It
had been about a year, and I was sitting in the parking lot of the WaWa just
outside the Richmond airport. I wasn’t alone; a beloved friend was with
me while we waited for Steve and Lori to finish the coffee run, after which we
would head to their place to continue the visit and allow peristalsis to deal
with the effects of Carrini’s Italian Restaurant.
Without
there being any plan for it to happen this way, it turned out to be the moment
I had asked of this treasured young lady several months ago . . .
I
have no idea why we make the connections we do with certain people. We
may not be related to them, or married to them, or even spend much time with them,
but their effect on us is profound, spanning the remaining years of our lives
with an influence that is completely unique. We have experiences in life
that they alone can make sense of, or allow us to finally get past, or at least
come to understand by validating what we feel deep in that mysterious place we
call the heart. I have a small number of such people now; one was sitting
in the car with me that evening. Earlier in the year, I had told her that
I was looking forward to being able to spend some time with her because I knew
she would allow me not just to air a grief that still lingers, but to safely
place some of it with her so that what remained would rest a little
lighter. Curiously, as it turned out, I only had about 5 or 6 minutes to
speak. It was all I needed.
__________________________
I
can’t tell how old I was, but the memory of when I realized what had happened
is still quite clear in spite of it having occurred around 53 years ago.
I was a bit young to understand the physics of those old push mowers with the
curly blades like you see in the Tom and Jerry cartoon when the hapless Tom
gets his back mowed by the indefatigable Jerry, but it didn’t matter to the
mower. As the spirit of an INTP’s curiosity enticed me to lift and turn the
drive wheel with my left hand in an attempt to figure out how this marvel
worked, I never considered the potential danger to which I was exposing the tip
of my right middle finger. In a flash, the shearing effect of a closely
machined steel scissor resulted in my ability – in later years, but not now,
thank you - to give the high sign a little higher; the tip of my right middle
finger has a noticeable bump with a clear ring of scar tissue around it.
Sort of like I glued on a little beanie hat years ago and my skin just took it
over. I can still clearly remember the shock of realizing what had
happened. My response was an all-but-instantaneous shriek of pain and two
legs making for home at top speed. Technically, home was “next door”, but
unfortunately, the “next doors” were about 200 yards apart. In later
years, I might have thought to go back and see if I could spot a blood
trail. At the time, it never occurred to me.
I
can’t remember anything except the flash of pain and the start of my sprint
toward home; the aftermath was related to me by my sister Patty.
I
think most of you will remember her as I lamented her loss in the November of
2009.
I
made mention then that Patty was that second Mom that so many of us fellows
have in the form of an older sister. I was lucky, too, because Mom #1,
superb Mom though she was, was the kind that would – and once did – stand in
the middle of the living room, screaming, while the house all but burned down
around her. If it weren’t for 10 or 12-year-old Patty, our particular
branch of Hoyt’s would have been severely pruned.
So
on the day when I came warp-driving into the house, leaving what must have been
a large trail of splotchy red polka dots, it fell to Patty to hold me and
employ her marvelous sense of comfort while Mom managed to get us to the
hospital without carrying out some of that pruning I was mentioning
earlier. She never let me go for a moment until the ER people managed to
convince her I wouldn’t immediately die and turn to dust and ashes if she
did.
She
said a curious thing happened next; she fell against the wall, slowly sinking
to the floor in a faint. The stress caused by what was probably an
unbroken wail from back door of house to ER door of hospital was the likely
culprit.
It
was typical of the way she cared about me.
I
guess it was fitting then, when about 12 years later she came to me with a
request that must have been so very strange to her. We never spoke of it
again after that one time, but my brother tells me she told him about it days
later.
Discretion
will ever forbid me from relating the actual content of the conversation, but I
stood firmly in what I knew was the right decision. Actually, I never
even really needed to stand firm. My response to what my sister asked me
seemed obvious and needed very little consideration to answer. She
accepted my answer, and bragged to my brother of her pride in my maturity.
Frankly,
I am under no delusion that I was being mature. I just loved my sister,
and I believed that what she asked for would have brought her harm.
It was a gift from the God of heaven to protect her in the same way she had so many times protected me.
She
wasn’t the only sibling to do so; the brother to whom she bragged had done the
same kind of thing on more than one occasion.
My
sister moved away from home soon after high school, and largely for the same
reason many young ladies do: to get away from a tyrannical and clueless fool in
the form of a father. Oh, don’t worry, we’ve all long ago made our peace
with Dad; he went a long way toward making that possible when he had nothing
left to communicate with but his eyes. His voice gone, and his limbs
capable of little more than spasms, his eyes spoke with a power I’ve never seen
equaled since the last time I saw him. What an awesome thing to consider
- how much power he displayed in asking forgiveness and expressing his love as
he knew his moments were drawing to a close in this life. I wish he were
still here, for in coming to know myself only a few years ago as a tyrannical
and clueless fool, I would now be able to love and appreciate him as he was.
But
that was as he was dying; in the years when we were still young, it was less
than pleasant being around him most of the time. Dad would speak, but
frankly, the rest of us would rather have listened to a tractor-trailer full of
aluminum trash cans T-bone a railroad car full of live hogs. Now that I
think about it, I can prove it, because a lot of the music I used to listen to
as a teenager sounded a lot like that . . .
One
can imagine my sister’s dismay when, having moved all the way to Virginia from
Massachusetts after marrying a tyrannical and clueless fool who lived in The
Old Dominion, she learned that Mom and Dad and were moving around the corner
less than a year after the wedding.
Taxi!
Taxi!!
As for me, I had only reached the state of cluelessness; the tyranny would come later, but at that time, I just thought it was neat that I’d be living so close to my sister.
She
still watched out for me, accepted me, protected me when she could – dear old
Dad was still a good number of years from getting a clue, and by that time he
was dying – and worried about me as any decent sister would. I remember
her reaction to my announcement that I had been to the movies to see . . .
Well,
I won’t tell you what I went to see, but I shouldn’t have seen it, and she let
me know with that unique form of dismay and hurt that has you feeling like you
just slammed this person’s finger in the car door.
Patty
was the one that knew – just knew – that Mom had died by herself at home.
Dad had passed on years before that, and although Mom allowed herself the
company of a few blithering idiot boyfriends, she never remarried. We
didn’t blame her.
Patty
was working at what I think was an early incarnation of K-Mart or some such
blemish on the face of capitalism in the dearly departed Tower Mall in
Portsmouth. (It’s funny how places like that go from being the bee’s
knees to the kind of thing that would make a toxic waste dump look like urban
renewal.) The place had entered its death throes by the time she was
working there. I was at home not far from the mall when the call came
from the hospital. Patty had a unique alto voice, deep for a woman, but
not at all masculine, although she had a way of using it to strike terror into
the hearts of the underlings at the security outfit where she worked for the
last 25 years of her life.
“You
better come down, Jeff. It’s Ma.” There was a compelling
combination of strength and resignation in her voice.
I knew without her having to say it . . .
It was January 17, 1986. My brother Steve, his current flame, and I had had lunch with Mom just three days ago on her birthday at that restaurant on George Washington Highway across from Brentwood. I have no idea what it was called then, or is now, or the 13 names it’s probably had in-between. But now, she was gone, and somehow Patty knew from 3 miles away, flying out of the store with little or no explanation to management, coming home to find little Brandy-dog trying to wake Mom up as she lay by the front door. When I see her, she’s still laying, but on a gurney in the ER of the old Portsmouth General Hospital. She doesn’t look all that different, really. But she isn’t there anymore.
To this day, I believe, and always will, that my Mom died herself.
Not killed herself, died herself. She had problems with diverticulitis, which is known to mimic the pain of a heart attack. It was thought that she mistook the latter for the former, and it cost her life. Maybe. But I think Mom knew what she was doing. It had fallen to her, the matriarch of the family, to take care of our paternal grandmother in her final months, and the mental images of her condition are not pretty. I want to point out that both of my aunt’s also had Nana in their homes to care for her in her final year or two, but Mom had her at the end, when things were really tough. I am fully persuaded Mom deliberately kept us from having to know that anguish. By God’s grace, I hope to be able to do the same for my own children, should the circumstances be similar.
But
still, it fell to Patty to be the first to know about Mom by that amazing bond
of love that some offspring seem to carry with their parents and that
communicates in ways that can’t be measured with electronic gizmos.
And
in her own death, I believe my sister did much the same for us as Mom
did. Patty fought for a time, but the day came when I think she realized
it was a fight she could not win, and when she came to grips with it, she was
soon gone.
There’s
a little spot in the ER of Maryview Hospital, just about halfway between the
two rooms she had been in before the night when I would speak to her for the
penultimate time. In the first one, she had come in for some
treatment necessitated by a fall. After seeing her safely into the room,
I waited in the ER lobby, and while we drove home, she made the comment that
her brother had been something of a hit with one of the nurses. My
response was a sage and learned “Hunh?” She had to explain it all
to me – again.
In
the second room, she had by that time deteriorated rather badly, and I stayed
with her for part of the treatment. Sitting quietly off to the side, I
had been observing the structure and motions of one of the nurse’s hands.
(Yeah, yeah, make the jokes already, fine. Admittedly though, she was
rather awesome . . .)
Being
a little out of it all, and trying to keep the emotional roller-coaster acting
more like a hobby-horse, I defaulted by “asking” her if she played a musical
instrument. It was rhetorical; I already knew she did by watching her
hands. (She’s a flautist, and was just getting back into practice.)
It
offered a welcome distraction, although trying to explain to a stunning woman
you’ve never clapped eyes on before how you knew she played a musical
instrument by looking at her hands while your sister is lying all but
incapacitated in a hospital bed was, in retrospect, a little off the main
trail.
After
closing her mouth, then opening it again to ask me how I knew, I explained a
little about brain-types and their effect on motor-control, which is something
that my niece had told me about, and in my case, blah, blah, blah, but with
people whose brain types create superior fine-motor control, blah, blah, blah,
it shows in the structure and musculature of the hands, blah, blah, blah,
whereas with my hands blah, blah, blah.
It
got a bit embarrassing after a few minutes, although both the nurses seemed
fascinated by it all. Well, they never called security, anyway, in spite
of exchanging half a dozen looks that might have been amazement - or an
unspoken discussion about which of them could reach the door first.
Looking back though, I think the flautist thought it was kinda’ neat.
And
she really was awesome . . .
But
now, Patty was lying in another hospital bed, in that section next to the door
that leads out of the side of the ER. We were essentially sitting a
vigil; by this time, Patty was almost completely unresponsive. Her body
systems were shutting down, and she hadn’t spoken a word for a day or
more. Several people were there, some family, some personnel. After
a time of sitting and watching, I stood and moved to the side of her bed.
Others, in that blessed manner of graciousness that comes out in those of good
character in such times, parted and moved away from me as they yielded their
place for the closest relative my sister had in the moment: the one with the
unnaturally extended right middle fingertip, the one that has spent some
portion of the last year realizing how poorly he showed his love for this lady,
the one that’s having a hard time seeing the keys right now . . .
I
leaned over to speak to her, knowing that it was entirely possible that this
would be the last time I would see her alive, although I was given about
another hour the next day. I knew, although we had discussed it before,
that it was time to remind her of something.
She
had, for many hours now, been doing nothing but slowly trembling with her head
going from side to side and her eyes looking at nothing. Speaking softly
and only for her, but not trying to hide my words from anyone, I said “Patty,
you made me a promise. You promised me we’d spend eternity
together. I want you to know I’m expecting you to live up to that
promise; that you meant it when you said you knew that you had eternal life . .
.”
I
wasn’t expecting anything from her other than what she had been doing for
hours, but she had one last surprise for me.
Patty
stopped trembling, stopped the little sounds she had been making. She
turned her head to face me; her eyes went binocular and looked directly into
mine. She didn’t speak, but it wasn’t necessary - full consciousness
reached out with those eyes and told me of her love for me and her trust and
belief in my love for her, and that I could rest in the promise she had made.
The
next evening, an abandoned grocery cart sat in the canned vegetable aisle of
the Food Lion on Tidewater Drive.
My
sister had died.
I
now know that the death of a family member leaves a wound that never fully
heals, but I also know that it is a mistake to desire that it should.
When you lose someone who is of your blood, your life, and your heart, how
foolish and cavalier it is to think we should be completely delivered from any
pain that such a loss brings. I believe the remnants of pain are a
pointed blessing, reminding us of what we had, and from that, we recall the
good times and the happiness, the blessing of which I personally know does not
diminish with the passing of time. I suspect that every year around
November, the awareness and the pain will return. A little less each
time, perhaps, but like the old science conundrum of how long it will take to
reach a point if every step is only half the distance of the previous one, I
don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where it doesn’t hurt. Nor do I
want to. And beside all this, I can trust that I will spend eternity with
Patty.
My
time with my friend helped a great deal. She said very little, but there
was no need for anything else. I received what I had asked of her those
months ago – acceptance of the anguish and loss that I had been able to express
to no one until those few minutes outside a WaWa.
And
now, it is only a matter of some few years, seeming to pass faster as each one
goes by, until a promise is realized.
“I’ll
see you again, I’ll see you again, I’ll see you in Glory some day; for now,
it’s goodbye – don’t sorrow or sigh. I’ll see you in Glory someday.”
