It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  I am so freaked out by all this that I run to the bathroom and call Kirsten on the cell phone. I don’t have anything really to say, and I get a really funny look from some guy who comes in to pee, and I’m sure he went right back to his table and said, “Some jackass is on a cell phone in the fucking bathroom talking about nothing!”, but it is enough for me to just hear her voice. I feel better, and the melancholy folk singer slips in a Hank Williams tune amongst the many numbers by obscure depressive singer songwriters, and I am pacified. Also the pizza is good.

  Is God Listening?

  One day after I visit Kristen, I find myself stuck waiting for the elevators, a situation that annoys me to no end. There are three elevators and ten floors, but you can literally wait ten minutes for an elevator. They have machines in this hospital that can detect a cancerous spot on your spine only a few millimeters wide, but they can’t seem to get people from floor to floor efficiently. I guess if they have to skimp somewhere, better on the elevators than on the lifesaving equipment.

  A woman is there, and we are both nervously checking our watches, because I have to get back to work for a meeting (or at least I think I do–it later turns out the meeting had been canceled before I left work, but nobody told me. ) and she, as it turns out, is ten minutes over on her parking meter, and I say something lame like, “Boy, these are the slowest elevators in the world,” and she says, “Yeah, we’ve been here for three weeks, and I still can’t believe these elevators.”

  We are right outside the transplant unit, and three weeks is Kirsten’s scheduled stay in the bubble, so I say, “Oh, do you have somebody in for a transplant?” and she says, “No. you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Well, we’re obviously going to be here for a while, so I indicate that she should tell me and then we’ll see if I believe her, and she tells me that her sister in law came in to give birth, and something went horribly wrong, and they lost the baby, a ten-pounder, and the sister-in-law has basically been in a coma ever since, during which time she had four surgeries and dialysis, and she only just woke up today, and nobody’s told her she lost the baby yet.

  All I can think is “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.” What I say is, “Well, thank God she’s alive,” and I mean it–I think about the horror of that experience for the dad, and how awful it would be to go in to the hospital for what you think is a happy occasion and then have your whole fucking family die, and so thank God that she didn’t. The words fall out of my mouth before I have a chance to intellectualize, and it really feels like a prayer to me when I say it, because it comes from a much deeper place than my stupid conversational gambit about the elevators.

  “Yeah,” the lady says, “we’ve all been praying for her, and it worked!” and I envy this woman her certainty as we say goodbye, and later on I think , Well, presumably the people who are praying for her now were also praying for her to have a healthy baby. So how can you say it works?

  And I know her response would probably be to point to the success of the mother’s survival and ask how I could say it doesn’t. And I know I am asking the wrong question, or something. Faith isn’t scientific, and here I am trying to examine data and make it fit the hypothesis, like life is a lab report for my creepy eighth grade science teacher, or my perverted tenth grade science teacher, or my foxy eleventh grade science teacher. Or something.

  So does it work? When Kirsten got good news from her second round of chemo, my mom told me that she thought everybody’s prayers were helping, and she told me how somebody she works with that Kirsten and I have never even met has these two sons who every night when they say their prayers before bed say, “Please make Kirsten’s medicine work.” I am incredibly touched by this–I mean I am sitting here getting teary just thinking about it. I asked for my co-workers to pray for us, and I asked my prayer group to pray for us, and I love it when we are in church and the minister says in the prayer something like, “we pray for those going through chemotherapy,” or “We remember those waiting for test results,”or something like that.

  But God just can’t get off that easy. I mean, if God made the second round of chemo work, he presumably made the first round not work. Right? He presumably gave her cancer in the first place, right? He presumably killed that baby. And then something good happens and we go, “Thank God.” Well, shit. I can’t make sense of it, and I want so much to be one of those people who believes, I mean really believes deep in their soul in God’s goodness and justice, but I just can’t square it with the data, and I know that’s the wrong way to look at it, but I can’t seem to make myself look at it any other way.

  My sort of nebulous Christianity doesn’t really offer much in the way of answers. When Job, sitting in shit and covered in weeping sores, asks, like Nancy Kerrigan, “Why me? Why me?” God doesn’t offer that Job was the object of a wager between him and Satan, he just says, basically, Who the hell are you to ask me that? Shut the fuck up. Go make a universe, and then you can ask me about what goes on in mine.

  Fair enough, I guess, but it sure isn’t satisfying. One of those Christian heresies that caused lots of people to get persecuted and executed in the middle ages held that the universe was actually the object of an endless war between an equally powerful God and Satan. Now that’s an explanation I could buy! God gets the credit, Satan gets the blame! And they killed people for believing this! Now people who believe this just get TV shows and control of the Republican party.

  Sigh. I have prayed less since this whole thing started than at any time in the past year and a half. I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I really wish I had the faith of those little kids, or the lady by the elevators, or my mom, or pretty much anybody.

  Gotta Catch ’Em All

  One day I head down the hall on the bubble floor, and I notice that there is a new sign on one of the other patients’ doors. It says, “please check with nurses before visiting pt.” I don’t know jack about what goes on on this floor, but this looks to me like it can’t be good news. There are a bunch of people standing around the bed looking sad, and all I can think is that this person is dying.

  And they have their TV on, and as I walk by is this ad for the new gold and silver Game Boys, which in some way that I don’t understand correspond to some new Pokemon games or something. And it just freaks me out. What must it be like to be dying and have fucking Pokemon ads playing on your TV? It seems absurd and obscene and kind of sad to me–like if someone is dying, their TV ought to only show really meaningful stuff or something. What could it possibly be like to watch this Pokemon ad and think to yourself, “this is one of the last things I will ever see”? It strikes me as incredibly depressing. Then it occurs to me that perhaps it is a blessing. Maybe you can look at this dumbshit ad and go, “well, there’s nothing really left for me to stay for here,” and just ease on over to the other side.

  The Home Front

  Rowen is not freaking out. Mostly. This is very good news. In the first few days that Kirsten is in the hospital, she cries a few times–once when I pick her up from school, we are just walking down the street and she starts to sob. I know the feeling. But she bounces back pretty quickly, and pretty much acts like her normal self, which is to say that she is sometimes angelic and sometimes completely psychotic, which I guess is pretty standard preschooler behavior. A couple of weird things are that she starts refusing to talk to Kirsten on the phone, which is kind of odd because she has never been shy about the phone before, and she never wants me to tell Kirsten anything that happens at home. For example, I will be videotaping to show her the Christmas tree, and Rowen will say, “NO! Don’t Show her! Don’t tell her!” I finally decide that this is about her wanting to be able to tell Kirsten everything when she gets home.

  Rowen has this system of affection where she has number one, which has always been Kirsten, and number two, which is not exactly a close second, and that’s me. Which is not to suggest that she doesn’t love me or anything. As I’ve said, we have a lot of fun together, but if
it’s a choice between me and Kirsten, she’ll always choose Kirsten.

  I have been waiting patiently for the change in positions that everyone says is inevitable, that eventually little girls are supposed to favor their dads, but she’s almost four and hit hasn’t happened yet, so I have pretty much resigned myself to having to wait for her teenage years when that weird mother-daughter tension creeps in and dad reaps the benefits. If, that is, dad can restrain himself from being overprotective and never wanting his little angel to have a date with some wispy-mustached perv of a teenaged boy. Ahem. But some have greatness thrust upon them, and in Kirsten’s absence I have taken over the number one spot. One day I tell Kirsten in the hospital, “I never wanted it like this!” I feel like the understudy who steps into the starring role because the star met with some kind of horrible accident or something.

  And I don’t know why this surprises me, but being number one is somewhat of a mixed bag. It is nice, sure, but it is also kind of exhausting, as it involves a fair amount of clinging. And this is nice because I love her and because it makes me feel needed and important, which is something I think everybody craves (I know it’s something my mom craves, and the fact that she hasn’t gotten it much from us since Rowen was born is probably key to a lot of the tension between us), but, at the same time, you know, sometimes you want, for example, to be able to be at church and go pee by yourself.

  So if I am number one, that means my mom has slipped into my number two spot, which is good, I mean this is probably two spots higher than she’s ever been in the affection hierarchy, but it is tough for her because being number two involves a lot of “NO! I want daddy!” and I know from personal experience that that is also hard to take, but I do manage to convince my mom not to take it personally, that this is just the way Rowen is. Rowen apparently throws a couple of screaming fits in the morning, and this to me indicates that my mom has really arrived in Rowen’s mind, because she will really only throw screaming fits at us and is totally silent for people she doesn’t know or especially like.

  It is helpful and nice having my mom here. I am initially annoyed by stuff like her using the oven as a drying rack for pots and pans (I ask her not to do it and then yell at her when, a few days later I am pre-heating the oven and have to pull two pots with handles that miraculously hadn’t melted yet out of the hot oven before sticking the food in) and the fact that she has a really terrible sense of direction (on the first night she complained about getting turned around in our house, which has five rooms). Mostly, though, my mom is pretty easy to hang around with, and we have a fairly decent time. I am reminded that I really don’t appreciate her enough one night when Joe comes over to go out after Rowen goes to bed, and Rowen’s bedtime is happening a little later than planned, so I leave Joe with my mom for a few minutes while I finish up the bedtime ritual, and as we are walking down the street later, I am about to apologize for abandoning him with my mom–not that my mom is so heinous or anything, but I think if I went to a friend’s house and was forced into conversation with their mom I had never met before it would feel pretty awkward–but before I can open my mouth, Joe says, “I really enjoyed talking to your mom! She’s really cool!” He’s right, and I feel guilty for thinking I needed to apologize.

  One night she is watching TV, and I come in to join her and she is watching Providence, and I say, because I’ve never watched it, “Oh, is this any good?” because she tends to favor the “Quality TV” kind of TV, whereas I like to watch cartoons and rich people throwing stuff at each other, and she says, “No, not really.” And I say, “but you watch it regularly,” and she says, “Yeah. I just really can’t explain it.” It baffles me, but I do sit down and watch the entire episode, and it is corny, cheesy, and unbelievable–a total throwback to those hero-doctor shows of the 1970s, except starring this really attractive woman with great hair. In fact, between her great hair and Mike Farrell’s white hair, that just makes me go, “BJ! You’re so old!” because of course I grew up on M*A*S*H* in the BJ years, the show is really all about hair as far as I’m concerned.

  Even though the show is awful, it is somehow a nice evening.

  Cry If I Want to

  Two Sundays before Christmas we have this fully-packed day. We go to church and Rowen is going to be in the Christmas pageant as a sheep. This is what passes for a rite of passage among Unitarians–you start as a sheep, then move up to angel, then to townsperson, then, if you are lucky, to Three King or holy family. So Rowen is beginning her journey as a sheep, and after one practice during church school we hear that she was the best sheep in the place, but then when it comes time to practice it in the church in front of people, she starts sobbing: “I don’t wanna go up there without you! I’m scaaaared!” So, in another Unitarian rite of passage, I take over the role of father ram from another parent who has played the role for three years.

  I have brought Joe and Katy’s camcorder to record the event, but now I have to be up there, and I can’t really be taping it then, so I hand the camcorder over to my mom and explain that it’s very simple to operate, basically just point and shoot, and I should know that we are in for trouble when she looks in the wrong end and says, “I don’t see anything.” But ok, I figure it’s no big deal, if the camcorder is in my mom’s hands, I have a small but greater than zero chance of getting the event taped, and if it’s just sitting in a pew, there is pretty much zero chance that it’s going to tape the pageant on its own.

  So the pageant goes ok, and afterwards we go to coffee hour in the parish hall and grab a snack, and my mom just disappears. I spend about ten minutes looking for her–I stand on the stage and scan the crowd and try to be polite to the nice people who come to talk to me without really looking at them, because then I won’t be able to see her, and eventually I see her and smile and wave.

  Rowen and I go over to her, and I see that she has tears in her eyes. And I am convinced that she thinks I blew her off, because this is kind of a theme of our relationship so I immediately say, “I’ve been looking and looking for you, and I couldn’t find you,”so as to make the point that I didn’t just ditch her, because that is what I am sure she thinks.

  Well, I don’t know why I am still learning this lesson after thirty-two years, but it is folly trying to read my mom’s mind, because when she gets home, she starts crying full-on and says how she couldn’t work the camcorder and she felt like that ruined the experience of the pageant for her, and she is never here to see these kind of things, and she had bought this new outfit for Rowen that doesn’t fit, and she wanted to brush Rowen’s hair but I wouldn’t let her, and Rowen looks like hell.

  I am explicitly indicted on the last count, because my mom has been sort of obsessively trying to brush Rowen’s unruly hair all the time and I told her that Rowen’s routines are very important to her and now was not the greatest time to be adding new ones. I am implicitly indicted on the other two counts because I am the one who gave her the camcorder and, okay, perhaps unreasonably expected her to be able to work it, and I rushed her out of the store when we were buying Rowen’s outfit because it was late and it was full of insane Christmas shoppers and I felt like screaming.

  I apologize, but I am mad. I am mad because she said that Rowen looked like hell while Rowen is sitting right there, but most of all I am mad because I just don’t have the energy to deal with this right now. My wife is in the hospital, I have to worry about how my four year old is feeling, and I just don’t have the time or energy to worry about taking care of my mom’s feelings. Perhaps that makes me an asshole. I don’t know. All I know is that I am so fucking tired and it’s all I can do to take proper care of myself.

  And I also think, well, here we go again. Every visit these days seems to involve tears, and it always seems to boil down to me being a bad son in some way, and this is difficult to deal with at any time, but right now it is enough to just send me to bed.

  My mom calms down, and Rowen and I head off to the fourth birthday party of one of her classm
ates. And it is, without exception, the coolest birthday party I have ever attended. Including adult ones. They have rented out this club which is under a pizza place and is like half club, half bowling alley. They have this jukebox stocked full of CDs by the knowledgeable guys who run the record store next door, and I feed it dollars and play, “I Want You Back,” “Pressure Drop,” “I say a Little Prayer” (The Aretha Franklin version–I had heard the Dionne Warwick version in the car driving to the hospital earlier in the morning and thought about the fact that that is one of only two songs I could think of with two really great, really different versions. The other one is “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, though now that I think of it, the Clash also do a killer version of “Pressure Drop,” so go ahead and add that to the list) and “It’s Not Unusual.” Other people make good selections too–it’s tough not to when there are so few bad CD’s on offer, and I am just delighted.

  I must take a detour here and say that one of the CDs they have stocked is the first Devo album, and as I am flipping through I see it and remember that it has a song called “Mongoloid” on it. And we kind of thought that was funny when we were twelve listening to it at Danny’s house, and I say this as a Devo fan, but is a cruel and shitty song. There is a kid at this party with Down’s syndrome, and I now know enough about living through tough situations that I am not going to say that her mom is a hero or that she is this perfect little angel or anything, because I’m sure her mom gets frustrated and I am sure that the kid is a pain in the ass sometimes as all kids are, but nevertheless, they are very loving, and the kid is just incredibly cute and sweet, and I just think how shitty it is that that fucking song is on the jukebox here. And I am horrified when, later, somebody from the other birthday party also taking place in this space actually plays it. I can only believe that they were oblivious to this girl’s presence, because any other explanation is just too horrible to contemplate, but anyway, I look nervously at the mom, and she is totally oblivious, she’s totally got the music tuned out, and I guess she’s not familiar enough with the Devo oeuvre to recognize it.