As soon as Dad got wind of the costs at the Capistrano by the Sea Hospital rehab, there was the expected blowup. “That’s 10 thousand dollars and 80 cents a month thrown down a rat hole,” Mom quoted him. “He’s shined me on for years and I’ve had it. I’m through. He can go to work just like everyone else has to.”
Mom reiterated how much Randy needed help. Dad started yelling. She ran outside, gave it some thought, came back, and pleaded with him to stick by Randy through thick and thin. Dad, still furious, ended the conversation with “He trashed a house we own. He’s never said thanks for anything I did for him. I’m not going to support him anymore. Got it!?!”
Later, alone at her desk upstairs, she picked up her pen and wrote in her journal what she’d basically written thousands of times before: Randy was going to get better. He was writing. He would drink less. He would thrive in the healing atmosphere of Capistrano by the Sea. He would dutifully take Buspar, a pill Dr. Markson ordered to treat symptoms of anxiety, and fear.
Randy was admitted two weeks later. At the first group session, the group leader asked how Randy was doing. “Fine,” he said. Asked if he would care to expand on that, Randy responded with “Finer.” The next day, the group leader told Randy he had to say more than one word. Randy got up and walked out.
It was hard for me to identify with Randy’s pain. I couldn’t put myself in his shoes. It was easy for me to let him remain in the background of my life. As life went on, Randy occasionally sent me some of the pieces he’d written. One, titled “Seahorse,” brought tears to my eyes.
Delicate little creature with the plunger mouth, and beer belly. What is it you ask of me? Yes, I found you in an orange grove frozen in the dirt. Your prickly leather skin caught my eye as I stooped to pick up a fallen orange. How remarkable you were, so far from your tropical home, so strange among the ants and green leaves that surrounded you. I put you in my pocket. Today, nearly three years later, I look at your boney frame, your tiny eyeless sockets and wonder at my love of “death-preserved.” Is it my own mortality? One day I too will be frozen in dirt, my bones the only definition of my life. Is that the answer to the question your body forms? On a shelf full of bric-a-brac, you are the only object that once existed, your little shape among stone and glass is a terrifying truth, even a reminder that we come to our God in fear, our bones dripping with answers which our bodies are not ready to accept.
I hadn’t thought of Randy’s seahorse piece until recently, when I opened the kitchen door and found a fluttering hummingbird on the ground outside. I ran inside to see what I could do for the little thing. Was it hungry? Frantically, I searched the Web to read up on what to feed a hummingbird: place a few drops of nectar on the end of its beak. I didn’t have nectar. I decided to boil sugar, put it in an eyedropper, and try to get it down the little guy’s throat. After several attempts, I could see it was on its way out of this “old world,” as Grammie Hall would have said. And, sure enough, after a few moments it stopped fluttering its wings, and died. I went upstairs, took the small box Mom had made in her silversmithing class at Santa Ana Junior College, and gently placed its body inside. I put it on the bookshelf in my bedroom. Every morning, as I make my bed, I look at Mom’s box, honor the little hummingbird, and thank Randy, whose words have come to be my guide into the exploration of mysteries I’ve avoided all my life.
CHAPTER 8
A LAST KISS
On Tuesday, April 3, 1990, Mom wrote:
Robin and I loaded up the car for a few weeks in Arizona. Jack was to follow later in his truck. When we arrived at 10:30 PM we were so tired we couldn’t think straight. I called Jack. He was supposed to be on the road. He answered sleepily. “Are you alright?” He said something about not getting ready as fast as he thought he could, he’d decided he would start out the next day. We said goodnight. I went to bed. The next morning I called to see if he was about to begin the eleven hour drive. He said he’d be on the way soon. When I called him late that night he was speaking in vague statements. Robin and I called Dr. Copelan. Upon hearing the symptoms, he told us we needed to get Jack to St. Joseph Hospital for an MRI brain scan as a precaution. I knew Jack would not like the idea of Robin and me flying home for his brain scan. But we did. As soon as we saw Dr. Copelan’s face, we knew the news was bad. He told us of two cancer masses located in the frontal lobe of Jack’s brain. He showed us the pictures. In no uncertain terms, we needed to drive to UCLA, where a certain Dr. Black would be waiting for us.
In those brief five months of illness, Dad was looked after by an onslaught of caregivers who came and went. Mom had no false hopes of a recovery. The days were filled with duties that drove her half mad. She resented all the people in her home, night and day. She began to rewrite her marriage. Suddenly Dad had been her leader, her friend, her counselor, her courageous husband. She bemoaned the loss of the hands she loved so much. They were not there to hold her. She felt she’d become half a person, wondering how to live out the rest of her life.
Dad didn’t want to die; he didn’t want to leave a good day behind. He’d spent his entire adult life worrying about his little bunch of dreamers and how they would get by. Not one of us had or has a practical bone in his or her body. Five knuckleheads. Five useless people at sea in the real world. As head of the family, he had no room for dreams. He had to make sure we were taken care of.
Randy joined our family around the dining-room table on Cove Street in Corona del Mar, in our parents’ last house, overlooking Dad’s beloved ocean view. We listened to our father try to hold his thoughts together as he described the details of his last will and testament. We all looked on with solemn concern. Dad’s greatest legacy, his biggest success, the acquisition of money, would be distributed evenly, but only after Dorothy passed. While he struggled with his words as he tried to describe the allocations, Randy suddenly got up, left the table, and bounded out without so much as a goodbye. He never came back.
Not long after, I was sitting next to my bedridden dad, looking at the waves through his picture window, when he said: “Dianie, did you hear about my biopsy? I was sitting in the audience of this theaterlike room when the doctor asked if there were any people with glyoma, my kind of tumor. So I raised my hand. I told them about the two and a half dollars growing on either side of my brain. This doctor, the chief surgeon, had me come to the stage. I sat in the center and they put a cage over my head, a small cage that fit tight. They hammered something into my skull. They didn’t give me anything for the pain. I don’t think they did. It hurt some, but mainly the sound of them hammering into my skull bothered me the most. Then they took a needle with an even longer needle inside the needle and injected it into the tumor, so they could take out the fluid and study.” Suddenly he stopped talking. He’d noticed something, and turned his head so that he was facing the television set. His favorite show was on, Major Dad.