by Kris Jacen
Jimmy had wings? Jimmy was free?
“‘Kay,” Connor nodded. “Mom, remember when I used to climb trees?”
“Yeah, honey. You loved them. You would go up and hide—your father and I could never find you. One night, right after your father died, you disappeared for hours—we called the police, the whole neighborhood was out there looking for you, and you know where you were?”
“In a tree,” Connor managed. The words were harder to say. Jimmy was free? Their love had made Jimmy free?
“Yeah.” There was something hot on the back of his hand, and Celia was holding it next to her face. “You were in a tree. You were huddling in there, shaking, and when we found you, you said you were reaching for Daddy in heaven, but he told you to stay behind.”
Connor laughed, his brain looping. “Jimmy and Connor, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
The bed moved, the world swam, and Jimmy was on Connor’s other side. His face was a blur of light against the pending darkness, and his lips were soft on Connor’s cracked, chapped lips. “Best tree I ever perched in,” Jimmy said. “Maybe your mom and I can hang here for a while, and you can go reach for heaven now, okay?”
Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you… He thought it. He thought it and tried to move his lips, but instead…
The little boy’s lips curved into a smile, and Connor was that little boy with the missing teeth and the apple cheeks and the crooked grin. He waved madly at the white faces, lit by the sun with the darkness at his back, and then turned toward the dark tree, the shadows of the other boys flickering in shade-on-shade as they climbed. His bare feet padded briskly in the dust, and the grass prickled his soles for a minute. He had to chicken-foot it to the rough bark of the trunk.
Trees always felt so good under his hands, so real. This one was no different. His knees scraped on the bark and his palms chafed up, became raw, and still he climbed. The others were in the top of the tree, and he wanted to catch up with them.
He got to the top, a magic branch holding him up as he stood to his waist in prickly, dusty-green leaves, and found he was alone. Those other bodies, the isolated, childish voices had faded, and it was him, reaching for the endless velvet of a sky just before the last of the light faded.
A star appeared, and another, and another, and then, just as the final gold ray was cut off at the curve of the horizon, a meteor streaked through the heavens, brilliant, burning silver, gold, and red, so close he thought he could catch it.
He extended his hand, higher, higher, here it comes, Jimmy, Jimmy, look—I’ll grab that star and go flying! You want to come flying with me? But Jimmy was a pale face on the ground, in the evening shadows, only his grief making him brilliant against the black.
Jimmy would follow, he thought confidently. Jimmy loved trees as much as he did.
Connor extended his hand just a little more, his fingers taut and trembling as the star flew into it. He shrieked and gasped and clutched it tight and swung his other arm high above his head. It was so easy, the exertion was a joy, and he clenched the star in both his hands, and it burned, cold, so coldly bright, that he almost let go, but couldn’t.
His feet lifted off of the magic branch, and he was lifted, lifted by that struggling star, and the cold began to burn through his limbs, through his lungs, and he laughed, because it tingled, and oh, God! He felt so alive as that star began to zoom, resuming its hectic course across the night sky.
The wind flowed around his skin, balmy and sweet. His lungs pulled in great gasps of laughter as the world disappeared in darkness behind him, and the gold glowing from the star in his hands opened up before his eyes.
“Bye, Jimmy! You can catch the next star!”
It was supposed to be a celebration of Connor’s life—at least that’s what Connor had insisted upon when he’d written out that fucking will.
“I want a party,” Connor had insisted. “I want people so roaring drunk, they take pictures of each other to prove that they were really that shit-faced. I want the music cranked up so loud, the neighbors complain, okay?”
Most of the neighbors were in the backyard, getting roaring drunk with Connor’s coworkers, and his sister, and their other friends. The laughter was too loud, the music was too loud, and everyone was doing their damnedest to do Connor proud.
Everyone except Jimmy, who was in their room, holding Connor’s old pillow to his face, and trying to smell that last redwood, working-man, dusty computer-geek scent molecule, to prove to himself that no, in spite of the year of warning and Connor’s disgustingly healthy, “live-life-to-the-fullest” attitude, Connor wasn’t really gone.
The door opened, and Jimmy didn’t need to look up to know that it was Celia. The bed depressed next to him, and an arm that was all mother looped around his shoulder. He sank into her like he’d never been able to sink into his real mother, who didn’t like children, or hugging, or commitment, and she laid her head on his shoulder, tears soaking through his “R.I.P., Connor” shirt, the one Connor had made when they’d first drafted the will.
They had taken care of each other, this last week, and when she had made noises about going back to her small apartment in the next city, Jimmy had mumbled, “Please don’t. Please don’t leave me,” and the next thing he knew, she’d canceled the lease and was staying in the guest bedroom, indefinitely.
Jimmy, flighty Jimmy, who would drop on a dime and fuck on a whim, thought he would give up sex forever, just to keep Connor’s mom there, being his mom too. Maybe that would change. Maybe someday, she would get another apartment, and he would move Connor’s shit out of the garage, but not now. Not now.
“The thing is,” he said out of the blue, his voice unapologetically clogged, “the thing is, he was no fun at parties whatsoever, you know?”
“No, I didn’t,” Celia said, using his shoulder to wipe her eyes. “Tell me.”
“See, we met at a party, and he was just hanging out in a corner, passing the joint, passing the beer—but never taking any of it. And I was pretty buzzed, and I thought, What is this total geek doing here? And I went over to ask him, right? And he started pointing out people—this one kept checking her hair, and she was hitting on a guy that he’d slept with a month ago, and he was wondering when she was going to figure out that the signals didn’t fly. This other one had just had a break-up, and he was drinking to forget. It was all about why people were there—he liked their stories, liked watching them play out. He really liked chatting with the drunk people as the party wound down.”
Jimmy’s mouth twitched. Connor hadn’t made it to the end of that party. Jimmy had gotten close enough to see those eyes—not remarkably colored, but kind, and crinkly at the corners, and Jimmy had hauled him to a back room for a one-off that had lasted six years.
Jimmy hadn’t wanted to commit at first, because he was sure he’d break Connor’s heart. He still felt a little angry that Connor had been the first one to leave.
“Mmm…” Celia murmured, and Jimmy liked the way she really thought about what he was saying. Connor hadn’t sprung from thin air—Jimmy had realized that this last year. “Why do you think he wanted a party for his funeral?”
“Don’t know,” Jimmy lied. “Don’t fucking care, either!” Sobs broke in his chest, and he was vaguely surprised. He’d held onto them for the last week—he’d been a grown up. He’d made all the arrangements, used Connor’s compulsively made checklists, just generally kept it all together, but not now.
Now, Celia held him as he sobbed into her lap, muttering, “I fucking hate him, Mom—how could he fucking leave us like this!”
Celia weathered his storm. The sleeve of his shirt and the back of it were sodden by the time he was done, but she stayed solid and true, just like her son, as Jimmy said horrible, horrible things about the man they’d both loved.
She ignored them, and Jimmy remembered hearing her voice, shrill as it had never been shrill, as Connor broke the news that the cancer had spread, and the chemo was
n’t working, and it was time to plan the endgame.
You’re just going to fucking give up on me? ME? Don’t you have any goddamned respect, son? You’re not supposed to leave before I do. Oh, God…Connor…don’t leave me…
As Jimmy lay, finally still and quiescent, in Celia’s lap, he thought that maybe Celia had done this part already.
After some moments, heavy in the darkened room, Celia’s voice came as a welcome surprise, and was not shrill at all.
“Do you remember what he said?” she asked, and it was a rhetorical question. How did you not remember your dying lover’s last words?
“He said, ‘Bye Jimmy. You can catch the next star.’”
Celia nodded. “C’mon, sweetheart. It’s broad daylight outside—there’s not a star in sight. You can go star-catching later, okay?”
Jimmy pulled in a breath and shuddered it out, and stood and offered Celia an arm. She took his arm, and leaned her wet cheek on his sleeve (the other sleeve, so now he had a matched set), and they moved toward the brightened hallway. It was the full sunshine of late October outside, without even a hint of rain. God, Jimmy wanted a rain to fall, something that would wash away the grief and the lead roots that seemed to bind his heart to the ground.
Not yet, he thought, hearing the pained chatter from the backyard. Not yet.
The party was winding down, and it was time to listen. People would speak wisely now, and be truthful, and memories of Connor would be thick and real, and his presence would be as palpable as the fluid light from the autumn sun.
Winter was coming. Stark branches, stark thought, bleak hearts, and the terrible void of Connor.
Maybe when spring returned, and the trees grew thick with leaves, Jimmy could perch in the nest he’d made with his mate, and think once again of flying.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
It’s all just noise...
Tuesday, the 30th of November, finds me on the outside of four ICE therapy treatments, with the results of the latest comparative CT scan in hand, and in so much physical pain I want to scream.
The good with the bad, as per usual.
Doc admitted me to the hospital on November 15th, and warned me he would be there over the weekend, but would begone the following week. I was hit with the usual sense of dread knowing I would have to contend with the weekend warriors. Doc knew it too, because the next words out of his mouth were to offer a choice of warriors to check up on me that week. I chose one over the other, knowing Dr.P had at least a minor propensity to *pretend* to listen to me, and that was fine, except HE was on vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday, leaving me with the worst choice of all.
Naturally, she came in, wholly inundated by her own sense of godlike powers and started delivering ultimatums.
“I want to stop the blue.”
“Why?”
“Because based on your blood tests, I think you are becoming hemolytic.” (A fancy word to say that my blood was being destroyed.)
“Okay... How many doses of blue have I had so far?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You can get that information from your nurse.”
I told her I wanted more than just her “I think.” to go on, and got back some noise about how she didn’t have to prescribe it (“Sit down and shut up,” in other words.) and no, she couldn’t let me go home. (I didn’t even have a chance to ask.) Not with the condition I was in.
Fair enough, and even justifiable, but she would have saved us both a LOT of grief if she had simply treated me like a thinking individual and told me there had already been FORTY-SEVEN doses of blue (as compared to the twenty-six we stopped at during the third treatment.) That would have been enough “concrete data” to convince me right there, but no, we don’t talk to patients like they have a brain. Not when we firmly believe that ‘doctor is god’.
The conversation ended with me telling her it was all but impossible to keep control of my mouth and thoughts and to get out before I lost it altogether and really started yelling.
Turns out she was right enough, or at least as much as I could tell from the specious data I could glean from her. Her solution however was to pump me full of the antibiotics that Doc took me off of once he could not find a reason for the transient fever spike. Spikes I have had off and on and she would have KNOWN, if she had bothered to read my back chart or even listen to me when I told her so.
The end result of that was retaining so much fluid in my legs that they began to split and weep, but by that time she was out of the picture and I was back to working with my first choice, who after a few arguments did finally decide to cut back on the IV delivered medications. (There is still significant swelling even now as I sit here at home typing this, and as I mentioned, the pain is excruciating.)
He also ordered the CT scan that Doc talked about before he left. The one that would be a comparison to the baseline scan prior to starting the ICE therapy. Pretty standard procedure, and that was completed on the Sunday afternoon prior to Doc’s return on Monday.
Too bad I made the mistake of asking a certain nurse for a print-out of the result. She chose to fall back on the safety of policy and not give it to me, despite my having demonstrated repeatedly that I was well able to handle any unknowns it might present. The end result of that is she significantly precluded the time I would have had discussing the results with Doc when he made his rounds, and all in favor of giving me grief because she doesn’t care for me all that much.
Too bad, Jessica. Your petty bullshit still cannot negate the essential news of that scan, which Doc “interpeted” in formal language for me so I could include it here:
“All the lymph nodes have returned to normal size (less than 1.5cm). The liver and spleen are back to normal. Basically, no evidence of lymphoma seen anymore. Of course we still know that there are viable lymphoma cells SOMEWHERE in there, but using this CT alone you could not identify where. This would be called a complete remission (CR) and is truly the best results one can obtain.”
In the grand scheme of things, when all is said and done, I am only one insignificant blot in an otherwise huge, encompassing design, and anything I might say or have to say in the future is all just noise, but with this last scan and the result it proffers, however long that result will last, all that noise is still music to my ears.
My deepest, heartfelt thanks to all of you who have stood by, held me up, let me fall softly and picked me up again throughout all of this bizarre roller coaster ride. Without you, I am certain I would have lost the few marbles I still possess and become as arbitrary and recalcitrant as anyone else might have in my position. Without you, I would have ceased to be me.
With the sounds of a new future playing music in my ears, I bid you all a fond farewell, hope we might still keep in touch as that future unfolds, and look forward to a time when I can someday meet you all face to face and give you the hugs and love you so richly deserve.
Until then, take care, and beware the weekend warriors!!
Patric
Afterword
Elizabeth North
In the early summer of 2010, I was sitting on my front porch swing, swapping tales with Patric about the antics my sons get up to with virtually unlimited acreage, a golf cart, power tools, and sometimes more imagination than sense. Patric was filling in with his own adventures from childhood, including homemade fireworks and police stations, and I can say with complete certainty that it is a good thing that Patric and my sons live on opposite sides of the continent. The world would not be safe if you combined Patric's ideas and sense of humor with my sons' youth, determination, and lack of fear. Having said that, it is my fondest wish that someday soon my sons will have a chance to meet Patric because Patric Michael is one of those rare individuals who touches your life, no matter how briefly, and you walk away a better person for the experience.
During that conversation, Patric said to me that people were starting to ask him how he wanted to be remembered after he was gone. He wasn't sure how to answer them.
He had definite ideas about what he didn't want, but only the seed of an idea for what he did want. That seed grew into this book.
At that time, several authors had already written stories for and about Patric, and he felt that all of them combined were a good representation of the many facets that make Patric unique. He felt that if you combined the stories with his experiences as set forth in his blog, it would create a book that was both an accurate reflection of who he was and a record of the highs and lows of fighting cancer. His wish was that others fighting cancer and their families might find help, comfort and understanding through his shared experiences. He wanted to offer what we all long for—a chance to connect with someone else with similar views, feelings and experiences and to be really understood. He hoped with words to achieve that moment of “here is someone like me, someone who has felt the way I do.”
As we were putting the final touches on this volume, I was talking with Patric. I asked him how he felt reading the draft now that it was in actual book form. His first comment was, "I wish I'd done a better job editing my blog entries before I posted them." The customary tension relieving joke was followed by, "I'm too close to it." Those words tell me that we succeeded. Not in being able to capture everything that makes Patric special—that would be impossible—but in coming as close to Patric as we possibly can and sharing that irrepressible man with you.
January 2011