by Jeni Birr
The hardest part of my breakup with Eric was looking at our now empty apartment the day I turned in my keys. I handed them over, barely made it out the door, and I broke down on the sidewalk, sobbing. In my moment of weakness, I texted him: “just tell me you miss me, and I’ll never ask you for anything again.” He wrote back immediately that of course he did and wanted to talk. My dad and mother were still in town for one more day so we agreed I would call him as soon as they had left. On January 2, 2010, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, I did.
We spent almost three hours on the phone that afternoon. He explained that leaving was simultaneously the worst and best decision he’d ever made. He had realized in the last two weeks that nothing in Detroit meant anything to him without his family (Apollo and me) there to share it with him. He admitted that he’d been a real asshole and had put a lot of really unfair stipulations on me, and that I was the only one that really knew him and understood him, and three hours boiled down into one sentence: he wanted to get married. Eventually, I agreed. We were going to wait a few years until we could afford a nice little ceremony, because we knew we weren’t going to get any help from either of our families with that part, and I didn’t have a ring or anything, and he was in Michigan and I in Florida with a brand new seven month lease that I was not about to break, but we were engaged.
The original plan was that once Eric got a job and saved up some money and found a reasonably priced place for us to live, that I would come back to Michigan. I had already emailed Mike, my District Manager at Cosi, and Lord knows why he said I was welcome back at any time, just let him know when I was coming. Well, he did say he was a little hesitant that I would leave again, but I had always done a good job while I was there and gave at least a month of notice before I left each time. However, no matter how diligently he looked, Eric could not find a decent job. He had sold his car in Florida to have money to go back to Michigan on, but his position had been filled at the independent dealer, and the Saturn he had worked at for the year in between had closed down, obviously, when Saturn went out of business. He was crashing on a friend’s couch and borrowing his dad’s minivan he wasn’t using at the time, and he was running out of money quickly.
Meanwhile, in Florida, I was actually loving living alone. It wasn’t terrifying like I thought it would be. I had my very own place for the first time, and it was mine. I took pride in keeping it neat, organized and clean. I thought that I would be bored and lonely, but I wasn’t. I was working so much at Quiznos, and Fridays at the Club, and Eric called me every day, and if it wasn’t him then it was Andrea, or I was at Sneakers with Jamie and the crew, or over at my Dad’s, who was now back in Jacksonville. Aside from my fiancé living eleven hundred miles away from me, this was a good time in my life. I proved to myself, even though it was for only three short months, that I could live alone and self-sustain, and it was very empowering. It taught me I didn’t need a man to save me when things got tough.
At the end of March though, Eric realized he was not going to find a decent job in Michigan and decided to come back to Florida and stay with me. He hated Jacksonville, but we settled on Tampa which was a much bigger city with sports teams, which is very important to him (yes, Jacksonville has the jaguars, but let’s be honest, they’re an expansion team that had only been there eleven years at the time, and they still can’t sell out a game because just about everyone in Jacksonville is from somewhere else). It’s very much like a really big small town. It was the largest city in the country by actual land mass, and most things are very far apart from one another, but the people have a very small town way about them, or at least the natives, which are few and far between in most of the areas we frequented with the rest of the other transplants. Eric always worked blue collar jobs though, and those were usually heavy with natives because as far as I could tell at the time, the only industry in Jacksonville is insurance and the navy. I’ve never much loved working in restaurants, but I didn’t mind it nearly as much in Florida because it was sunny and warm damned near every day. I was perfectly fine with the idea of moving to Tampa.
I knew this wasn’t going to happen by early May though. Every year the PGA Tour holds a golf tournament called “The Players” at TPC Sawgrass, usually on Mother’s Day weekend. We had gone the first year we were there because Eric got free passes as a groundskeeper of the course. The second year we were there he still had friends working there and they gave him a couple of their passes. I don’t remember why he initially hadn’t wanted to go back to Sawgrass when he came back in March, but he was working at a much lower-end course over in the Orange Park area at the time. At the tournament though he ran into some old co-workers that told him some news about some changes happening or something, and that night he suggested putting off moving to Tampa another year because he was thinking of going back to Sawgrass and didn’t want to be that guy that just kept coming and going (the way I had been with Cosi, but I don’t think this is what he was getting at). I just knew right then we were never going to make it to Tampa.
Then, a few weeks later, I was checking the history in my browser on my computer, and discovered that he’d been looking at apartments in Chicago. When I asked him about it, he had to tell me he was thinking maybe we should move there. I assume most of you have seen the movie Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks among other greats, and he has this line about a third of the way into the movie: “fellas, we just lost the moon.” This is how I felt. I thought Tampa was a fabulous compromise and Tampa was my moon. Or any other city in Florida, where it was warm and sunny and beautiful and close to my dad. Nothing against Chicago, it’s a toddling town according to Ol’ Blue Eyes; I’ve been there several times, it’s wonderful, but it might as well just be Detroit for how far it is from Florida, and it’s way more expensive, and there was no way that Eric was going to walk Apollo all winter like he kept promising me. This was the plan for maybe a month or so, but as the end of our lease got closer and we still had no savings, we put that off too. Thankfully.
I never particularly liked living on the ground floor. My patio faced the parking lot, was right up against the sidewalk so anyone walking by could see my entire apartment if I didn’t keep the blinds closed, and anyone walking behind the building could see into my bedroom if the blinds weren’t closed, so it kind of felt like a shoebox. Fortunately, there was an upstairs unit opening up that would be available at the end of our lease for the same amount. I don’t think Eric wanted to move units, but he said if I really wanted to then we could. I was surprised. Eric was usually kind of a my way or the highway kind of guy and I was just sort of used to not getting my way somewhat more often than not because very few things were important enough to me to argue over, so I would just concede; but I remember feeling even more in love with him after he pretty much single handedly moved us into the upstairs unit in the next building over, simply because I wanted to. It had a private balcony, a much better view out the back window, and even a garbage disposal and a dishwasher, which the previous unit didn’t have because it was handicapped accessible so everything was designed to roll a wheel chair underneath.
Upon moving though, we obviously had to sign another lease, so I knew I had at least seven more months in Florida. A few weeks after the move I got it into my head that I was going to check with Panera Bread again, and just let them know I was still interested, so I sent Kenny an email one morning, from Quiznos, and got a call on my cell phone only a few hours later from Steve Lisner, the Jacksonville District Manager. We scheduled an interview at the San Jose store for several days later.
He apologized for not contacting me sooner, but was glad I’d followed up because they were indeed looking to hire more managers at that time as they would be opening another store in St. Augustine in just a few months. I think he liked that I was honest and admitted that I didn’t absolutely love working in restaurants, but it was a stable salary, and art and music didn’t pay the rent. He had wanted to write the great American novel out of college and starte
d working in a restaurant so he could at least feed himself and just worked his way up. We talked about writing and music and somehow we got on the topic of vitamins, and very little about the company, but I imagine Kenny had already let him know that I would be a decent manager and he was just trying to get a feel for my personality, which of course, is “sparkling.” I thought this interview went just as well as the first and several days later he called me while I was walking Apollo and offered me exactly what I had planned on asking for, which is more than I would have taken but left me bargaining room. We agreed I would start training in just over two weeks at the Bartram Park store, which was only about fifteen minutes from my apartment.
The first three days of training were actually Baker Training, which takes place over night. I had to show up at 10pm and work until 6am, which really threw off my circadian rhythm for a few days, but then I was given the weekend off to catch up. I loved Panera. I loved that all the bread was baked fresh every day and whatever wasn’t sold at closing time was donated to local charities instead of being thrown away. I loved the extra security measures that were strictly adhered to of not even opening the back door after dark because all of my previous restaurants had been robbed that way. I loved that they had an armored car service come pick up the deposits from the store as opposed to sending the manager to the bank, as there were always stories of people getting shot and killed over a day’s deposit. I loved the benefits, the schedule, the people, the two weeks of vacation my first year and that there were stores all over the place if we needed to borrow anything, which everyone needed to do from time to time. If Eric hadn’t taken my new position with my significant raise as an excuse to quit his job at the low-end golf course (which, to be fair, was mistreating him grossly and very poorly run), this would have been a lucrative time in my life. It was, at least, a generally happy time.
Sunday September 26, 2010 around 9pm or so, cop cars and a fire truck came screaming into our parking lot. Carol’s daughter, who came to visit her pretty frequently, was there. They knocked several times, but I guess she didn’t answer because they broke the door down and a second later her daughter screamed “NOOO” in the most horrific, strained, painful scream I think I’ve ever heard. To this day I can still remember the sound of her finding her mother, dead. I cried. I continued to cry for the rest of the night. Not because I had known Carol all that well, but because I was so afraid of the first time I would lose someone close to me, like my dad. Eric had lost his mother to cancer about nine years before and I asked him a lot of questions and he was a real comfort, but I just remember that being my biggest fear in life for years because I knew it was inevitable.
CHAPTER 10
The next day, Monday September 27, 2010, I was closing. It was my last week of training and Laurie, my training assistant manager told me to go have a cigarette before dinner rush started. I never keep my phone on me at work, always in my purse in the office, but would check it on the occasional break, and this particular night there was a message from my grandmother that my dad had gone to the hospital after a fainting spell he’d had at work. He didn’t want me to know, but if you know my grandmother, no one tells her what to do and I am glad she called me. I called my brother, who had his phone off, and then called my dad, and his was still on and learned that he had passed out in the lawn on Thursday, drove himself and Tom home later that day, somehow coached Tom (who had never learned to drive a car, just practiced a couple times here and there) how to drive them back to work on Friday, but wasn’t able to concentrate or get any work done, and they went back home. His policy was always to sleep it off, and never go to a doctor. When he didn’t feel better by Monday, he tried going to an urgent care clinic, but those are for minor illness and accidents and they told him he needed a hospital. He eventually made it to the hospital by the beach around 5pm; about the same time my grandmother had called me.
I ran back inside, told Laurie what happened and she told me to go, even helped me figure out where the hospital was and how to get there. It was a good thing I did go because not too long after I got there, they determined that they needed to move my dad to the main hospital downtown; that he had to go in an ambulance, and Tom could not ride in the ambulance, so he would have been stuck at the hospital.
We stopped by their house to get my dad his phone charger, electronic cigarette, toothbrush and glasses and hurried to the main hospital, but it was too late in the night to do anything that day as all of the doctors and techs had gone home. We stayed for a little while, but then I took Tom home, and went home to Eric. All we knew so far was that my dad had a brain tumor, but we didn’t know if it was malignant, or operable, or fatal; simply that it was there.
Fortunately, I was off the next day, picked Tom up and we went straight to the hospital. They took his vitals every few hours, did another MRI and a CT scan, did his EKG twice because they couldn’t believe his lungs were so clear after smoking two to three packs a day for the last forty-five years. They scheduled his biopsy for Thursday morning. His surgeon, Dr. Chandler, was a super nice guy, and very informative. I liked him and I trusted him. He really made me believe he had my dad’s best interest in mind. It took about four hours, but Eric came to the hospital with us that day and I don’t know what Tom did, but Eric and I walked around. We went down by the river and saw a few dolphins swimming, which was not uncommon in the Jacksonville River. Fortunately, the operation was a success and you couldn’t even see the scar and they didn’t even have to shave any of his hair. We wouldn’t have lab results back for a few days though.
I decided to go to work Friday because I couldn’t just keep sitting in the hospital room unable to help the situation, and Panera had been gracious enough already letting me leave in the middle of my shift on Monday night and giving me an extra day off to be there for the biopsy. Tom had figured out a bus route he could take to get to the hospital and back, so I wasn’t really needed. I told everyone at work what was going on that hadn’t already heard.
Saturday morning, October 2, 2010, the surgeon pulled my brother and I aside into a consultation room at the end of the hall to let us know the results had come back late the night before. It was a Glioblastoma Multiforme, which is a very aggressive malignant tumor, a stage four, the fastest growing, and he had about a month to live. I remember thinking his birthday was in exactly one month. What if he didn’t even make it until his birthday?
I kept it together while we all went back to my dad’s room and the surgeon told him the news. My dad seemed somewhat un-phased by this information, but I think he already knew. If there was ever a man I knew that was more in tune with his own body than the rest of the world, it was my dad. He ate processed garbage, smoked, and drank in moderation, but he was also very into martial arts, yoga, meditation, and he had read lots of books about a lot of things, and a bunch of those were about the body and mind. He admitted to me later he’d already noticed himself “getting stupid” for over a month leading up to the fainting spell, which was later determined to have likely been a mini seizure. He just hadn’t gone to a doctor because he didn’t have health insurance, hated doctors, and figured it was likely something critical that he didn’t have the money to fix.
As part of my dad moving back to Jacksonville, he had agreed to go back to work for his previous boss from his previous company that had gone under. He was working on a new online gaming program and needed my dad’s programming expertise and my brother came as a bonus because he could test the games and let them know where the bugs were. Problem with this scenario is they were paid with promises of certain salaries once said program actually got a buyer, which of course, it never did. They were working for him for months, essentially for free. My dad had gone to him a month or two prior and told him he needed at least a minimum to keep stringing them along, but that was only enough for rent, utilities, gas, groceries, the bare essentials. I had told him before he took the job that I didn’t like the idea, and get something in writing about what they would ge
t if the project never went anywhere, but he didn’t, and they got nothing. I feel like if my dad had a real job, with health insurance, he might have gone and gotten checked out sooner, and he may have chosen to fight it. But he didn’t.
My dad was always the smart one in the room, and he knew it and he was proud of it. He said he could already tell the difference in the way his thoughts were processing, and he didn’t think he’d ever get that back, and he didn’t want to live as a “stupid person” and decided not to proceed with treatment, he was just going to let it happen. He also believed it would be only a month. He entered hospice care almost immediately. The administrative nurse that came to his house to enroll him, Mary, was very kind and had pretty long red hair. My dad liked her. She initially admitted him at a fifty percent capacity because he taken a bad turn since getting home from the hospital. He was having a very difficult time using the restroom, and the hospice people ultimately determined he had a urinary tract infection and would need a catheter for the rest of his life. The toxins in his urine were pretty much poisoning his body, but once he was finally able to excrete them, he seemed like he was doing much better.
I started going over every other day, running errands for them, doing grocery shopping, picking up whatever they needed. I remember about a week after the diagnosis, I drove by a wedding dress shop on A1A, and I broke down in tears, which was common these days. I was never the girl that dreamed of her wedding. I was terrified of marriage, and probably never would have gotten up the balls to walk down the aisle if my dad hadn’t gotten sick. The only thing that ever mattered to me about my wedding was that my daddy walk me down the aisle. I called Eric in tears because my daddy wasn’t going to be around to walk me down the aisle, and he said “well, then let’s get married now.” I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me, but like I said, I didn’t need some big ceremony, I wasn’t religious, I actually got really excited by how simple we kept everything. We went to the courthouse on Wednesday to get the marriage license, set up that the magistrate lady would come to my dad’s house around 6pm on Saturday, I went to a thrift store and picked out a cute white sundress for all of six dollars, and baked us a cake.