by Jason Good
I look back at my screen and see that the mail icon has turned blue.
From: Michael Good
Dear Jason,
I want you to know that I have no fear of death, none at all. I have very little concern with what is in store for myself. My first concern is with Jody, the absolute love of my life. I deeply regret the burden this news will place on my family.
I’m not gone yet, but you need to know, that with this current major exception, I would not change a thing about my last 68 years. Those years have been exciting, adventurous, challenging and rewarding. They are so far beyond the dreams I ever had for myself, that I consider myself beyond fortunate.
But most of all, you, Lindsay, Silas and Arlo make every other adventure and reward trivial by comparison to the happiness you bring me.
I love you all so much.
Dad
Sent from my iPad
So eloquent and concise, nothing unnecessary, nothing left out. When did he write this? I immediately consider drafting one myself for such an occasion, but decide it would be premature and in poor taste.
I yell down to Lindsay, “So, the first flight I can get is tomorrow morning at ten.”
“Doesn’t he want to see the boys?” she yells back.
“Good question. I’ll ask him.”
Jason
Should we all come?
Dad
Yes, that would be great, thanks. We know it’s just so difficult for you guys to all fly out here.
Maybe Lindsay and I had complained too much about flying six hours from New Jersey to California with kids in tow. Of course we would all come. How bad do things have to get before Dad starts telling me what he wants?
I remember him and his siblings mocking their mother’s passive-aggressive martyrdom. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll just be over here dying,” they’d joke. And now that he is doing the same thing, I wish I had brothers and sisters of my own. I imagine that in a few days we’d be sitting around a picnic table mimicking him: “I’m so sorry about this horrible thing I can’t control that’s making you all so completely miserable.” We’d laugh, clink our bottles, and then stare off at people playing Frisbee nearby, squirming with guilt over having fun at his expense. I know that’s trite, but as an only child I’m particularly vulnerable to advertising’s mawkish portrayal of siblinghood.
This is my fault, though. I should have known Dad would want to see his grandsons. They’re his Charlie Buckets, and he’s their Grandpa Joe. “BooBoo,” as Silas and Arlo call him, thinks kids should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want: “They’ve got a lifetime of stupid rules ahead of them.” The boys eat pasta with their hands while sitting on his lap; play drums on his belly. He teaches them piano, and laughs when they sit on the keys. Not wanting to miss a single moment during visits, he tells them, “Now, when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you should do is come to our room and wake us up.” I guess Dad trusts Lindsay and me to cover all the boring important stuff, like how to pet a cat softly.
On the flight to San Francisco, I’m still raw as hell. Is there a protocol for weeping on an airplane? Might this be an appropriate time to use my call button? Does the crew have a grieving curtain they can give me? There’s an airsick bag for the physically ill. Shouldn’t the emotionally ill have a similar option? A privacy mask? No. Crying with a mask on would terrify the other passengers.
My only option is the lavatory. Forced to choose between the mirror or the beige plastic wall, I go with the more self-indulgent option.
Oh, look how sad I am. This feels good. A damn ugly cry. Between each wave, I fix my hair, wash my hands, brush flecks of dandruff from my shoulder. Finally, some me time. Other passengers are waiting, but my condition takes precedence over their pedestrian bowel needs.
In my seat, I’m distracted enough to hold it together for an hour at a time. The boys only know that BooBoo is “sick sick.” I’m not sure what that means to them exactly, but they aren’t crying, so I guess we did the right thing. Maybe death isn’t an existential shit storm for kids. Silas watches TV and plows through multiple pouches of Delta Sky cookies and aside from complaining about the fit of his earphones every five minutes, he does quite well. Across the aisle, Arlo jumps up and down on his seat, squealing while the other passengers smile at him hesitantly, unsure if he’s ridiculously happy or developmentally challenged. I try to distract him by playing “Walk up and down the aisles touching all the exit signs,” but eventually he wants his mom. And his mom, like me, is busy faking a calm face and dreaming of parachutes. When we finally touch down, and the boys smell the stale air of Jetway freedom, excitement sets in for them.
Waiting for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) at the airport, I’m holding it together.
I can do this. Maybe I can do this.
Silas and Arlo enjoy seeing how close they can stand to the edge of the platform.
“Stay behind the yellow line, guys,” I say, calmly.
They ignore me. “Seriously, stand back. There’s a train coming.”
They don’t listen.
“Silas! Arlo! STOP IT!” I’m yelling now.
They giggle and stand behind the yellow line, but test me by sneaking a foot over. Fear and frustration churn in my head. With a wry smile, Arlo looks at me and slowly scoots both of his feet over the line.
I raise my shoulder bag above my head and slam it on the platform.
“Stay the fuck away from the edge. Why won’t you listen to me?!” I pick up the bag, planning to put it back on my shoulder, but instead I throw it down again.
“Goddammit! What the hell is wrong with you? Do you want to get hit by a train? Well, do you? Do you?”
“Do you want to get hit by a fucking train?”
My boys are afraid, and so are the Northern Californians in the station. This is an East Coast outburst. Lindsay takes the boys’ hands as if guiding them away from a stranger who has asked if they want to see the inside of his van. “Daddy’s having a tough time,” she says. “We should leave him alone right now.”
I stare straight ahead, defiant. My behavior was righteous and justified. When the train arrives, I get on, not caring if my family follows.
I sit alone, staring out the window. The fabric-covered seats on BART are all stained. In New York, subway car interiors are plastic and metal. Every night, they’re cleaned with fire hoses. But San Francisco, apparently unwilling to acknowledge that people are disgusting, uses absorbent cloth for their seats. Thankfully, I resist the bizarre temptation to smell mine. I’d regained control of my actions. By the time we arrive at the San Leandro station, I’m crashing from the adrenaline rush and feeling calm.
From the top of the escalator, I can see them waiting for us outside the turnstile. Mom looks effortlessly glamorous, Audrey Hepburn-esque. Over the past few years she has started wearing her hair down instead of wrapping it up in a bun. Shoulder-length and almost completely white, it provides a nice frame for her Roman nose.
Dad looks the same, only vulnerable. He’s slightly hunched, but that’s nothing new; we come from a long line of tall people with weak backs. His hair is longer than normal: healthy, thick, and wavy. Still fifteen pounds overweight (all of it in his stomach), he looks like a potato that sprouted skinny arms and legs and a giant head. People mistake him for Bill Murray and Bill Clinton. Dad’s thrilled with either. He’s wearing his green suede jacket, black lace-up Vans, and the Levi’s he gets in three-packs from Costco: the same thing he always wears when not teaching. It’s strange, but perhaps I expected for a terminal illness to come with a new outfit.
Arlo and Silas run up to BooBoo and Mimi. Lindsay hugs Mom. Dad and I embrace last, and we make the most of it. Any traces of male hesitancy dissolve, replaced by uncomplicated, aggressive squeezing. “Careful, you’ll crack my rib,” he says. Twenty years ago, I snuck up from behind, wrapped my arms around him, and lifted him off the ground. He couldn’t take a deep breath for three weeks. It wasn’t my fault.
I was young, and red wine had me feeling aggressively affectionate.
Dad insists on rolling one of our bags for the three-block walk back to the apartment. “Jesus Christ, I’m not dead yet. I can still roll a fucking suitcase.” But a block in, I see he’s fallen behind. “I just need to catch my breath,” he says. I must look concerned because he seems conflicted. Not a tough guy, nor particularly proud, Dad likes that I’m empathetic, but he doesn’t enjoy being on the receiving end of it.
“I’m winded because I’m anemic, Jason. Not that other thing.” I suppose denial isn’t bound to logic. Anemia is the prevailing symptom of his greater illness. His bone marrow creates bad blood cells that divide rapidly and never die. That goop deep inside Dad’s bones that makes the blood which biologically connects me to him, him to his grandsons, and me to my sons, is spitting out a seedless fruit. That was the extent of what I knew about leukemia then. Hour upon hour of research later, I don’t understand it much better. The Internet is a scary place: a Choose Your Own Adventure book that always ends in death.
Dad isn’t interested in the specifics of his illness. I think he knows that, save a heart attack, stroke, bus accident, or environmental mishap, this disease will be his demise. He doesn’t want to spend whatever time he has left hunched over a laptop reading medical papers and scanning the MarrowDisorders.org community forums. We won’t go hang gliding, drive a convertible through Big Sur, or build a meth lab in the desert. Dad has no bucket list. His life, he once said, “has been one big bucket list.” He’s lived it exactly the way he wanted to.
The six of us cram into the elevator along with two suitcases and Silas’s miniature rollie bag, which is probably filled with Pokémon cards, oven mitts, and one pair of shorts. The fluorescent lighting casts a slightly jaundiced light on the rest of us, but it’s powerless against Dad’s pallor. Normally a pinkish German-blooded hue, his face now almost matches his silver hair.
Arlo wants to push the elevator button. I can tell because he’s jumping and screaming, “Button!” I pick him up, he lets out a theatrical grunt, and with a little undetected assistance from me, the button turns orange.
Mom grabs my free hand. “He looks pale, doesn’t he?”
“I can hear you, Jody,” Dad says. “We’re in an elevator, for Christ’s sake. Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”
“You do look a little peaked,” I say.
Silas looks up at me. “What’s peaked?”
“It’s another word for pale,” Lindsay answers, putting an end to any further discussion of Dad’s condition in front of the boys.
Mom and Dad’s apartment is a long open penthouse with white walls and light blue carpeting, the kind of modest palace that makes baby boomers feel fancy and successful without appearing ostentatious. After a decade there, Mom is still tickled that the elevator button says “PH” instead of “5.” The layout is perfect for young energetic kids. Our small Dutch Colonial in New Jersey doesn’t provide much running room, but here the boys can gallop from end to end. It only takes a few minutes for them to find the Bozo the Clown Inflatable Bop Bag that Mom bought. It’s a four-foot-tall punching bag, but people don’t use the word “punch” around children these days. Bozo’s big red nose squeaks when hit squarely, and he falls straight back only to pop right up again. Eventually, the boys wear themselves out, which is good, because Arlo napped on the train. Kids have a suspicious ability to stay awake during stressful events only to inconveniently crash when they’re over.
Arlo has become nearly impossible to put to bed, routinely staying up until ten-thirty or eleven at night. At home, I sometimes take him to Whole Foods in his pajamas at eight-thirty to “run him.” There’s nothing cuter than a three-year-old sprinting through a grocery store in robot pajamas and shoes, and nothing quite as awkward as his six-foot-six father giving chase. Arlo is quick, reckless, and hard to catch, so I have to stay close. I don’t want him knocking over a cheese display or falling headfirst into a giant barrel of quinoa.
Mom says I was the same way at that age. I never slowed down. To get me to eat she would place food around the house so I could snatch up fuel midstride. A piece of cheese on the corner of the coffee table, a cracker on the bannister, a slice of apple at the top of the stairs. The mice must have thought it was some kind of trick. “Jesus, these people aren’t even trying.”
In California, we have a time difference working in our favor, and after Bozo takes a standing eight count, and all the “Look how high I can jump” and “BooBoo, BooBoo, Mimi, Mimi, Mommy, Daddy . . . listen to me whistle!” activity is over, the boys wander off to yawn in private and pilfer from BooBoo’s change bowl.
Silas’s whistling ability is extraordinary, especially for his age. He reminds me of a snoozing Mickey Mouse from the 1930s: each exhale, the trill mating call of a sparrow. Dad is proud, too. The Goods come from fine whistling stock. “Yeah, don’t encourage him unless you want tinnitus,” I tell him.
He smiles. “Well, Jace, ya know what? One morning Silas will wake up and simply not whistle anymore. A few days will pass, and he’ll forget he ever did. Believe me, you’ll miss it.”
He’s right. Soon after an annoying habit disappears, we mourn it because change indicates the passage of time, and as much as we want our kids to be different in any given moment, we also want them to remain exactly the same.
The boys finally asleep, the four of us sit quietly for a while. Eventually Mom breaks the silence with a sledgehammer. “Oh, by the way, if one of us gets up and walks away, don’t take it personally. We’re just going somewhere to cry.”
“We find it cathartic,” Dad adds.
The moment is too morose for my family. We find the most abject sorrow to be innately comical. “Great, so we’ll all be huddled in the bathrooms crying while Silas makes dinner,” I say.
Mom laughs. “That’s better than Arlo making it!”
“Yeah, I guess so . . . ,” Dad mutters glumly, not playing along.
“Oh, shut up. We’re going to have fun.” I wasn’t going to let him feel guilty about being sick.
Dad shakes it off. “You’re right. Should we go to the city tomorrow? Or take the boys to the zoo?”
Mom looks nervous. “I think that’s too much walking for you, Michael.”
“We can rent you a Rascal, or a Jazzy, or whatever those things are called,” I joke.
Dad hurls a pen at me and smiles. “Screw you.”
“Who wants more wine? I know I do!” Mom seems relieved that we’ve moved on to levity.
Lindsay declines the offering. Dad feels that some rest might do him good, and I don’t drink (though I used to and enjoyed it immensely).
“Okay, just me, then,” Mom says, gliding off to the kitchen.
“I’ll stay up with you,” I tell her.
“Then it will be just us!” she says.
Trying to avoid talking about Dad, I get nostalgic. “Hey, do you still have my high school soccer jersey?”
“I think so. There’s a box with a bunch of your stuff in the hallway closet.”
“Remember how Dad would get kicked out of all my games for yelling at the refs?”
“Oh, it wasn’t all of them.”
“I can recall six without even trying.”
“He didn’t understand the rules.”
“Yeah, and it was the referees’ responsibility to teach him how offsides worked.”
Mom laughed. “Of course it was!”
“I think that’s why I started sucking on my jersey.”
“You’d sucked all the blue dye out of the neckline.”
“Sounds healthy.”
“And if you weren’t doing that, you were biting your fingernails.”
“Dad always yelled at me from the stands.”
“He did?”
“Yes, remember? ‘Stop eating your hands!’ ”
“Oh God, I do remember that. You always yelled back, though.” Mom smiled and sipped her wine. “He liked it when you sto
od up for yourself.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. It was something he never did to his dad.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a little less scary than Edwin.”
The jersey is right where Mom said it would be, along with other pieces of memorabilia: a “book” I wrote in kindergarten, a wizard puppet Uncle Clement made me, some vintage puffy stickers, pictures from various graduations, and so on. There are also a few photographs of Dad and me from the early seventies. In one of them, he looks exhausted, slumped on a floral-patterned couch. His hair is long and greasy, clinging to the sides of his pockmarked face. There’s a fat baby in light blue overalls and white pleather shoes sitting on his lap chewing a cork coaster.
“Jesus, look at this one. Dad looks like he was running guns for the IRA.”
“I know! Menacing, right? He didn’t always look like that.”
“How old was he here? Twenty-eight or so?”
“Yes, you were eight months old, so he was twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine.”
I see myself in the photograph, not as the baby, but as the father. We don’t look particularly similar, Dad and I. I’m twelve years older now than he was then, have short hair, and the acne he passed down to me has lain dormant for years. What I recognize is a state of mental fuzziness that fathers have after fully understanding they can’t turn back, and wouldn’t even if they could.
It seems impossible that forty years could simply evaporate. He was so young then. But I realize that what happened in that time was me. Salt-and-pepper hair and reading glasses, shit, I’m old now, too.
“I want to show this stuff to Silas,” I say.
“Okay, sounds good. I’m heading off to bed.”
“Me, too. See you in the morning. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She smiles. “We’ll get through this.”
“I know.”
I’ve seen pictures of Dad as a kid, standing with the rest of his family, all of them gussied up in their good clothes and forced smiles. I like to imagine that after church, or whatever the occasion was, Dad and his brothers went out for lime phosphates, played baseball until it got dark, and read Mad magazine inside their fort. On the way home maybe they spotted a dead body down in the creek bed. I want to believe that part of Dad’s childhood was idyllic because the inside of his house was crowded, hot, loud, and tense: four children, two parents, and an invalid grandmother crammed into a tiny three-bedroom ranch.