by Jeni Birr
I even worked the day of my wedding, October 16th, which also turned out to be Sweetest Day, but a lot of states don’t even know what that is. I was scheduled until 5pm. Everyone knew I was getting married that evening though so they kicked me out around 4pm. I rushed home, showered, did my makeup, brought my dress, shoes, and the dollar store veil and flower bouquet I had made and drove over to my dad’s, where Eric was already waiting. I called before I got there and he waited out in the back yard until the magistrate got there, and I was ready, so he wouldn’t see me on the day of the wedding. It was magical, in our own little way. My uncle Pat, great uncle Bill, and my mother were all there because they were already in town to see my dad. The only thing I would change is that I wish Eric’s dad, Norm and his wife, Karen, could have made it down, but they weren’t able to. That, and I wish we had brought Apollo.
My mother wore the dress she had brought in case there was a funeral, which was off white with angels and very pretty, but I knew she had brought it for a funeral, not for a wedding. She attended the ceremony portion, but shortly after the “I dos,” she went inside and went to sleep, which honestly was probably better, because the rest of us proceeded to get rather intoxicated, like everyone should do at a wedding!
My dad’s own mother however, didn’t make it down to Florida until November 8th. I could probably write a whole other book about her, but let’s just say she doesn’t handle death well. She lost her father at a young age, and hasn’t gone to many funerals since, even though she’s lost a sister, a sister-in-law, a lot of friends, a son, and a husband. I think she only went to her husband’s service because she had put it together, it was expected. I imagine if she could have gotten out of it, she would have. She had a Florida house she went to every year around early November and could not make it down before then for lots of perfectly good reasons. Thankfully, my dad was still doing okay when she finally made it, five weeks after he was given one month.
She came up every few weeks and my dad started calling her every night. After my grandmother visited the first time, my dad asked my mother to move in to their house to be his full time caregiver, as she was not working at the time, and I don’t think he wanted to put that much pressure on Tom, who was very good at keeping track of what medicine he was supposed to take and when, and cooking, but he never wanted to go outside, he wasn’t very good at cleaning anything, and frankly, I don’t know why. I think, honestly, that it was because he wanted them to re-strengthen their bond because Tom was going to have nowhere to go once my dad wasn’t around to take care of him.
This only lasted about a month though. She was always spouting her bible verses, and wanting to pray, and making it known she felt like she was in “enemy territory” and as my dad descended he became very short tempered. He was ready to go and had stopped eating or drinking anything with calories. He drank only water or black coffee, and even asked his nurses if any of his medicines or vitamins had any calories. My uncle was gracious enough to be sending him money to pay his rent and bills, and he qualified for food stamps, which Tom used to cook meals for himself and anyone else who was visiting. I wasn’t there for any of the real blowouts, but I guess it eventually got so bad that my dad told her to leave and Tom called the cops when she wouldn’t. She moved back home to Savannah the next day and visited every so often.
I was still visiting every other day and watching him slowly descend into a clumsy, constantly confused, angry retarded zombie. The location of the tumor in his brain was affecting his speech and he would frequently not be able to find the right words for things and it was always a process to figure out what he was trying to say, which just made him frustrated. It was also a real eye-opener that he couldn’t even dial a phone because he would say “five” and point to the nine, or any other number, so he needed someone with him at all times. Panera had been very supportive of my situation and kept me at my training store where I already knew everyone, and was only scheduling me mid-shifts so there was always another manager present in case I needed to leave at any point. But then the St. Augustine store opened and they had to move me and a few other people around, which was fine, but it was still going to be a big shock to go to a new store and learn a whole new team of people. My dad had also not eaten in over a month, and Eric was still not working, almost four months now since he had quit the golf course.
Needless to say, I was in a very low place. I had borrowed my mother’s set of Dave Ramsey cd’s that I had been listening to in the car in my many miles I was driving between home, work, and my dad’s. Dave Ramsey, if you don’t know, is a relatively well known financial planning guru with lots of neat little tips and tricks to getting out of debt, staying out, and building a nest egg to pass down and basically “change your family tree.” He’s very funny and interesting though, and also a man of faith, which he actually leaves out of his lectures, which I appreciated and the reason I actually made it through the whole series. The last disc in the series though was the story of Christ, and how much he loves every one of us, and how the angels in heaven would just have a royal party if I accepted him into my heart. So I did. I figured, hell, what could it hurt? Everything was turning to grits around me anyways. And Dave made a very convincing argument. So I repeated the words, out loud, in my car on my way home on December 20th. I didn’t hear any trumpets or celebrating, but I felt like a weight had been lifted. When I got home, Eric informed me he had an interview with BMW in Detroit in two days. He had also already spoken to his father and turned out he was leaving his Florida house the next day to drive back to Detroit and said he could hitch a ride if we met him at the freeway exit, and I just so happened to be off the next day. This may have been just a coincidence, but it was still a big one.
What also may have been an even bigger coincidence is that a few days later, my brother randomly checked my dad’s bank account which he wasn’t even using anymore because it was nearly empty, and there had been a direct deposit of Social Security we didn’t know was coming. The hospice social worker had apparently taken care of everything, and he would be receiving almost enough once a month to float him, so he wouldn’t have to continue living off his brother, which I know he hated. He took twenty-four hours to think about it, but ultimately decided to start eating again. I was so happy I cried for an hour.
What was probably also another coincidence is that my dad had also insisted on starting to divvy out who was going to get what of his things, and since Tom didn’t drive, it was determined Eric and I would get the car. It wasn’t worth much since the accident, but it was still plenty drivable, so we decided to sell Eric’s Honda Civic to buy him a new set of mechanic’s tools and box to keep them in, which are very expensive. The day of his interview in Detroit, I listed and sold his car in Florida, for the exact price he found a box with complete set of tools listed for on Craigslist in Detroit.
The following morning I had my transition day to my new store, which turned out to be the San Jose location, where I’d had my interview with Steve, where I had done my baker training, and coincidentally, where Kenny was now, who I’d had my initial interview with, so it wasn’t nearly as big of a shock. It was only a few minutes farther from my house, and had a younger, more fun staff; probably because the management was too lenient on them. I had just found out Eric got the job in Detroit, so I knew I’d be transferring in a few months, so I wasn’t about to rock the boat and have everyone hate me being the brand new manager that was then going to up and leave.
I had always known Eric wanted to be in Detroit, and in my grief early on in my dad’s illness I told him that once my father passed, if he wanted to go back, we could. Eric had spent the last few months at home studying for hours at a time to take his ASE certification tests to become a nationally certified mechanic and he passed two of them. He only needed one to become employed, but planned to take the others in the near future. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly, but it was only several days after he got his test results that he found the BMW job
posting, called to set up the interview, and clearly nailed it. They wanted him to start Monday, January 2nd. This gave him just enough time to fly back on Christmas Eve, spend a few days with me and my family, pack as much of his stuff as he could into the now-his Saturn, and drive back.
Yet another coincidence that happened this week is Andrea’s roommate had recently moved out and she was looking for someone else to rent out her spare bedroom. She offered it to Eric for very cheap so that he’d have somewhere to stay and could save some money for when I made it up, because our initial plan was that I would stay until my dad passed. Funny thing was, my dad wanted to move back to Detroit too. In the beginning he was okay with the fact that he was going to die. He was welcoming of it. Several months in now though, the tumor was doing a real number on his brain, and the hospice people had told us to expect certain things, one of which was denial. He was convinced he was going to reconnect with Mike, his former Tai-Chi teacher, and he would heal him. He wanted to get another dog. He insisted his house have a fenced yard so that he could get another dog.
This conversation with the rest of the family did not go very well. My grandmother absolutely hated the idea, and she made it known. Maybe Tom and I were in denial too, but he had made it several months now and was still able to walk, shower, feed himself and whatnot, he just had some neurological issues sometimes, but he seemed like he might keep going up to another year. We cleared it with his hospice doctors and had him all set up to transfer into Michigan Hospice once we got there. This was probably not the best idea, but he really wanted to go. I think deep down he just didn’t want to keep me from my husband, but we’d been apart for months at a time before and understood this is probably what was going to happen again, but he wouldn’t hear it. He insisted on moving back to the Detroit area at the end of February when his lease was up.
I looked at quite a few housing options on Craigslist, and most of them seemed to be offered by one guy, so I called his people and tried to schedule an appointment for the Saturday I would be in town, about three weeks before our move date. The agent I spoke to just told me to call back once I actually was in town. I called him from the airport the Friday I landed, and left a message that I would be expecting to meet with him the next morning to go look at a couple houses I was interested in. I called him about 10:30am after Eric and I had gotten some breakfast and had to re-explain to this man who I was and why I was calling, and remind him I only had this one day to look at houses because I was flying out tomorrow. I think he was in the middle of something, but he met us at one of the houses about an hour later. This one did not have a fenced yard and was kind of a shithole, pardon my potty mouth, but this is what my dad could afford. I knew it would be cleaned up before he moved in. The man also showed us another property, but there were stairs to get up to the front door, and stairs to get up to the bedroom, and I knew that wouldn’t work very well as he was already needing help walking. This man showing us places had to get to another appointment, but he took all of my information and criteria and sent me a list of about ten properties that roughly matched. I forwarded them to Tom and let him decide, but I was already back in Florida by this point and everything else was processed through phone calls and emails. I never saw the house he chose.
On my flight out of Detroit Monday night, about twenty minutes into the air, the flight attendants went running to the back of the plane. One came on the loudspeaker and asked if there was a doctor on board. There was a nurse. Apparently, a man had suffered a heart attack, and this nurse had likely saved his life, and we emergency landed in Cincinnati so that he could be rushed to a hospital. I was already fighting back tears, and the young woman I was sitting next to and I became very close for the next hour before we were finally allowed to take back off. Needless to say, none of us made our connections, which were all the last flights out for the evening, but the airline was kind enough to put us up at a local hotel for the night with vouchers for food from the airport for breakfast, and we were all booked on the first flight out to our final destinations. Fortunately, I didn’t have to work until 2pm the next day, so I had enough time to fly in at 11am, go back by dad’s and pick up Apollo before running home for a shower. Overall, this whole trip just felt unsuccessful, aside from the fact I got to see my husband for the first time in almost two months.
My dad was doing pretty well in January, but by February, I started to wonder if he was going to make it to the move. We already knew the house they were going to be moving into was fully carpeted, but he got very upset when Tom was about to throw out a rug they wouldn’t need. He screamed and yelled and just kept saying “but it’s my stuff!” For the first time he looked at me like he didn’t know who I was, and then the same to Tom, and then just started screaming “Die! Die! Die!” Which was his way of saying he was ready to die. Then he started crying, which I had never seen him do. This sort of thing was happening more and more and he was losing the use of his limbs. He could no longer hold up his own weight and needed help in and out of a wheelchair by the week of the move.
We had all previously decided the easiest way to move everyone back up to Detroit was for my dad to fly up with my brother a couple days prior, and Eric would fly back down from Michigan to help me pack up the shared moving truck, which he would drive back, and I would drive my car with Apollo. This would allow me time to clean both their house, and our apartment without distraction and get us both our deposits back. The day that they flew out, Thursday, February 25, 2010, was probably the longest, most stressful, and exhausting day of my life.
I got to their house about 7:45am and it took both Tom and I to get my dad into the car, who was pretty confused all the time by this point, which had only come on several days prior. We put their bags in the trunk and I drove them to the airport. A very nice man who worked for the airport helped my dad into a wheelchair and told Tom where to go to check in for their flight. I went to a local coffee and donut shop to wait for Tom to call me that they had successfully made it through security and were waiting at their gate before heading back to their house to finish their packing, and clean their house. Their flight left at about 10am, they had a connection in Atlanta, and didn’t land in Detroit until about 5pm. I was terrified all day that something was going to go wrong on the plane; but thankfully, that part was smooth. Tom called to let me know they landed safely, Dad was okay, and our Uncle was there to pick them up and take them to their new house. I was about done at their place so I went back home to shower before driving to the Orlando airport to pick up Eric, who was flying in that night.
While I was in the shower I got a call from Tom, in hysterics. Apparently, the house they had chosen was a complete mess, was ridiculously cold with the only heating vent in the living room, there was no overhead lighting in any room but the kitchen, and Tom had said something rather rude and ungrateful to our uncle and he left. My dad was rocking back and forth on a chair repeating “so cold. So cold.” Tom had done a good job of taking care of our dad in Florida where there were nurses he could call, and me to drive them around, but now he was eleven hundred miles away with no car, and it was February in Michigan and he didn’t have any idea where he was, or anything else for that matter, and he couldn’t leave my dad alone. I felt so helpless.
I called the only people I knew would do whatever they could to help me, the Miltons. They were the parents of my ex-boyfriend that I had always kept in touch with and considered my second family. I called them “mommy-almost, and daddy-almost” and they called me “daughter-almost” and they are probably the kindest people I’ve ever known. I think they were at Costco when I called, but they could tell from my voice that it was an emergency and they dropped what they were doing to go get my dad and Tom and take them to a nearby hotel.
I called the landlord, who was clearly at some casino somewhere because I could hear the machines in the background once he finally answered and I explained they could not stay in that house. When he insinuated that I had seen the house, I further
explained to him that was my intention, but his man had treated me like I was unimportant and didn’t make time for me when I was in town, even though I had called him twice the week before he was to show me the properties; which I think was news to him. Fortunately, he had another house only a few miles away that was still a dump, but at least it had heating vents in every room, which you would think every house in Michigan should have, but apparently not. It also had a fenced yard, and a garage, neither of which they needed, but the rent was only ten dollars more.
While I was making these phone calls however, I was drying off from my half a shower, getting dressed, walking Apollo and getting back in my car to go pick up Eric from the Orlando airport. If you’re wondering why Eric didn’t just fly into the Jacksonville airport, it’s because there are very few direct flights from DTW to JAX and they were all quite a bit more money than we wanted to spend, and he didn’t want to take more than Friday and Monday off, so he had to be able to work a full day Thursday and fly out at 9pm or so, direct. We found a cheap flight that went straight to Orlando, which was just over two hours away.
Halfway through my drive to Orlando, just after the Miltons called me to let me know my dad and Tom were safely at their hotel for now, traffic stopped. The entire freeway of I-95 slowly came to a complete stop and didn’t move for probably twenty minutes or more. There had apparently been a very bad accident just up ahead and they closed the whole freeway and were re-routing traffic across the median and back up the opposite way to a detour connection. At that moment, I thanked God that the house shenanigans had made me several minutes late from my desired departure time.