Driving to work, coffee kicking in, fingers on the tuner and eyes on the road, and my ears stumble onto a tune that sounds familiar even though I know I haven’t heard it before. The sky a typical, magical upstate New York sort of gray, and a riff rings out from the speakers, distilling the infinite sadness coursing through me into a few melancholic chords.
The DJ comes on, mentions the song. The Decemberists. Of course, I think. They helped get me through Lauren traveling on, and I couldn’t listen to them for years after, but here they come again, right on time, with another tune or two to help walk me through this next round.
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Four months ago he walked ten miles a day, five in the morning and five in the evening. Sometimes when I drove up to my house at the end of the day, I’d see him coming down the street as he finished off the evening five.
We walked a lot of miles together, me and my father, in the weeks and months after Lauren died. I went back to work for a while and he and my mother would watch my two youngest, still in diapers at that point, all day. When I’d get home, in that winter of 2007-2008, we’d suit them up in snow pants and hats and mittens and heavy coats and we’d load them into the double stroller and we’d walk for an hour, or an hour and a half.
My father has not always been the most talkative fellow, but on those walks, recognizing his son as too stricken to speak more than the occasional sentence or two, would talk for the both of us. We’d walk as the sun set, the babies would babble happily, and he would ramble on, desperately, filling the cold air between us with stories of his childhood, and what a childhood it was, straight out of Dickens. I’m still amazed he managed to overcome it to turn into the man he turned into.
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One night in late September, my bot Dan called to catch up. It had been a while. We both have young ones, you get caught up in the day to day, time goes by, but when you talk to the people you love the most, even if you haven’t talked in too long, when you finally do, it feels just like you talked to them this morning.
He asked about my folks, and I said, fit as fiddles, my Dad’s still walking ten miles a day.
The next day, not long after I got home from work, my Dad called.
Is Sheila home yet? he asked.
No, might not be a while, what’s up.
I wanted to talk to you and your brother about something, What time are you eating?
I don’t know. I’ll come over when I can.
Something in the tone of his voice worried me.
Is it something bad, I asked.
It is what it is, he said. It is what it is and we’ll go from there.
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It became the usual cancer blur after that.
First they told us he had pancreatic cancer. 99% certain, said the doctor who did the endoscopy. There’s a mass wrapped around his pancreas.
A few days later an oncologist told us, well, actually, it is Hodgkin’s lymphoma, presenting in an unusual manner. He said it was treatable. It took awhile to identify the exact subtype of lymphoma he had, but eventually they did, and they came up with a treatment plan.
He got sicker, but we expected that, and we had Thanksgiving at my house, across the street from his, the best turkey he’d ever eaten, he proclaimed, and we had Christmas at my sister’s, and when she raised a glass to faith, hope, and love, we all thought he had a lot longer than he did.
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Today was Lauren’s 50th birthday.
Over the past few days, as my father rapidly deteriorated, as he went in and out of the hospital, as we went from this is treatable to we need to change the treatment from chemo to palliative care, I have sometimes taken refuge in wondering how Lauren and I might have celebrated this milestone birthday. Would I have sent her back home to England for a few days, for a wild (or as wild as a 50 year old can get) weekend with her dear old friends in London? Would we have just had her mother watch the kids while we retreated somewhere, just the two of us, a honeymoon of sorts?
And my father now, barely able to walk from the couch to the bathroom, and how I would love just one more of those long walks, he and I, the stories, the fullness of his presence enough to carry me through yet another difficult milestone of a day.
I live across the street now, and I sit in my living room, typing this, those melancholic chords ringing out again and again. He may not be gone quite yet, but I miss him already.
I can see their living room window. I have been watching it, on and off, for hours. As long as it stays dark over there, I know he is fast asleep. In his last days, as he travels on, we don’t have a lot to hope for, but I hope that light stays off. I hope you sleep well tonight, Dad, and I hope you know I love you.