by Linda Kenyon
It’s still too rough to do anything, so while Chris goes down for his after-dinner nap, I just sit in the cockpit, stare out at the waves. This isn’t good. Too much time to think.
We kept a five-gallon pail at the back door of the barn, where Brad would put afterbirth and tiny testicles and little pigs that had been crushed to death by their mother. The dead pail, we called it. Every few days Brad would go out back, dig a hole, and bury its contents. He usually kept a piece of plywood over it, to keep the cats out. But sometimes he would forget to cover it. Don’t look, I would warn myself as I walked by. Don’t look. Don’t look. But I always did. It’s hard not to look in the dead pail.
We were at a cottage we had rented — a new thing since we’d moved to town: summer vacation — when Brad finally decided it was time. His kidneys were failing, we both knew that, but it took him a while to surrender to dialysis. We were both afraid of the next step. We knew exactly what it would do to our lives — at least we thought we did. I had driven my brother John to the dialysis unit at the hospital every second day, watched it take over his life, and in the end, watched it take his life. No wonder Brad was reluctant to make the call.
We had taken the cell phone to the cottage — a good idea, we thought, given the circumstances. I listened to him talking to his doctor as we walked up the road, around a big rock that looked like a bear at dusk. Emily was trotting ahead of us, glancing back from time to time to see what was taking us so long. I had our new puppy, Chester, on a leash.
“Okay,” Brad said, listening to the doctor’s instructions. “Okay. Friday.”
We went back to the cottage and lay down together on the couch in the front of the window overlooking the lake, the dogs curled up on the floor beside us. The three of them fell fast asleep. I didn’t. I lay there, looking out at the lake.
We had barbecued ribs for supper that night, his favourite, and corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes from the roadside stand just outside Lakefield. He wasn’t very hungry, though, and pushed his plate away before it was clean. As I scraped what was left into the garbage can, I counted the days until Friday.
Just before noon, we stepped off the elevator and into chaos. There were people everywhere, some coming out of the dialysis unit, some going in. We didn’t know what to do. We heard Brad being paged but didn’t know where to go. A nurse came up to us, recognized me.
“Aren’t you John’s sister?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How is John?”
“He’s dead,” I said.
I realize now I might have softened it somehow, but it just came out. They paged Brad again.
“That’s me,” he said.
“Oh, come with me, then. You wait here,” she said to me.
Once he was on the machine, she came and got me. Most of the people were in beds. Some of them looked very sick. But he was sitting up in a chair, smiling, as I walked towards him, though he was looking very pale. There were two tubes coming from his chest, just below his collarbone. I felt the room start to swim but managed to collect myself.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said. I stood beside him, put my hand on his shoulder.
They didn’t keep him on for long that first day, maybe an hour. Afterwards we went to the park. It was an unusually warm fall day, and we just sat on a bench and watched the ducks for a while. Neither of us knew what to say.
I stand up, scan through the falling dark for ships. Nothing.
Ten more days. Just ten more days till we make landfall. I can do this.
I don’t know when it all started going wrong for my brother John. It was sometime in his teens, I think. There was a thin but clear line, in our family, between the big kids and the little kids. Peggy, Brenda, and I were the big kids. John was one of the little kids, even though he was born the same year Brenda was — the babies were coming thick and fast then.
I lost touch with him after I left home. I would get glimpses of him from time to time — I heard that he was working as a welder, knew that he’d bought a muscle car he would drive too fast. He had a girlfriend, then a wife, then a couple of kids. But I was too busy trying to be a good farm wife to take much notice.
Then he started to have some kind of trouble with his heart, couldn’t do any heavy lifting, so he had to quit his job. He found work in an electroplating plant, I’m not sure what he was doing, but then he started having episodes of congestive heart failure. This was just the beginning of his troubles.
John had diabetes, which he’d had trouble dealing with, whether because he was a typically invincible teenage boy or because he was actually allergic to the insulin available at that time I don’t know. I just knew that in his twenties, his eyesight started to fail, then his kidneys. He had to quit working altogether, stop driving, give up drinking beer with his buddies. His world was getting smaller and smaller.
He needed to live someplace close to the hospital when he started dialysis, so he came and stayed with Brad and me in our first apartment in the city, the one we moved into after we left the farm. He and I would sit up late at night, drinking tea and talking. I was horrified at how ill he was, but he was hopeful about the future. Until he was told that, with his heart condition, he was ineligible for a kidney transplant.
I won’t say he gave up after that, but things went downhill pretty quickly. They found gangrene on one of his toes and had to amputate. But that didn’t stop it. They took his leg below his knee. Then above. Then the other foot.
There is some debate, in our family, as to which was our worst Christmas ever, but I’d have to say it was the one after John had his second leg amputated just below his knee. He was living at Mom and Dad’s by then, and was too ill and in too much pain to come downstairs. I went up to sit with him in his room for a bit, and found him lying on a blanket on the floor, the only place he could stand to be, rocking and crying. I didn’t know what to do.
He was in and out of the hospital after that, then they finally admitted him. We all knew he wasn’t coming home again. But he hung on for another year, said he didn’t want his children to think that giving up was ever an option. But then he did. He decided to stop dialysis, which he knew would end his life. But I don’t think he knew how long it would take, or how awful it would be.
Ten days it took, altogether. The fluids built up in his body, and the toxins. We took turns sitting with him, day and night. They gave him something to ease his anxiety, and it did seem to calm him. But it made him hallucinate. One night while I was sitting with him, he said to me, perfectly matter-of-factly, “I know it’s not real, but when I look down at the floor, all I see is a big hole. I can see down into the room below us, as clearly as I can see you sitting there.” Which was a little disconcerting.
The last night, I was sitting with John when they brought his dinner tray in.
“Will you make my tea?” he asked, not opening his eyes. “Nobody makes it like you do.”
This was a kindness he did me when I came to visit. He knew how helpless I felt, how much I wanted to make things better for him. Making his tea was something I could do.
I opened the little metal pot of hot water, dropped the teabag in. When it was just right, I opened two little plastic containers of milk, emptied them into his cup, filled it with tea, stirred it.
“It’s too hot,” I said. I always said this, even though we both knew the tea was lukewarm at best.
“Better let it cool,” he murmured as he drifted back to sleep. I settled back into my chair, opened my book. But he wasn’t really asleep.
“Will you read to me?”
“Sure,” I said.
So I read to him from a biography of Virginia Woolf while he drifted in and out of consciousness. My brother Dave says that’s probably what killed him.
About a year after John died, I got a call from his heart specialist. I didn’t know it, but he
had a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which causes the heart muscle to thicken and impedes blood flow. This is what had been causing his congestive heart failure. The condition can be hereditary, so he wanted to screen all of John’s family members. Reluctantly I agreed to come in. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
I circled the hospital a couple of times before I parked the car. It was the first time I’d been back since John died, and I really didn’t want to go in. But I did, finally. When I reached the clinic, the receptionist looked at her book, frowning.
“Your appointment is next week at this time,” she told me.
“Well, I’m not coming back,” I said with more force than I intended. She could see I was serious. She went and talked to the technician, who agreed to give up her lunch hour to do my echocardiogram.
I had never seen my heart before, and there it was, flailing around in my chest like a wild thing. I always thought hearts just pumped quietly away, slow and steady. It was hard to imagine that my heart had been working that hard since the day I was born — since before I was born.
“Thank you, little heart,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
A couple of weeks after my echocardiogram, I received a letter saying I was fine, my heart was normal, but my mother, my sister Sandy, and my brother Dave all had signs of the condition. The family with the thick hearts, I imagined the doctor calling us.
Not thick enough, I wanted to tell him. Not thick enough.
June 4
Day 14
And then the wind just dies. By morning the waves have subsided — there’s still a ten-foot swell but with a long interval, so it’s very gentle, soothing, actually. Up, pause, then down. Up, pause, down. When I come off watch, I sleep for a solid six hours. Six hours! Then Chris goes down for a nap and I fiddle with the sails, trying to make the most of the very light winds.
I go forward to adjust one of the preventers — securely clipped to the jack lines because I’m alone on deck — then stand on the foredeck for a while, just enjoying the sunshine and the fresh breeze. I see a couple of shearwaters in the distance, gliding — okay, shearing — over the water. What are they doing way over there? I wonder idly. They usually follow the boat, waiting for scraps of fish to be thrown overboard. Obviously they can’t tell a sailboat from a fishing boat. Then I see a sleek back with a sickle-shaped fin curve slowly out of the water and disappear beneath the surface. A whale!
I’m not sure if I should wake Chris — the whale will be long gone by the time he gets out of bed. I decide to let him sleep, fish my guide to marine mammals out from behind the cockpit cushion. The whale is disappearing in the distance. I can just see it through the binoculars now. It arcs out of the water again. This time I see it blow. A small whale — a minke maybe? So we’re not alone out here.
“You missed a whale,” I tell Chris when he finally gets up. “I thought about waking you…”
“That’s okay. You made the right call. I really needed that sleep.”
We have a late breakfast — lunch, really — bacon and eggs, toast, coffee. Our first hot breakfast in a long time. Then I nap for a bit, then he does, stretched out on the cockpit bench with his head on my lap. I read my book, stroke his hair from time to time, keep a lookout for boats. The sails have filled now, and we’re sailing steadily over the sparkling sea.
Chris stirs in his sleep, wakes with a smile on his face.
“Want to hear my dream? You and I had a little cottage in the Azores, and we were running a little restaurant. I’d go fishing each morning and you would bake bread. Then at noon, we’d open our restaurant and sell fish sandwiches and wine made from grapes we grew ourselves on our little patch of land.
“In my dream, you were asking a couple of customers if they wanted wine with their lunch. ‘I’ll have a glass of Pinot Grigio,’ the woman said. ‘Chardonnay for me, please,’ said the man.
“You went to the kitchen and came back with a pitcher of wine.
“‘Pinot Grigio for you,’ you said, filling the woman’s glass.
“‘And Chardonnay for you.’”
We both laugh, then he drifts off to sleep again and I go back to lazily scaning the horizon for ships.
June 6
Day 16
Of course it doesn’t last. The wind has picked up again and shifted to the southwest. Now the waves have thousands of miles to build, and build they do. We are heading northeast, so we’re taking them on the stern, which is not very comfortable. The wind and the waves continue to build through the day, and by late afternoon, we’re wallowing along with two reefs in the main and just a little genoa out — and the stormsail too, in an attempt to keep the boat steady. But it doesn’t work. We continue to wallow sickeningly, except when two or three waves combine into one big one that sends us slewing from side to side.
This won’t do. Chris keeps trying to raise somebody, anybody on the SSB to get weather information, but no one responds. We alter course to the southeast so we’re taking the seas on the aft quarter rather than the stern. The waves are now pounding against the side of the boat. I’m not sure this is a big improvement.
We eat a cold supper, then Chris goes down for his pre-watch nap. I decide to make myself a cup of tea — a small enough comfort as darkness falls. I brace myself against the wall in the galley and put the kettle on — the stove is gimballed, so it stays more or less level as we pound along, and the kettle is clamped to the burner, just in case. While I wait for the water to boil, I get out a cup, pour some milk into it, put a teabag in. Carefully, carefully, waiting until we are between waves, I pour the water into the cup, but just then a big wave slams into us. I watch in despair as a line of milky tea runs down the front of the counter and across the floor. All I want is a cup of tea. Is that too much to ask?
I take my half-full cup of tea above deck and carefully, carefully reach for my iPod. One of the earplugs lands in my cup of tea. That can’t be good. I put it in my pocket to dry and stare gloomily at the rough, slate-grey sea, covered with whitecaps as far as the eye can see, except in the distance where it fades into the slate-grey sky.
Dialysis is a blunt instrument, we quickly discovered. Brad would feel weak but pretty good when he came off the machine. The next day would be okay, but as the fluids and toxins built up in his body, he’d feel worse and worse. I don’t know what it felt like. I’d look at him as we drove to the hospital. His face was pretty grim. I think he was relieved to get there.
We made the best of it, though. We got to be pretty good at card games, figured out how to lay out the cards on the arms of his dialysis chair. And when we got tired of that, we found ways to torment the nurses who in their own way were tormenting him. One time we tucked a rubber rat into his chart. I don’t think the nurse who found it ever forgave us.
After about a year, he asked me not to come up with him — he wanted to drive himself there.
“Get on with your life,” he said to me. “The best thing you could do for me would be to just get on with your life.”
He’d drive himself to the hospital after work, but couldn’t drive himself home, so around nine o’clock, I’d bike to the hospital, throw my bike in the trunk of the car, go up to the dialysis unit and collect him. I’d feel so guilty, walking into the room with cheeks red from the cold, my hair all windblown, so healthy.
I don’t know what he thought getting on with my life would look like. After he left for the hospital, I’d do the dishes, maybe take the dogs for a walk. Some nights I’d just lie on the couch in the dark and hug Emily. Chester would come up and lick my face. What’s wrong? I was afraid I was losing my husband. I was losing my husband.
It was two years before he had his transplant. During that time, he drifted further and further away from me, moved further and further inside himself. One day I came across a short poem, which I wrote out carefully in my journal.
Send me out into a
nother life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way
What if his life didn’t go all the way? He hardly had the energy to smile any more. My heart ached for him, but there was nothing I could do. I took care of the house and the dogs as best I could, drove him to the hospital in the middle of the night when necessary. We knew all the nurses in Emergency by the time he had his transplant.
He slept the whole way down to London. It was a beautiful fall day, sunny, cold, the last leaves still clinging to the trees. I kept glancing over at him as he slept. I was afraid. What if this didn’t work? We both knew this was his only chance. What if the transplant didn’t take? What if he died? I made myself think about it. I’d be fine, of course. I had a good job, the two dogs, our little house in town. My family would take care of me, get me through the really hard part.
But who would remember the time we hitchhiked home from school? I wasn’t allowed to hitchhike. I don’t know what my mother would have done if she’d found out. But it was easy. Brad just stood beside the highway and stuck out his thumb. The first car that came along was heading for New Hamburg. It dropped us on the highway outside town. The next car that picked us up took us to the Plattsville road. We walked from there. It was raining just a little, and leaves were showering down on us from the big maple trees along the road. My hair was damp, and kept blowing across my face. I’d never felt so free.
If anything happened to him, only I would remember eating meat-loaf sandwiches in the sawdust and concrete forms on our fifth wedding anniversary. The way he would stand in the barnyard shaking the grain pail, calling the sheep in from the pasture, here, girls, come on, girls, and they’d come running, follow him into the barn.