I don’t dread death. I am that strange bird looking forward to leaving this place most people are fighting for survival in. I don’t relay this as some sort of confession or a means of judgment against myself, and I certainly respect those gallant souls who struggle to stay here. No one fought harder to live here than Aaron, except for maybe Dad, though for very different reasons.
Aaron loved life and for a long time, Dad feared death.
I took Dad out to lunch right before his doctor’s appointment with a specialist he’d not seen before. The day, Thursday. He’d had a small lump in his throat for a couple of weeks prior. His regular doctor had scheduled this appointment after antibiotics hadn’t cleared it up. After a lunch of large tomatoes stuffed with luscious chicken salad, a meal we devoured out on a patio where spring’s trees barely shaded us overhead, Lisa met us at the doctor’s office.
We sat in the lobby a good while. Watched television with mothers and sick kids. At last, some nurse (dressed in white) called out, “Harvey Grigsby!” More than ready, we followed her into a small examining room leased by the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Man.
Lisa and I talked and joked while Dad sat stiff in the examining chair. He worried while his daughters tested the equipment. Savvy, we knew nearly when to quit.
Astute, the doctor walked in, broke up the nervous noise, pumped pedals, blazed lights. Soon, in too-much-real-time-fashion, my sister and I stared at him while he dug deep within the recesses of his patient’s mouth. His fingers of knowledge, well layered in latex, explored the gagging canyon. The stoma. Our father’s mouth.
The doctor discovered slimy deep depths before mine and my sister’s eyes, pointedly ignored silent exclamation of dismay and disgust from his feminine audience, but exploited his own. He pulled his tongue-depressor-hand out from within the gaped hole, slung my father’s foam from a right-handed glove, then peeled off the drenched with the dry. Discarded the pair.
I thought of rabid dogs, though I’d never seen one. The faint odor of mucous was disturbing.
The doctor barked down at his patient, “Do you drink a lot?”
Dad. Startled. “No. A beer sometimes.”
The doctor continued to look somewhere in Dad’s direction. It was as if it pained the good doctor’s good senses when he directly looked at his sick patient.
Dad was sprawled back in the odd chair, mouth opened. His aged body struggled some. To rise, to defend.
“Sir. Do you understand the gravity of your situation? This mass is in your left lymph node.”
Dad shrunk back into the tilted chair. He looked like a very old child in trouble.
Dad told him yes. Yes, he used to drink, yes; he once smoked a good bit, dipped, yes, that too. Then no. No, he wasn’t in need of detoxification before someone could cut on him.
The doctor spewed some necessary information. Recommended a surgeon, some other surgeon.
Numerous nouns, adjectives and expletives were sang out by the good doctor as he orated aloud and penned heavy on a chart with lengthy strokes: High risk. Emphysema. Asthma.
Dad’s list of deadly disease included Stage IV squameous cell carcinoma before we left the doctor’s office on that day, April 22, 2004. A slow grow, the cancer had birthed at the base of Dad’s tongue around a year prior to its manifestation. The doctor scheduled Dad with a surgeon in Lubbock , Texas
We left. Dad was in the car with me, Lisa in her car just behind us.
My right foot accelerated on the gas pedal. The turn signal clicked, up, down, up, down. Three or four miles into twenty miles from home, my Camry somehow maneuvered through and overtook the late afternoon traffic. I set the cruise on sixty-five, muted the volume to my Eric Clapton CD, turned and smiled at the man I might lose.
He smiled back at me, awkward at first, then said, “Punkin, I think I’m going to fight this. What do you think?”
My mind raced. He’d always said he wouldn’t. I’d agreed with that first decision. I didn’t want to lose him yet, but his future, our future with him, didn’t look promising. I didn’t think he could live through a surgery and the monstrous treatments afterwards, but I must’ve babbled something intelligible.
Something encouraging.
After I got home and boiled or fried or nuked some food for supper that night, I looked up into the heavens of my kitchen ceiling, stared at a greasy kitchen fan. For the past two years, I’d all but lived in Lubbock
I lowered my gaze toward the kitchen curtains, cheap things but new. Prints of birdhouses, colors of teal, purple and yellow. Blue. Words of welcome on the fronts of their miniature homes seemed to mock me. Again, I looked toward the once-white ceiling fan and I muttered to its wind, “Okay.” But only a dirty-winged wind—a barely breeze—not even that, gathered a spread of cooking heat, blended with the solar spray from the room’s west window, vainly spent its energy and finished mine. The sun spends from noon until night in this window. Who’d build a house so?
The sun was low, its job nearly done. “All right then,” I said to it, to them, the sun or the fan, “All right. So this must mean Aaron is coming home. I know You wouldn’t take both of them from me in the same year.”
The fan just spat hot air. The sun didn’t budge.
The sound of my own voice must’ve given me some relief then. A substitute hope. I decided I’d keep the news about Grandpa from Aaron. The Marine in Fallujah didn’t need this concern.
It was a Thursday the day Dad was diagnosed with this first cancer, and then it was on a Monday that two Marines came to my door and told me, then us, the news of Aaron’s death.
Monday’s news constricted our airways. And the Thursday just prior, the date of April 22, 2004, not easily retrieved otherwise or recalled at the snap of a finger; it may have required going back to a calendar or an old appointment slip, had it not been for the news of Aaron. It’s not difficult to count back four days.
When I think of how close I came to never conceiving Aaron, then I’m always grateful for Dad. At the age of twenty-four, I’d scheduled a tubal ligation. I’d buried one sick son. Feared for ever birthing another.
Dad called me three days before the scheduled surgery. After the how-are-you’s and comprehending we’re both fine, Dad spoke one short sentence. “Punkin, I think you ought to think about it.”
Before this, there’d been twenty-four years without advice from this man. His words: always locked up in a quiet place. Unhandy to take out, to utter or to spew. But with this one love word and its tacked-on sentence (for many years I was Punkin), I changed the course of my life. And three years later, I gave birth to another life. Aaron.
And here I am, years later, writing about that life. Some people sing, some write or paint, some dream. We share in some life some way.
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. Joel the prophet in the version of King James.
I dream of dreaming old men’s dreams and I envision the visions of a young man I once had as my own. And many times, I plead to drown in the spirit. I think about Dad and Aaron every day. I’ve never dreamt of Dad and I’ve only dreamt of Aaron once. I don’t know why the hole inside me all livelong day constricts itself so entirely during my sleep. It must be a relief to dream. It puzzles me some. But Dad dreamed.
*
One of the first things Dad told us after he finally talked, after the adept hands of the surgeon had compressed ten hours of surgery into five, after the radical neck dissection, and after they replaced the first trach with the second one, after he learned to use it, the first, second, or maybe even third sentence he relayed to us was not an epiphany, not a request, but a command. “Put in my living will, not to ever give me one of these again,” he said and pointed to the plastic piece that stuck-out the hole in his neck. What a raspy, snotty piece of airway it was. Dad held his fingers to his neck. They trembled. No, they shook.
It bothered me to watch him shake. I could see my future.
He pushed on his larynx, formed the guttural language again. A computer sounding substitute voice charged, “I don’t ever want one again. I’d rather be dead.”
And we’re thinking, okay, he’s not serious.
We nodded and went on with other things at hand. Pushed no further for adjectives that described this simple marvel. One that allowed him verbal communication as well as an ability to breathe. But he’s agitated. Doesn’t perform well with morphine. We were impressed by the fact Dad demanded anything at all. Though he was changing on us, he’d never been a demander. No opinions or advice, solicited or otherwise.
But things do indeed change. Then stay the same. Start. Stop. Turn around.
Aaron’s death.
Dad’s cancer.
Imagine unity in sorrow, and for a large part, there was. For the larger part, just a great deal of driving, of going to and from. Radiation, chemo, hospital stays. These drives across the desert lands of Southeastern New Mexico and the red-flat plains of Texas
My turn.
Lisa’s turn.
Gary’s turn.
Stripped siblings.
My dad and son were extreme opposites. Heads and tails. Affected by each other, yes. Grandpa and grandson, always. But during their earthly lives, they used a third party to communicate. Me. I was the one who relayed their news back and forth. Their relationship didn’t call for many words. He’s good. Doing well. He loves you. Not much more than that.
There was never a scene between them, sparked or somber. At least, none that I knew of. Dad had never said. Never used his mouth much. Description. Dialogue. Filtered through me, or so I thought.
Besides driving, my siblings and I took turns staying, nursing, encouraging, of filling syringes and bleeding their air before pouring chocolate or strawberry nutrients down a plastic tube sticking deep into Dad’s feeding hole, of ripping sticky bandages from the slit in his neck. Him: jumping, jerking, shaking. The ripened raw of his neck, a very thin and flaccid neck, blazed before our eyes each time the bandage was pulled, at first gentled, measured. And right before he hollered, we’d already given one quick yank. He never saw it coming. We blocked his view, but never failed his dread.
There seemed to be so much trying for all of us. We each tried to snatch away moments of sorrow, to hold each other, express our grief. Discuss dismay. Watch the fight of the feeble. Hear that the strong have died. Sorted mixed messages of how the good die young and only the strong survive.
During those days, Dad and I each lived in a world of pain on hemispheres half a world apart. Me with my loss. Dad, merely trying to gain.
Back then, after long talks with my God and myself, I pushed for existence in the world where my dad fought to live. I envisioned his mother, the grandmother who’d spoiled me as long as she’d known me, and I'd think, okay, MaMa, I’ll take care of your son. You take care of mine.
I struck up another deal.
But soon, another drive, another appointment, another hope that felt false, I’d go back into my hole, Dad into his. We shared the rides, long questions, short answers.
With this cancer, there was something without a singular name. Always the unexpected response. Rarely the reply hoped for, yearned for. Nothing shared—much lost. I’d wondered back then if it was fear or miscommunication causing this lack. Maybe things had always stunk this way, but just now reared a full gland.
Would a quick burst relieve the nasty pressure?
We lacked the right balance of words. I chose too many, my dad, not enough.
On one ride he said, “I had a dream about Aaron.”
“Really? What?”
“Just him in my house.” Then he hacked and choked into one more tissue, his mouth a moist mass of phlegm. “I’m so sick of being sick.”
No more words then.
I found out later Dad had shared his sorrow about Aaron with my sister-in-law. They’d stopped at a local convenience store just down the street from her house. I knew well the sign on the store’s front that must have caused him to reminisce: Copenhagen/Skoal 2/$7.89.
“I’m sure going to miss buying dip and sending to that boy,” he said. Words enough.
It was the affirmation I needed when Karen told me. Dad and I had shared grief after all. Through a third party and with an interpreter, yes. Inadvertently, true. But in crucial times, we take what we can get. And I was grateful.
Two, three, maybe even four times, I’d told Dad how those few words he’d spoken over the phone some twenty-odd years ago had ensured what must’ve been one of God’s greatest gifts to me. My son. “Just think Dad, if it hadn’t been for you, I would’ve had that surgery and missed twenty-one years of the biggest roller coaster ride of my life.”
There was never a reply. Any elaboration, only mine.
Weeks later, in a hospital room in which twenty-four hours of chemotherapy for five days straight was administered into the weakened man I hung out with, where vitals in red-numbered digital counted the two bags held in juxtaposition, one the fluid of poison, the other, a fluid of life—it was in this setting Dad disclosed his dream. He said Aaron and a host of other young men dressed in olive drab stopped and slept for a night in his apartment. In Dad’s dream, Aaron had slept on top of the covers with him; he’d spent the night and slept next to his Grandpa. The other troops and their journey’s humped gear had rested on the living room floor.
Dad told me, “It was so real. I woke up, cold, I guess. I still thought they were there. I got up from the bed and went and hollered at those boys in there, I asked them, ‘Why doesn’t somebody get up and turn off the air conditioner?’”
I don’t remember what I said after he recited his dream. I surely said something. My mind embarked on a quick interpretation. Of Dad and Aaron, together. Was Dad dying?
Me. Always reaching.
Sometime after this, I learned Aaron had been trached upon the rooftop of that house in Fallujah. The trach brought him back to life for a short time. After I found out, I sought Dad. To share this. I wanted him to tell me once again how horrible the trach had been for him in the hospital. How he’d rather die than have one again. To fill in some final hole for me of those last few moments before my son’s soul and spirit left me here with too few family men to talk with. To grieve with me over the fact that one of our biggest talkers may have been without words in the end.
To tell me, “He’s better off then.”
“It wasn’t so bad, I guess. I just hated all that stuff coming out,” he said.
“You said you felt like you were choking. Wasn’t it hard to breathe?” I tried to remind him of the nightmare of it all.
He looked so sad. “Yeah, I guess it was.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “This hernia of mine is about to drive me up the wall.”
I didn’t say anything, but I remember thinking, another freaking hole. This time, with some little bit of acceptance. Still though, some word yearned for.
Old men dream dreams into the future while their daughters write words from the past.
Searching the spirit.
Pushing.
Dad died two days short of three years and four months after his first diagnosis, one day after Karen’s birthday. It was a second and short-lived cancer; liver cancer killed him. And it was within that time my sister-in-law reminded me of another story.
She must’ve told me the story once before, before Aaron had fallen in Fallujah, before Dad’s first diagnosis, but at that time, its relevance buried itself beneath some other thought, some other hope. So she told me again how Aaron had helped her and my brother carry Dad’s new television into his senior-citizen apartment on the eve of Christmas 2003.
Before Aaron left a second time for the dirt of a different desert.
Before he left his grandpa one more time, that last time, he’d told my dad how much he loved him. The two of them had hugged a little longer and bawled like the real men they were. Men with full hearts.
One heart I’d always known.
The other, I finally came to know better. The man with few enough words. Words that counted. Measured with meaning. As deep as they were few.
God prompted me in the knowledge that Dad’s time was short. Short-short. If I didn’t want regret, I needed to get over there more. The caretaker that usually cared for Dad was due for vacation. I applied for her job and started it just short of two months before he died.
I’ve made a rather good employee since my five years in the military. I knew I’d be at Dad’s four hours a day, five days a week. What surprised me is that I often stayed longer. Off the clock.
Lord, how I miss them.
There are those who’ve suspected Aaron knew, somewhere within the deepest recesses of his soul—that he knew—he knew when he left us that Christmas in 2003 that he’d joined with us for his last, his last Christmas with us.
I don’t know.
I will ask him though.
I have a list full of questions.
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