One of my cousin Robbie’s running jokes was the self-deprecatory references he’d make to his Southern heritage. On the phone from the office at the farm, I once heard him say, “Now then, mister, I’m gonna need you to go a little more slowly with me, I’m from Missouri.” It was in the spirit of this that I took a playful jab at him when I saw him at my grandmother’s funeral a few years back. We were gathering at the little hilltop cemetery in the country, in the chilly December air, and we grinned at each other as he walked in my direction from the family car, a PT Cruiser my cousin Joan had had painted in the green and yellow color scheme of her Alma Mater, the University of Oregon, including the school’s stylized giant letter “O” across the hood. ”I like your car,” I said. ”Does that ‘O’ stand for ‘Ozarks’?”
He chuckled at that. ”No, but I guess it could!”
Later, after we’d laid grandma to rest, and moved on to the memorial service, I’m pretty sure this was one of the times we ducked out by the parking lot and shared a few sips of smuggled whiskey, and grumbled and joked about our extended family. They’re good people for the most part, and I love them, but they can be a stuffy, conservative lot, which is why we had to sneak out for whiskey in the first place.
He died, last week, on Sunday. When I had spoken with my mother on the phone just a few days before she’d brought me up to speed on Robbie and his tumor. I was surprised when she told me Joan had met with ‘the hospice people,’ as I thought he had been recovering. ”Didn’t they cut it all out?”
“They did, but not enough, it seems. It grew back, and he’s just been getting worse.” It had grown on the side of his brain where we keep all our words, eating away at his powers of speech, of his ability to connect with other people. It’s frustrating enough to have a word or a name at the tip of your tongue, but that your brain won’t quite release it to you yet; quite another to know that there might have been words once, and an awareness that they were missing, but not to have the faintest idea what they were or where they went. I imagine it might be like waking up knowing that you had been in the midst of a dream, but not able to recall any of it. Maybe it was strange, or scary, but the actual content was lost to you, having drifted away to wherever it is where these things go. Of the phrases he had retained, ‘I don’t know’ seemed to be one he could still use freely. ”He and Joan were sitting in their living room, watching TV,” my mother told me, “and he suddenly just shouted out ‘Hey!’, and after a minute he shouted it again, and when Joan asked him what was wrong, he just said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’” Maybe it was “this hurts,” he wanted to say, or “I know I’ll be gone soon. Don’t ever forget that I love you,” or something else deeply felt, but that he was no longer able to articulate.
I don’t know.
I got a text from my mother on Sunday morning, asking me to call. I put it off, having a sick feeling in my gut about why I needed to call. It’s far too soon, I reasoned. He must have at least a month left, or maybe two months, or any other small amount of time that seems like it ought to be enough, and if hanging on for a year after your first surgery isn’t enough time then I guess nothing is. She told me that he’d died, and my first thought was of his girls. Becky had just come back from her first year of college, and I am horrible at keeping track of how old everybody is but I don’t think Rachel is any older than eight or nine, and I imagine like me they just sort of quietly hoped he was going to keep hanging on, and probably woke up on Father’s Day ready to spend a day with dad only to discover he had already left.
I remember the day he joined our family. We drove up here from San Diego for the wedding. I was probably twelve or so, dressed in a clip-on tie that clashed badly with my dress shirt and my very silly cardigan. (My mother had recently allowed me to start picking out my own clothes, and twenty years later I don’t seem to be much better at it.) He was wearing his Marine dress uniform, in honor of his brothers-in-arms deployed in Desert Storm. We have photos somewhere — he and Joan looked very young, and very happy. I’ll remember him that way, and the jokes about the family we sometimes felt like outsiders in, and those swigs of whiskey in the parking lot, and his gentle Southern drawl and his infectious chuckle. I wish he could have stayed to watch his girls grow up a bit more. He was a good father, and I know he was very proud of them, even if he couldn’t have told them as much there at the end, he doubtless had it written down in his bones in a language that needn’t be spoken anyway.
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