by Abby Maslin
We have treated each other badly. We have punished each other for the things we cannot punish others for. If we are guilty of anything, it is for wanting more from this life, for succumbing to the very condition that binds all humans: our eternal quest for contentment.
At the beginning of this journey, we couldn’t see past our own feet. We simply had to stay alive, to stop the bleeding of our former lives. When things became quiet again, we were made new, unable to see the many ways we’d each been transformed. And now that TC and I have given each other space, taken time to sit with the grief of our lost identities, I wonder if we might be ready to start walking on the same path again.
I don’t believe the work will be easy or that either of us are fully done unraveling our individual pain. Acceptance, I am forced to admit, is a process, not an outcome. Every time I feel I’ve reached that place, another mile marker has appeared, reminding me there is still distance to go. Maybe it will lead us back together. Maybe it already has.
* * *
The next two months are difficult, but in a way that has nothing to do with TC. Our time is spent in and out of Georgetown Hospital, negotiating more surgeries and more treatment, as my father’s body continues its slow surrender.
Finally, we are ready to have the inevitable conversation. Huddled at his bedside, we convene: my mother, TC, Bethany, and me.
“He’s never going to get better,” I say carefully, giving language to a reality we’re all at different stages of acknowledging. “He’s never going to walk again or probably ever leave this hospital.”
TC nods, his arms crossed, his lips tightening in sad agreement.
“I know,” Bethany whispers. “But what do we do?”
“We don’t let him die like this,” my mother says, inserting herself. “We take him home.”
And so, on a cloudy February afternoon, two days before his seventieth birthday, we bring him home to begin hospice.
“I want to go to the island,” he’d told us days earlier, when we offered him the choice. There’s no way of knowing exactly what he understood—that going home to St. George Island would mean ending the dialysis treatments that were keeping him alive. But for all his weakness, in that one sentence, his voice projected certainty.
Now, with my father home, my mom tucks him into clean sheets on a rented hospital bed that sits facing the wide living room windows of their house, overlooking the creek and the swaying marsh. The leaves have fallen from the trees. The grass on the front lawn stands frost covered and short, dulled by the lifelessness of the season. But still there is beauty. This is the land he loved, the place he brought us fifteen years earlier, when we were convinced we could never love anywhere like we loved Arizona.
In preparation, my mother cleaned the house with her signature intensity, stocking the refrigerator and snatching up every last dust bunny hiding under the couch. My father notices none of the details, of course. She is fixing the environment for herself. Controlling the only part she can control.
If I thought deeply about it, it should make perfect sense to me, this need to harden around the edges. She is composed, focused on logistics, determined to persevere through the days ahead but unable to surrender to the sentimentality of it. At the very least, I should be telling her how sorry I am. She is losing her best friend. Of everyone, I should have the words for this moment.
“You’ll notice that his appetite will probably drift off in the next day or two,” the representative from Hospice of St. Mary’s has explained to us. She smiled sympathetically as she said this, delicate in her delivery of information. “That’s normal. His skin may begin to look mottled. He may stop taking fluids or perhaps even sleep for most of the day.”
We scrutinize my father, watching attentively for any imminent signs and Googling symptoms we never imagined existed. At night, one of us sleeps on the couch beside him, listening for gasps of air and changes in breathing. A revolving door of family and friends comes to visit, paying their final respects and delivering hugs to my mother.
It’s odd. The pre-death. The life taking place around him as he fades from this world. We eat tuna noodle casserole and watch Downton Abbey. We work on our laptops and slip into ordinary conversation. Sometimes, as in the case of the hospice worker, we talk strangely about him, as if he’s not there. One day my sister and I sit side by side on the couch three feet from his bed and write his obituary while he sleeps.
TC and I explain to Jack what is happening, that Pop-Pop is getting ready to say goodbye, and we encourage him not to be afraid, but to lean in and be present.
But Jack doesn’t need our advice. He’s more comfortable than the rest of us at facing death. Some afternoons he sits propped on a stool at my father’s bedside, a three-year-old feeding his grandfather spoonfuls of pineapple and yogurt.
“You want more, Pop-Pop?” he asks sweetly.
The yogurt leaves a white oval around my father’s weak mouth. He swallows slowly, then opens up once more and silently waits for Jack to feed him again.
The sight rips me in two, my heart unable to stop watching. My brain yells at my insides to settle as they simultaneously explode and wither. Watching my baby feed my dying father is too much emotion for my one fragile, human heart.
I tighten instead. It is the only way to survive the transition.
* * *
A week after entering hospice care, my father still has not passed. On the evening before I’m expected back at work, I take Jack’s place on the stool beside my dad. I hold the white skin of his thin fingers in my hands and look him in the eyes. He can barely talk anymore, and I don’t have words either.
It feels like the kind of moment in life in which you’re expected to achieve absolute understanding. To fill the silence with words of forgiveness, to ask the questions for which you need resolute answers, to share your fondest memories, or simply to say “I love you.”
But I don’t need words or explanations, and he doesn’t need any from me. Words are the filmy residue of a life well lived; they can’t touch the experience of what it’s meant to actually be his daughter. He’s given me everything I could want, but nothing greater than the honor of getting to say he was my father.
I kiss him on the cheek. In silence, I thank him for this life.
CHAPTER 25
May 2014
My mother does not believe in funerals. She believes in what my father believed in: celebrations.
“We’re not going to do that thing where we dress in black and sob all day,” she asserted in the days after his death.
I wasn’t surprised. I remembered the wishes she expressed to me many years ago, that she and my father both be cremated, their ashes joined together and spread over the three places they loved most in their lives: the mountains of upstate New York, the Arizona desert, and the water of Southern Maryland.
Three months later, the grass shimmers with dew once more. In the May sky, the sun peeks from behind thick clouds, a hopeful foreshadowing of the celebration my mother has painstakingly planned in my father’s honor.
Family members gather in the brick chapel of the living-history museum my father once directed. The building is a reconstruction of the original seventeenth-century church that once stood in its place. It took years of fund-raising efforts before my dad was able to break ground and bring the chapel back to life. Now it stands as a monument to the birthplace of religious freedom in this country.
I keep Jack on my lap, fidgeting with the collar of his shirt as TC walks to the podium and pulls his speech from the breast pocket of his suit. There has been an ease to our lives in the months since my father’s death, a settling of our souls. It’s as if our paths truly are merging again, connected by the shared experience of missing the man we both considered a father.
“It’s . . . thank. Thank you,” he begins, placing his glasses atop his nose. “Marty was more than my fathe
r-in-law. I loved him because he was my dad.”
He continues on with unmistakable nervousness, his paper shaking in his left hand, his words jerky and sometimes hard to follow. For TC, there continues to be nothing more difficult than speaking in front of an audience, the constant crapshoot of how his aphasia might present itself on a given day.
As he speaks, my stomach is in knots. The part of me that holds my breath like an anxious mother watching her child perform in the school play never seems to go away. With TC, I will always be gathering my nerves, praying for his success.
But it’s clear I’ve underestimated him. Over and over, he’s shown me how capable and resilient he is. It’s not my job to protect him from suffering or try to minimize the possibility of failure. For the past twenty-one months, I’ve been faithless about the world’s ability to make space for a man like TC, when all along I should have staked my faith in TC’s ability to handle the world.
“One of the things I’ll miss most”—he smiles from the podium—“is our breakfasts at the kitchen table. Newspapers, eggs, just talking for hours about the world and Marty’s thoughts.”
My husband is not going to crumble into despair over a stuttered speech. He is not going to quit life because life is hard. The world is not going to reject him for being different. Why on earth would I?
“You’re amazing,” I whisper in quiet sobs as he returns to his seat in the pew beside Jack.
* * *
I cry more than I expect to throughout the day. I’ve been certain my tears are long used up, but every few minutes of the memorial, I find myself bursting into another round of joyful, grateful weeping, including at the unexpected sight of our friends Dannie and Des, who we first met during TC’s second round of therapy in Halifax, and who have made the trip without ever having met my father. I laugh and sob as Jim tells a story I’ve never heard before, of a professional conference in which my dad was leading an important panel. It’s a story that reminds me of my father at his best—brilliant, playful, careful never to take himself too seriously.
“Marty was dressed in what I came to realize was his frequently preferred attire—pinstriped suit, pale blue shirt, and an elegant tie. As he began to address the audience, he took off his coat and loosened his tie. He then unbuckled his belt, took off his pants, and neatly folded them onto a chair. He then proceeded to take off his tie and then his shirt.
“Now he’s standing there in his boxer shorts, a little red cape over his shoulders, and a blazing blue T-shirt that said Mighty Mouse. Then, without skipping a beat, he asks the crowd, ‘Are there any questions?’”
I can picture it so clearly, my father’s warmth and unmasked sense of humor. This is how we Sullivan-Maslins must continue to do life—with lightness. With laughter. With a cape and a smile.
On the wall of a giant tent plays a slide show of my father’s life. Photos of him at eighteen in his army uniform, thin and lanky with a head of jet-black hair. One of him standing in the kitchen of a Bethany Beach rental house, his arms around Jim’s and Moira’s shoulders, a goofy, crooked grin on his face. Him lying on a picnic blanket on the grass, his elbow bent, one hand resting on his cheek as he looks into the face of his nine-month-old daughter, me. Three Dog Night playing gently in the background as one photo morphs into another, leaving me in a teary, grateful grin.
My father’s death was gradual, like a shadow moving across a field, presaging his exit. We lost him for so long and for so continuously, I stopped remembering who he was before illness, who he’d always been to me, and who I wanted to remember him as—my dad.
At the end of the afternoon, a children’s chorus from the local school sings “Amazing Grace” to close out the celebration. After they finish, TC and Jack and I rise from our seats under the tent and walk out to the great lawn of the museum, which sits on the St. Mary’s River, opposite the bank of the estate where TC and I were married.
One beginning. One end. Separated by the unbroken current of the river.
In the distance, a magnificent double rainbow begins to take form, absorbing the day’s final sunlight.
Part V
. . . for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force.
—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
We are gathered at Bethany Beach again. This time, for the first time ever, without my dad. A tradition that’s existed for more than three decades continues to live on, carried forward in his honor. It would make him happy to know we will always return to this place.
My father is gone, but TC is here, for the first time in two years, since he missed last summer’s trip while he was in Canada. The joy has not left his face since we arrived. The familiar beach house overlooking the bay. The smell of the ocean air affixed to every towel and damp swimsuit. TC is delighted by every small detail, as if Delaware might be the most enchanting landscape he’s ever marveled at. Maybe he has a point.
There’s something comforting about a place that hardly changes. Throughout the many moves in our adult life, Bethany Beach has been a fixed point on the map. It doesn’t matter how much time goes by between each visit. The same childlike excitement takes over our adult bodies the moment we turn on to Route 26.
Now I resume a most unusual position, legs crossed, on the hot pavement beside the parking lot dumpster, wearing my pajamas. TC sits beside me, his left hand digging through the contents of a large black trash bag.
“Anything?” I ask, still feeling my way through the contents of my own bag.
“I don’t think so,” he answers uncertainly, a look of brave disgust on his face.
We are looking for my engagement ring. It went missing last night after an epic lobster feast TC and I prepared for the ten family members staying at our beach house. I’ve spent all morning trying to retrace my steps. First, I’d been standing at the counter near the sink. Next, I’d slipped the ring off as I chopped jalapeños for the corn salad. I distinctly remember leaving it on the counter, but then I drank two glasses of wine and my memory grew fuzzy.
The counter is the first place I checked this morning when I woke up and nervously realized it was missing from my finger. It would be one thing if it were the cheap band I bought online before our wedding. A band would be replaceable. But the engagement ring, a modest, antique-looking diamond, was special. TC had it made for me when we were twenty-six, living in Boston. And I’m not ready to let go of this particular artifact from our former lives.
When I mentioned over breakfast that it was missing, my mom sprung into paranoid action. “Go get the broom,” she directed me, insistent we sweep under every baseboard and appliance. It was the same vigorous cleaning action she’d initiated last night, instructing TC and me to move out of the way as we cooked so she could preemptively attack the dinner mess.
“Mom,” I said slowly, prepared for her defense, “you don’t think there’s any chance you swept it off the counter as we were trying to make dinner?” I pictured her with the sponge in one hand, the garbage can in the other, maniacally clearing away discarded food.
“No.” She frowned insistently, then sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
The dumpster was the last resort in our search, one that after two hours of inspecting the house proved fruitless. It’s a shared dumpster, used by the twenty or so beach houses in this particular community, meaning that we first needed to climb in and determine which bags belonged to our family.
Inside the five we finally identified are pounds and pounds of decimated lobster bits. Sharp shells, slimy intestines. Indiscernible mounds of goo.
I can’t believe we’re even out here trying this hard, so unlikely is it that we’ll actually find the ring. At this point in the search, I’ve begun to make peace with the idea of its being gone forever. As my mom has grown more and more anxious about recovering it, TC and I have grown increasingly relaxed.
“We’l
l get you a new ring, Noonie,” he promised after the kitchen search turned up empty.
“Please don’t,” I said sincerely. “I really don’t need one.”
Before we’d gotten engaged, I’d been crazy about rings, educating myself on the three C’s (cut, clarity, and color), and obsessing over which one TC might choose. I’d been a bridezilla head case, poring over every issue of Martha Stewart Weddings, intent on picking out the perfect everything for my once-in-a-lifetime perfect day. And not once, over nearly five years of marriage, has my ring—or any of the other details—made one shred of difference in how I actually feel about my marriage.
It would be an extraordinary waste of money for TC to buy me another ring.
“Noonie,” I say now, looking up from the lobster guts. “Let’s just give this up. I don’t want to waste a whole beach day digging through the trash.”
As I speak, my finger stumbles over something solid, hiding inside the curve of a discarded shell. I pull out the piece of broken exoskeleton and see the ring buried inside. I hold it up, amazed by the improbability of my finding it.
TC’s eyes are still fixed inside his own bag. When he looks up a moment later, his eyes widen in shock.
“No. No way,” he says, before a grin spreads across his face. He picks up the ring from between my thumb and index finger and holds it up to the sun.
“It doesn’t look half-bad,” he comments, then wipes it on the hem of his shirt.
“Noonie Maslin.” He turns to look at me, the ring in the palm of his hand. “Will you be my wife again?”
I laugh and nod my head as he places the ring back on my finger.