The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  In print, at least, Lisa fretted endlessly about Tim’s health and safety, while wasting little time on her own deteriorating condition. By early summer, though, she knew something was seriously wrong. With increasing frequency she suffered bouts of heartburn and gastroenteritis. While out in the barn, working her horses, she noticed a nagging soreness in her back and shoulder. There were more hospital visits and scans, one of which showed a significant tumor blossoming in her abdomen.

  July 25—I went to University Hospital for a check-up. They said I could get the tumor in my stomach radiated. I said I’d rather wait till winter. I told them to make sure and see “Seabiscuit” the movie! Tracy (the M.D.) said she is going this weekend!

  Over the course of the next month Lisa continued to weaken. There were more scans and tests, this time offering irrefutable evidence that the cancer was spreading, and that she had little choice but to engage the fight once again.

  August 20—It has been recommended for me to do the chemotherapy. The tumor in the left side of my abdomen is bigger, and there is a tumor near my rectum. The tumor in my lung is starting to affect my breathing. In general—I’m falling apart.

  * * *

  That entry was precipitated by a visit to an oncologist, during which Lisa was told that if she did not begin treatment, she likely would have only a few months to live. Even with treatment, the prognosis was not encouraging. She was accompanied to the office by her mother (Tim was on the road once again). Sitting in the doctor’s office, the two of them took in the words and held each other tightly, and began to cry.

  “She had fought so hard, and been through so much, but that was devastating news,” Carol Calley remembered. “She didn’t want to give up, but the treatment was so harsh, and it had taken so much out of her the last time. She couldn’t imagine going through it all over again.”

  Two days later Lisa received a phone call from Tim’s sister, Cheryl, who, after thirty years in California had become something of a devotee of wellness and alternative therapies. She invited Lisa to come out for a visit, get to know some of her in-laws, and try some holistic healing while she was there.

  “I believe I will,” Lisa wrote in her journal.

  “I don’t have any formal training, but I have a belief,” Cheryl said years later, reflecting on that invitation. “I think doctors are great for surgery and for many other things. But sometimes, after you reach a certain point, they become drug pushers. There are other ways to do things.”

  Lisa’s journal entries for August 23 through August 26 are lengthy and descriptive, filled with the excitement of a woman who is either still hopeful or tidying up loose ends. She rushes about, completing chores, working her horses, going shopping, sharing dinner with friends and family.

  On August 26, 2003, she penned her final entry:

  I leave for San Diego at 4:40 p.m. Have to be at airport one hour early.

  * * *

  Two weeks—that was the plan. Then she’d be home. But Lisa found that she enjoyed the company of her sister-in-law and her new, extended family, many of whom she had never met before, or had met only briefly. She liked the sunshine and the ocean breeze, and she embraced the alternative treatments that were offered to her: the wheat grass smoothies, colonics, and vitamin C drips. If she was desperate or depressed, well, she did a good job of hiding it, Cheryl thought. Lisa was enthusiastic about her treatment, and on the good days she seemed optimistic about the future.

  “The best thing about Lisa coming out here was that we all got to know her,” Cheryl said. “She had come out once before, for my daughter’s wedding, but that was short. This time we really got to be together, and it was wonderful. I mean, it was sad, too, of course. She had been through so much, and she didn’t want any more treatments. Had she been a bigger believer in what I was trying to do for her, and started earlier, she might have fared a little better; it’s hard to say. She came so late in the game—cancer, stage 4. Her stomach was distended, and she couldn’t eat a lot, and I’m making her juice drinks and whatever, but she just wanted to eat pizza. I think she was at a point where she just wanted to get away from all this stuff that had happened to her. So we would sit at the table and talk for hours on end, sometimes about her illness, but about a lot of other stuff, too. Lisa was a private person, and her parents are very private and quiet. They’re wonderful people. But cancer is a horrible, lonely, isolating disease, and sometimes you need to talk to someone about it. Maybe I was that person for Lisa. I don’t know. But I do know that I’m grateful for the time we had together.”

  That time was more extensive than anyone had anticipated. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. If Lisa wasn’t exactly thriving in her new environment, well, she wasn’t getting any worse, either. If she was happy in California, everyone figured, then let her stay there as long as she liked.

  In November, though, Lisa suffered a seizure that resulted in hospitalization. Doctors at Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, concerned over her seriously compromised condition, encouraged Lisa to be admitted for observation even after the seizure had passed. Carol and Tim flew out to California, unsure of what to do, or even what they might find when they arrived.

  “It was strange,” Tim remembered. “I thought she looked like the picture of health—smiling, happy.”

  “We knew she was very sick,” Carol said, “but when we first got there, she didn’t seem that bad. She was walking the halls of the hospital, eating, talking. A week later she was bedridden, couldn’t walk at all. She went downhill very quickly, and we knew we had to make arrangements to bring her home, but we weren’t sure how we were going to do that.”

  Tim was going to fly back first, thinking he would pick up their truck and drive straight back across the country. Then he would reverse course, with Lisa sleeping in the backseat. But that seemed neither prudent nor safe. In the end they enlisted the services of an agency that specialized in the transportation of seriously ill patients. Tim and Carol traveled on one flight, while Lisa traveled first class on another flight, accompanied by a private nurse.

  “We were so fortunate to find them,” Carol said. “I don’t know what we would have done otherwise. The trip was hard, and Lisa had a bad accident on the way back, but the nurse took care of everything. We were waiting for them at the airport when they arrived, and I remember the look on Lisa’s face as the nurse was pushing her in the wheelchair. She was smiling and waving, like she didn’t want anyone to worry about her.”

  At home in Camillus, New York, in the same house where she had spent much of her life, Lisa moved into a first-floor bedroom so that her parents and husband, with help from hospice, could care for her more easily. There was no more discussion of “treatment” or “therapy,” only quiet resolution and a determination to fill the days with as much normalcy as possible. Unable to walk, she’d sometimes ask to be wheeled outside, even in bad weather, so that she could be near her horses.

  By Thanksgiving Lisa was virtually bedridden, but she still wanted friends and family to come to the Calley home for a holiday meal. That day, while Carol was busily preparing dinner, the strangest thing happened.

  “A chicken hawk flew through the living room window,” she recalled. “Smashed right through the glass and landed on the floor in front of the TV. I don’t know how it happened, whether it was chasing a squirrel or something and lost its bearings, but it wound up right on our floor.”

  You see a hawk in flight and it’s an impressive thing, the way it swoops and glides, floating effortless on the current. But to see one out of context, spread out in your home, is something else entirely. The Calley family watched the hawk twitch for a moment, its great wings fluttering feebly against expiration, marveling at its size and strength, and at the utter weirdness of the whole thing.

  “I got Lisa out of bed so she could see it,” Tim said. “We couldn’t believe it. We were all speechless.”

  It occurred to Carol as they disposed of the carcass and cleaned up the glass tha
t there might be something more to the hawk’s demise than a mere aeronautical miscalculation. She had spent her whole life in Central New York, a region thick with Native American influence and folklore, and she couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that greater forces were at work. What was it she had read? Something about a hawk’s symbolic significance, that it was considered a spiritual messenger of some sort. And weren’t birds, in all types of mythology, sometimes seen as escorts for souls moving from one world to the next?

  “Probably just a coincidence,” Carol said. “But it was very strange.”

  The last month was the worst, as Lisa’s body deteriorated to a state of utter dependency. Heavy and frequent doses of morphine dulled the pain, but left her exhausted and confused. She stopped eating, declined a feeding tube, and withered to less than ninety pounds. Tumors in her spine impinged upon nerves and left her unable to walk or control her bodily functions.

  “It was such a strain to see my daughter like that,” Carol said. “Moaning at night, hurting so badly, unable to do anything for her. Thank God for the hospice people. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”

  Tim had spent much of the previous year running from the harsh reality of his wife’s condition, thinking perhaps that if he just kept moving, kept working, something would change. But now he slowed down. When people visited the house to speak with Lisa he would hide out in his room or go for a long, solitary drive. His grief and fear were his alone, and he felt no obligation to share them with anyone else. When the house was quiet, though, he would sit and talk with Lisa for hours on end, holding her hand, sharing stories of the horses they had bought and raised and sold. Once a day he would pick her up and carry her to the bathroom and gently slide her into the tub. Then he would wash her and dress her, and bring her back to her bed.

  “I used to worry so much about them,” Carol said. “Timmy was big and fat at the time, and he had a bad ankle, too. I thought he might drop her. But he needed to take care of her. And I know she wanted him to do it.”

  John Tebbutt saw a different side of Tim during that period; he saw a strength in his friend that he wasn’t sure existed.

  “When Lisa was dying, he did everything he could do,” Tebbutt observed. “Tim did every single thing possible for her. He stayed with her the whole time. Anything she needed, wherever she needed to go, he was always right there for her. No matter what the situation was. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but the truth is, not everyone is capable of it. It takes strength. It’s admirable.”

  One night in the middle of December, while Carol sat beside her daughter’s bed, exhausted and filled with sadness, Lisa looked at her mother and smiled.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “I’m still going to be here.”

  Carol reached out and stroked her daughter’s forehead.

  “Really,” Lisa added. “I’m coming back as a horse, and I’m going to lie down before you.”

  Carol didn’t say much of anything in response, didn’t give it much of a thought at the time.

  “I don’t know what that meant, really,” Carol said after recounting the story. “I mean, she was on a lot of medication, so I didn’t put too much stock into anything she was saying at the time. I think she was trying to comfort me. We were very close. We always went to the barn together, had a lot of fun together. Lisa wasn’t just my daughter—she was my best friend, and I think I was her best friend.”

  Carol paused, her voice breaking at the memory.

  “She was very devoted to me, more than I probably deserved. Even as a little kid … she always wanted to be around me. She thought a lot of me, and there are times when I wonder if I gave as much in return. I don’t know. I feel guilty sometimes, and I don’t even know why. But for her to tell me that—I’m coming back as a horse—it’s unusual, right? For the longest time I didn’t even think about it. I mean, those things don’t happen.”

  Tim, ever the pragmatist, was even less prone to flights of fantasy. People died and then they were gone. Life went on. That much he had learned.

  Yet there was something about Lisa that made him wonder whether it was just the meds talking, or her natural inclination to comfort those around her. What about that time at Beulah Park, when he and Lisa were standing in the paddock? She looked at the young apprentice getting a boot up into the saddle of one of their horses, and she swore to Tim that just for a moment she thought she saw something.

  “A halo,” Tim explained. “She said there was a halo above his head. I told her she was crazy. Figured it was just something to do with her seizures. But the next day, you know what happened? A horse stepped on the kid and killed him. Deader than shit. It was like she had a vision of some kind. Not like she predicted it or anything, but she saw … something.”

  Lisa Ann Calley died at home on December 24, 2003. Christmas Eve. She was thirty-seven years old. Five days later she was interred at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Lakeland, New York, just a few minutes’ drive from her home and her horses. Carol, thinking back to her daughter’s tomboyish ways, and how she fidgeted anxiously throughout her first communion ceremony because she was so agitated by the dress she had been compelled to wear, decided to bury Lisa in slacks and a hooded shirt.

  “I wanted her to be comfortable,” Carol said with a laugh. “And I knew she wouldn’t be comfortable in a dress.”

  Inscribed on the modest headstone at Lisa’s gravesite are the following words: “Weep not father and mother for me, for I am waiting in glory for thee.”

  In the upper left corner, etched into the gray stone, is the image of a long-haired young woman standing in front of a racehorse, her hands gently clasping its muzzle. The animal is serene; the woman smiling, happy, healthy.

  Chapter Eight

  Grief is amorphous. It flows into your life, takes as much space as it needs, as much as it damn well pleases, filling every nook and cranny of your heart and soul, and then recedes an inch at a time. It’s an illness of sorts, with no cure, no protocol for treatment, no assurance of a complete recovery. So who’s to say that there is a right or wrong way to cope with it? Some people get on with their lives, finding comfort and solace in the routine of work or the support of family. Others slide into bed and try to sleep away the pain.

  Tim Snyder hit the road, trying, as he had so many times in the past, to outrun the hurt.

  It happened only a week or so after Lisa had died, a week in which Tim had stumbled quietly through the days, hardly talking to anyone, leaving the house for hours on end, returning late at night without explaining where he had been or what he was doing. Carol had known Tim long enough by now to understand the way he was, a hyperactive chatterbox who could weave a story across the space of an entire night when the mood struck him, but a man unlikely to share with anyone the enormity of a loss such as this. He would endure quietly, in solitude, comforting himself with time around the backstretch, the only place where he felt truly comfortable, and where nothing seemed to change. In time, she figured, he’d come around.

  “I was in my own little world, too,” Carol recalled of those first few days after Lisa’s death. “And I guess I didn’t realize how hard Timmy was taking it. He seemed okay. Then one morning I woke up, and he was just … gone. No good-byes, no explanation, nothing. He just disappeared. That made me mad.”

  Imagine losing a daughter to cancer, and then losing the son-in-law you had welcomed into your home; the son-in-law you had embraced and supported and loved despite all his baggage and eccentricities. The Calley family had accepted Tim for who and what he was, without judging him or trying to remake him. It was reasonable, of course, to think that things might change now; that Tim would eventually move out of the house and begin to rebuild his life. That would only be normal. But surely they would play some role in the reconstruction. They were family now, bound perhaps not by blood, but by something equally profound.

  How could he trample all over that? How could he just … leave?

  Ne
arly a decade later, Tim squirmed uncomfortably at the memory, and struggled to put into words the rationale for his sudden departure.

  “I couldn’t bear it,” he said. “The thought of being here, in this house, without Lisa. I just couldn’t do it. Every time I looked up I’d see the pictures on the wall. Her face was everywhere. Then I’d close my eyes and think about the last time I saw her, when they were putting her on a gurney and wheeling out of the house. I could see the hearse right outside the window, sitting in the driveway, getting ready to take her away. Long as I was here, living in this house, there was no escaping it. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I had to get away.”

  Carol and Frank didn’t see it that way; neither did Tim’s closest friend. Unlike the Calleys, though, John Tebbutt had seen this act before from Tim, the inability to cope with circumstances beyond his control, and the subsequent panic-stricken urge to flee. He understood Tim’s weakness in these matters and the upbringing that had made him this way. So he wasn’t completely shocked to hear that Tim was gone. But he also sympathized with the Calleys, who had now suffered a second loss. If the first one ripped their hearts out, this one pissed them off.

  “They had great affection for him,” Tebbutt said, “and they were upset when he left. It’s like losing another kid, in a way. It was wrong of him to do that, but this all gets back to Timmy’s basic personality—his rudeness and isolation. That’s the way he deals with things. It’s a coping mechanism, and not a very good one, at times. He didn’t do well for a while after Lisa died. Quite a while, actually. I didn’t even know he was gone, at first. I didn’t hear from him for the longest time. Then, after a few months, I got a call. And then more calls, every night for a week or more. Then they’d stop and I wouldn’t hear anything for a few more months. And then he’d start calling again. I never knew what to expect—his mood would vary depending on the time of the day or night that he called, and how much drugs and alcohol he had in him.”