Gone

by Cronk, LN

  “Come here,” I said softly. She walked over to me, took my hand and let me pull her down next to me.

  Taking my jacket off, I put it over her shoulders and then wrapped an arm around her. She leaned her head against me.

  “Please don’t make somebody else your power-of-attorney,” she whispered against my neck. “Don’t do that to me.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “You can do whatever you want. I guess I won’t know the difference anyway.”

  “I . . . I’ll go along with all the other things we talked about,” she promised, sitting back and looking at me, “but I don’t want to put you into a nursing home.”

  “Will you at least get somebody in to help you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone to stay with me so you can go out and stuff? Somebody who can handle me if it gets to where I can’t walk or whatever?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” she said. “That might be all right, I guess.”

  “You should have plenty of money to pay for somebody,” I told her, “especially with that insurance we have . . .”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll get some help as soon as I think I need it.”

  “No,” I said. “I know you. I want you to get some help before you think you need it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  THE NEXT MORNING, Mike suggested that we take a walk. He waited until we were about two blocks from the house before he told me what was on his mind.

  “We need to talk about Laci,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This is going to be the hardest on her,” he said hesitantly.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  He shut up and we trudged along.

  “Sorry,” I finally said.

  “It’s okay,” he assured me.

  “I’m just really worried about her.”

  “I know you are,” he nodded, “but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. There are some things you’re going to be able to do that can make this easier on her.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like if you would stop driving.”

  “Stop driving?!”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “I think that if you would voluntarily give up–”

  “I drive just fine!”

  “I . . . I know,” he said, “but under the circumstances, it really isn’t a good idea.”

  “I haven’t had one problem!” I cried. “Not one accident, no tickets, nothing!”

  “So you’re going to wait until you do have a problem before you quit driving?” he asked. “Gonna wait until you kill somebody?”

  “I’m not gonna kill anybody!” I insisted.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever seen people go through. When somebody insists on continuing to drive and then the husband or a wife or a child has to either worry constantly or go through the process of forcing someone to give up their license . . .”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know, last night you were telling her to stick you in a nursing home because you want to make things easy on her . . . well, if you really want to make things easy on her you’ll give up driving before she has to make you give up driving.”

  “I drive just fine,” I said again, quietly, but then I added, “but I’ll think about it.”

  “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about . . .”

  “What?”

  “I think anybody in your circumstance,” he said carefully, “is going to wonder at some point if it wouldn’t be better if they were already dead. One day you might think that maybe the best thing for you to do would be to just end it all . . . to let Laci get on with her life.”

  I stopped walking and looked at him. A small number of patients report experiencing thoughts of suicide . . . if you develop suicidal thoughts, contact your physician immediately . . .

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  He looked back at me for a long moment.

  “I can see how you might think that you’d be doing her a big favor or something,” he finally said, shaking his head, “but . . . well, if you were to do something like that then you might as well just kill Laci too.”

  “And here I thought you were going to offer to help.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Absolutely not.”

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “I’m so worried about her,” I finally said, my voice a strangled whisper.

  “I know you are,” he acknowledged, putting a hand on my shoulder. “And I know it’s gonna be hard for her to take care of you and for her to watch you go through this and everything, but she’s got a lot of people who are willing to support her and she will get through this . . . she will be alright.”

  I shook my head and looked away.

  “She will be, David,” he assured me. “Unless you do something stupid like kill yourself.” He paused before he finished his thought. “If you do that?” he finally said, “well, I can promise you that she’ll never get over it.”

  It was time to leave. We were all in the foyer and our bags were in the trunk of the car.

  “Listen,” Mike said. “Can we . . .”

  He hesitated.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Danica and I would like to pray for you.”

  I didn’t say anything, but Laci nodded and started crying again so we went into the living room and they put their hands on both of us and I closed my eyes – I honestly don’t know if I’d ever felt so uncomfortable before in my entire life.

  But then they prayed for me . . . and they prayed for Laci. And after that I felt better.

  By the time they were finished I felt peace (which I guess made sense, since that’s mostly what they had been praying for). I opened my eyes and looked at Laci. She still had tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying anymore and I could tell that she felt it too.

  “That medicine’s gonna help,” Mike told us in the driveway. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  I nodded at him, we all hugged each other goodbye and Laci and I promised to call them if we needed anything.

  Then I handed Laci the keys and told her she could drive

  ~ ~ ~

  IT WAS A four hour trip back to Cavendish and we stopped and ate lunch along the way, so by the time we got to my sister Jessica’s house, it was almost five o’clock.

  Jessica knew we were back in the States. She knew I was having some tests done at the Mayo Clinic. She didn’t know any specifics.

  When we arrived, she was home alone – her husband, Chris, was still at work. She hugged us as we stepped into the living room, invited us to sit down, and didn’t ask us any questions.

  “Can I get you guys anything?” she asked. Laci and I both shook our heads. I could tell that Jess was dying to know what was going on, but she kept quiet.

  “How’s Dad doing?” I asked.

  “About the same.”

  The same. That meant recognizing me and Jessica only about half the time, Laci rarely, and the grandkids and great-grandkids, never.

  I continued with the small talk, asking her about my nephew, CJ, my niece, Cassidy, and their families.

  Great.

  Everybody was just great.

  “Any activity on the house?” I finally asked. (After it had become apparent that Dad wasn’t going to even come close to a full recovery from his stroke, Jess and I had made the difficult decision to move him into a nursing home – excuse me . . . long-term care facility. We’d put his house on the market, but it wasn’t in the greatest shape in the world and the real estate market was in a slump. It had been on the market for eight months already with no offers yet.)

  “No,” Jessica said, shaking our head, “but we’re hoping that it’ll start showing more this spring.”

  “Is it okay if we stay there for a few days?” I asked.

  “Of course it is – or you can stay here
if you want. Whatever works best for you guys.”

  I glanced at Laci.

  “I . . . I think we’ll probably stay there,” I said finally, and Laci nodded. We needed time alone . . . to think, to decide what we were going to do.

  “Okay,” Jess answered. Nobody said anything for a moment and Jessica looked at me expectantly. I finally decided I’d better just tell her and get it over with.

  And so, I did.

  ~ ~ ~

  TELLING JESS WAS just the beginning. After we got to my dad’s house we started calling the kids and telling them – one by one.

  It was . . . awful.

  Really, really awful.

  The first phone call we made was to Dorito since he was already waiting to find out what was going on anyway. He had spent even more time than I had online, figuring out what we might be facing, so he had a good idea exactly what a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s meant and he was pretty upset.

  Then we called the four girls – all of whom were doubly distressed – not only because of the diagnosis, but because they were hit with the news completely out of the blue. Apparently neither Laci nor Dorito had hinted to any of them what was going on.

  We saved Marco for last since he was in Australia, where it was fairly early in the morning. There was quite a long bit of silence when I broke it to him.

  “I’m going to come home,” he finally said.

  “For what?”

  “To be with you!” he exclaimed. “To help you!”

  “Help me what?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Marco,” I insisted, “everything’s fine right now. There’s no need for you to come home.”

  “I want to come home,” he said, quietly.

  “Well, I don’t want you to come home,” I persisted. “You’ve worked way too hard to get where you are.”

  Marco was in the graduate program in Melbourne’s School of Engineering.

  Out of all of our kids, only Marco had followed me into engineering. Actually, however, he was becoming such a completely different type of engineer from what I was that I wasn’t really sure if it even counted as “following me” or not.

  Marco was studying to be a neuroprosthetic engineer – someone who designed and developed neural prostheses. Essentially, he wanted to make robotic devices that were actually hooked up to the nervous and muscular systems to replace missing or damaged body parts. Think about an amputee who has lost a foot. A neural prosthetic would replace the missing foot and actually respond just like a real foot would – the user wouldn’t even need to think about what he or she was doing in order to walk naturally because the artificial limb would be sending and receiving signals just like a real foot would.

  At first Marco had been fascinated with improving and refining the input coming in to the brain from prosthetic limbs (in other words, if you were touching something hot you would know you were touching something hot because you could actually feel it). But one class that he was required to take explored the field of optical prosthetics and after that he had been completely hooked. (“It’s just like what Lily’s got,” he’d explained when he’d told us about it, “except that it’s for your eyes.”)

  Our daughter, Lily, had been born completely deaf, but when she’d been little she’d gotten cochlear implants. Now, basically, Marco wanted to help blind people see as well as Lily could hear.

  “I thought you were going to work on artificial hands,” Grace had reminded him scornfully when he’d shared his change in plans with us. (His older sister by only a few months, Grace made it her personal mission in life to try and provoke Marco whenever she could.)

  “Naw,” he had said, waving his own hand at her. “Hands are overrated.”

  Now he was forever regaling us with talk of vitreous, phosphenes and photo diodes. And so (even though technically Marco was going into the engineering like I had), it was a whole lot easier for me to have a work-related conversation with Dorito, who had become an architect. When Marco talked about his future profession, he tended to leave the rest of us in the dust.

  Marco had gotten his bachelor’s degree from Princeton and had flown overseas only six months earlier once he’d gotten into the University of Melbourne. And now he was talking about coming home and throwing it all away?

  “I want to come home,” he said again, and I could tell that he was trying very hard not to cry.

  “Marco,” I insisted, “listen to me. You’re coming home for the wedding in just a few months.” (Grace was getting married during the summer.) “See how things are then, okay? If you get here and you decide you want to stay home then you can, but please finish out the semester. Please promise me that you won’t let this stop you.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Marco?”

  Still no answer.

  “Marco?”

  “What?” he finally asked.

  “What you’re doing makes me so proud,” I said quietly. “Don’t quit now, just because of this.”

  With that I heard him start to cry in earnest and I looked up at Laci and shook my head.

  “Here,” she said quietly, reaching for the phone. “Let me talk to him.”

  I handed her the phone and walked into the kitchen as Laci quietly tried to reassure him. I peered out into the dark back yard and then went out onto the deck, into the cold, night air.

  Why?

  Why, why, why, why, WHY?

  I usually tried very hard not to ask that question – I really did – but I couldn’t help myself right now. How could God not see what a huge mistake this was?

  I propped my elbows on the deck rail and rested my face in my hands. I was still standing there like that a few minutes later when I heard the door open and Laci joined me. She put her hand on my back.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, not lifting my head.

  “He will be,” she said quietly. She moved closer and wrapped an arm around me. I didn’t move much except to press myself against her. We stood there like that, together, for a long time.

  “I can’t do this anymore tonight,” I finally said, raising my head to look at her and she nodded understandingly. Next we had planned on calling Tanner and Charlotte and Mrs. White and Laci’s dad, but I just couldn’t take anymore right now.

  “We’ll do it tomorrow,” Laci agreed quietly and I nodded.

  We went back into the house and turned on the television, not really paying attention to what was on. We ordered a pizza even though neither of us was particularly hungry and we only picked at it when it arrived.

  After receiving my diagnosis, the previous night had been a restless one for both of us and today the phone calls to the kids had left us completely drained. We wound up going to bed before nine o’clock and it seemed as though my head had barely hit the pillow before I was in a sound and dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, when I woke up, it was light outside. I checked my watch and saw that it was seven o’clock. Turning my head quietly – in case she was still asleep – I looked toward Laci.

  She was wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

  She glanced over at me.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  “Did you sleep?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I moved all night,” I answered. “Did you get any sleep?”

  “I think so,” she nodded.

  “I’m going to call all the kids again today,” I told her. “I think now that they’ve had a chance to let it sink in it might be good if I could just talk to them a little bit and let them know that I’m doing okay . . .”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Laci said, turning toward me.

  After a moment, Laci got out of bed and pulled a pair of jeans on under her nightgown.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going to the grocery store,” she said, digging through her suitcase for a clean sweatshirt. “We don’t have anything for breakfast.”

  She headed into t
he bathroom, carrying the sweatshirt with her.

  I lay back in bed and was staring up at the ceiling – thinking about all the phone calls we’d made – when I suddenly remembered the afternoon that my father had called to tell me that my mother was gone.

  They had been planning for their retirement for years. Shortly after I’d graduated from college, Mom and Dad had bought nineteen acres out in the country – about twelve miles from the city limits of Cavendish. Dad bought a four wheeler and they’d had a pond dug. They went out there almost every weekend and fished and hunted and played.

  When she was two years away from early retirement, Mom started working with an architect to design their “dream home”. Dad contracted all the work out himself, supervising everything personally. They’d had the yard graded, but not landscaped because that was something they decided they wanted to do themselves after they moved in. Likewise, they’d had hardwoods put down in most of the rooms, but had left the floor in the kitchen unfinished (and the countertops, too) because Dad wanted to try his hand at tiling. Mom enjoyed painting, so they’d only had the walls primed, deciding they would pick their colors after they’d been in the house for a while.

  Once everything was as complete as they’d planned to get it, they’d moved in. That was in April – the spring before my mom retired. The next month during graduation (at the high school where she had taught for over thirty years) they had honored my mother by letting her hand out all the diplomas to the graduating seniors.

  By the middle of June, my mom had painted one of the guest bedrooms (she had gone with a mossy-green color) and had started papering the kitchen. Deciding to tackle the front yard, she’d ordered a truckload of fieldstone so that she could build some flower beds on either side of the front steps.

  Dad hadn’t planned on retiring until the end of the year, so he was at work the morning the stones were supposed to be delivered. When the truck arrived, the workers found Mom slumped in a chair on the front porch and by the time Dad got to the hospital, she was gone . . . the victim of a pulmonary embolism.