hard and the back tire of the family Monte Carlo dropped into the ditch. I gunned the engine again and again but the car would not budge.
Outside, I dropped to my knees and could see the axle resting on the ground. Shaun must have sensed my anxiety because he began to yip. The front door of the house opened, and a woman in a bathrobe appeared in the beams of my headlights. Someone who would help, I thought.
“Turn those goddamn headlights off!” she barked. “And get off my property. We’re trying to sleep.”
“But—” I began.
“And shut that dog up!”
“May I use your phone?”
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“Off my property or I’m calling the cops!” she yelled and slammed the door. I was now unhinged. I locked Shaun in the car, still barking wildly, and ran down the dark road until I came to a house with lights on. I knocked on the door and begged the man who answered to let me call my father. He sized me up, then told me to wait outside while he called for me. Fifteen minutes later, Dad pulled up. I had never been so happy to see one of my parents. He could see my distress. “Everything’s going to be fine,”
he said. “These things happen.” I warned him about the angry lady threatening to call the police, and he was not at all ruffled.
“We’ll be out of her hair in a few minutes,” he said.
My can-do father pulled a jack and a large piece of lumber from the trunk of his company car, hoisted the Monte Carlo up until the axle was clear, wedged the wood under the tire, and expertly backed it out of the ditch. He could have criticized me or ridiculed my incompetence. He could have grumbled about having to come out at midnight to rescue me. Instead he put his arm around my shoulder and simply said, “Driving’s like anything else; you’ll get better with practice. Now let’s go fetch your brother before he thinks we forgot about him.”