Home Is Burning (19 page)

“Oh, hi, Dan,” they'd reply. “So did you guys receive the noncompete?”

“Yes, we received your ridiculous noncompete forms, though I'm not too sure you have much to worry about, given that my dad has FUCKING LOU GEHRIG'S DISEASE. If he somehow does live long enough to compete against you, and wins, your business should probably not exist,” I wanted to say.

“Yes, we got them! We'll sign them and mail them back!” I actually said.

After a long day of getting a lot of really, really big business deals situated thanks to my amazing, herolike help, we received a call from my aunt Sarah. She informed us that my grandma Barbie wasn't doing so hot, and that the doctors were expecting her to last just a couple more weeks.

“Well, add another piece of shit to this feces burger we're munching on, am I right?” I said to my dad after we hung up with Sarah.

He had few working neck muscles, so his head always hung, but even if he hadn't had Lou Gehrig's disease, I'm pretty sure his head still would have drooped. Death was hitting him on all fronts: the poor guy was losing his mother while he was losing himself.

“I guess we're both losing parents. We finally have something in common besides our love for the Jazz.” He looked like he was about to cry. I shouldn't have said that. I'm a fucking idiot. Maybe I should learn how to keep my fat mouth shut. He took a deep breath in, probably wishing he had the ability to raise his hand and smack me upside the head, but instead said, “Let's get home. I've got to shit.”

We'd known my grandma's death was coming. She was eighty-four. She had casually smoked and drunk most of her life. She had been in decline for years, unable to walk on her own. In fact, she wanted to die. She, like my grandpa Wendell—who shot himself in the head with a sawed-off shotgun when his health started to deteriorate in 1994—thought that there was a certain quality of life that needed to be maintained. If that quality of life dropped below a certain level, then death was the best option.

It was a trait that most members of my dad's family seemed to share: the desire to have life end before it got too horrible. It was the opposite of how my mom thought, the opposite of how my siblings and I were trained to think. I remember when we were at a wedding on Lummi Island—a tranquil spot off the coast of middle-of-nowhere northern Washington—my dad, then healthy, and I had talked about his mother's health. While we stood watching the clear, nearly motionless water slowly roll onto the rocky shore, he mentioned that there were quality of life issues related to Grandma Barbie, and that she had the right to determine when she'd had enough. To him, death shouldn't be a long and painful event. It should be handled with grace and poise. He called it “dying with dignity.”

“Yeah, but hopefully she doesn't blow her brains out like Grandpa Wendell, just from a cleanup perspective,” I'd wanted to say.

“God, it's really beautiful up here, isn't it?” I really said, changing the subject from death to not death. I didn't like talking about morbid things back then.

My dad looked around and took a breath of fresh air. “Yeah, it truly is.” He would be diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease two months later and never return to Lummi Island. It was his last look at the place. Too bad he had to spend part of it contemplating the end of his mother's life instead of taking it all in.

Since Lummi, my grandma had been in waiting mode, sitting in her fancy house along Pocatello, Idaho's Juniper Hills Country Club Golf Course, hoping that something would go drastically wrong with her ailing body so she could elect to not treat it. Nothing life threatening was happening, though. Sure, her knees were ruined, and I think she had something wrong with her hip, and I think she also had something wrong with her bladder, or some other body part that I didn't want to think about, her being my grandmother and all. It seemed as though she had been waiting for a couple of years now.

Finally, finally, finally—praise the good lord—her prayers were answered. Her kidneys started shutting down.

“Well, shit, Dad. What awful timing, right?” I said while he pumped out a ten-pound grizzly bear shit back at home. He nodded his head as much as he could.

“What do you want to do? You want to run up there and visit her? I'm sure we could find some sort of AC power adapter to run your BiPAP, and I drive real fast. Still got some L.A. in me,” I said. He nodded his head as much as he could.

“ROAD TRIP!” I yelled as I extended my hand for a high five, forgetting about his disability.

We planned on leaving for Grandma Barbie's house the next day. I was able to round up a power adaptor for the BiPAP at Radio Shack. I didn't even know Radio Shacks still existed, but they did, and man, are they a great place to pick up supplies for a road trip with the terminally ill. Maybe that should be their new angle. I also loaded the car with diapers, baby wipes, a spare pair of pants, the urinal, cans of Promote to keep my dad alive, and pretzels, sunflower seeds, and beef jerky to keep me alive. I also brought my dad's communication device, not so he could use it, but so I could showcase all the jokes I had loaded into it to my dad's family.

Greg decided to accompany us on this journey. It would be nice to have him aboard. My mom had never gotten along with my dad's family, and it had been even worse since she shunned them at the Boston Marathon. In particular, she hated my grandma, going as far as referring to her as “The Queen B,” the B standing for Bitch. So there was no way she was coming. And the little girls had school. Tiffany agreed to keep an eye on the ladies of the Marshall clan while the men were in Pocatello.

Greg and I helped my dad get his near-limp body into the car, set him up on the BiPAP, turned on the car, and started the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Pocatello from Salt Lake. Greg hummed Disney songs. I slammed sunflower seeds and beef jerky into my fat mouth. We were just a pack of dudes on a road trip, rolling alongside the beautiful Wasatch Mountains up Interstate 15 as if we were invincible.

Though my mom didn't get along with my dad's family, I enjoyed hanging with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Most of them were up there playing golf, drinking, and hanging with the Queen B while she slowly died. I always wished my mom and my dad's family could find a way to get along. Because of the hatred, we unfortunately weren't very close. I knew the circumstances of this visit were shitty—the death of my last living grandparent and all—but there is no better way to forgive and forget the past than through birth or death. It reminds us that most of our problems are self-made and that the only real problems are centered around trying to stay alive for as long as possible. So, part of me thought that maybe between my grandma dying and my dad dying, we'd find a way to patch things up and all get along like a big, happy, loving family.

We rolled into Pocatello with ease. It was a simple drive. I think my dad only needed to piss once, which wasn't a big deal since we had the urinal with us. The big thing was that he didn't shit. What a blessing!

Though I was looking forward to seeing my grandma, aunts, and uncles, I could tell my dad was sad. I didn't know if it was because he was upset about seeing his mom for the last time or if he was worried about showing his family exactly how much damage his disease had already done to his body. Though there was nothing he could do about it, he felt guilty for the way the disease made other people feel, especially his family. It was an interruption to their life-is-a-vacation mentality. They wanted nothing to do with it.

We arrived at Grandma Barbie's and sat in the car looking at the house. It was a single-level residence to make getting around simpler. Apparently, stairs suck for old people. When we're born, life is really simple. It's all about keeping the stress to a minimum. As we grow into adulthood, we just complicate our lives with junk: kids, mortgages, marriages, cars, insurance, jobs, drugs, stairs. As we start heading for death, it's all about making things simple again. No more stairs. Big, safe, easy-to-drive cars. We only engage in a few simple, mindless activities that relax the brain. No jobs. No sex. No problems.

“You ready for this?” I asked my dad.

My dad took the deepest breath he could muster and said, “Yeah. Let's do it.”

Greg and I got out first. Greg was in charge of carrying things like the BiPAP machine and the urinal. I was in charge of moving the communication device and the old sack of dying bones that was our father.

“Why'd you bring that stupid thing?” Greg asked about the communication device.

“I don't know. Jokes. Plus, I think they'd like to know that Dad will still be able to communicate with them even after shit gets really bad,” I said.

I got him out of the car and we started the long walk into the house. Every walk is long when you have Lou Gehrig's disease, but this one seemed especially lengthy. I rang the doorbell.

“Just open the door,” my dad said.

“Oh yeah, I forgot you could do that with family,” I said. We opened the door and went in.

All my aunts and uncles carry that drinker's weight and have faces that seem to be permanently stained red. Sure, we were walking into my grandma's living room, but we could've very well been walking into a frat party where everyone was thirty years older than they should be. Right in the middle of it all was Grandma Barbie, the Queen B.

She looked pretty good. She had a few nurses caring for her, so she was dressed and put together. She even wore makeup, which almost made me cry. Here she was about to die, but she couldn't let go of that pressure to always look her best. And she did look her best. In fact, she looked beautiful. My grandma had a lot of good and love in her—even if my mom couldn't see it. She had, for example, paid for all of her grandkids' educations, which were not cheap.

“Hello, everyone,” we said, forcing smiles.

They all lifted their drinks to say hi. I set my dad up right next to my grandma so they could talk and hold each other's hands. My dad had always been my grandma's favorite, so they shared that warmth and togetherness that only a favorite son and a mother could.

“You look really good, Mom,” my dad said.

“So do you,” my grandma lied. My dad looked way worse than her. We weren't taking as good of care of him as my grandma's nurses were taking of her. She rubbed her old hand over the top of my dad's bony hand. His fingers were starting to sort of coil up. She managed to uncoil her boy's fingers and run her motherly hands up and down them, probably something she used to do when my dad was a child.

“You're very brave and a very strong woman,” my dad said.

“No, you're the brave one, Bobby,” she said. She always called him Bobby. That was his childhood name.

“This all sucks, doesn't it?” my dad said.

“Yes, yes it does, but let's have a drink,” my grandma said, fighting back the tears. My grandma's boyfriend, Walter, made my grandma a strong gin and tonic. Her favorite. She grabbed it with her liver-spotted hands and took down a gulp big enough to kill her. She probably shouldn't have been drinking, what with the kidney, but oh well. Fuck it. My dad didn't have a drink. He couldn't.

Everyone else refilled their glasses. I let my dad and grandma chat it up and share their last moments together while I talked to some of my aunts and uncles. They said they were grateful that Greg and I had taken some time off from our lives to help with my dad. In some ways, it meant that they didn't have to. My aunts Sarah and Ellen, in particular, were very sweet about it, thanking us repeatedly and telling us what good sons we were. That's always nice to hear.

My dad needed to go on the BiPAP for a little bit, so I laid him down for a nap. Then Greg and I went and sat down next to our grandmother.

“Well, Grandma, sorry you're dying and all. It's hard to see,” I said.

“Me, too,” she said, with a little hint of bullshit in her voice. She wanted to die, after all. All these extra good-byes were just extra pain for her.

“Thanks for paying for my college. It led to a pretty good job out of school. Though I had to leave it because of Bobby Boy's Lou Gehrig's shenanigans…” I said.

“I'm glad you got a good education,” she said. She took a big sip of her gin and tonic and looked me over. “We never really got to know each other, did we?”

“Yeah, if only my mom and you weren't in a bitch fight my whole life,” I wanted to say.

“No, we didn't, really,” I really said. “It's too bad. I think we could've been pals.”

“Well, maybe there's still some time,” she said. But we both knew there wasn't. We'd never have a relationship. “Let's have another drink,” she said, draining everything in her glass but the ice. She motioned to Walter to get her another round. Everyone else refilled, too. I guess dying with dignity involves a lot of drinking.

*   *   *

I didn't really know what to do once the conversations ran out. I couldn't get drunk because I had to drive home. Driving drunk in the dark would most certainly elevate our chances of dying. I wanted us to live. I wanted to see how all of this played out. I was curious. So, instead of drinking, I just wandered around my grandma's house. Greg was chatting with my aunts, so I started to explore. It wasn't their family home, so it didn't quite have the history I was hoping for. I couldn't go sit in my dad's childhood room and smell his old clothes, or anything creepy like that. But my grandma had a lot of photos up. I looked at a few. Since we were the outcasts of the family, there weren't many of us; just a few of me in my old basketball uniform, or Greg dressed as the Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz
, or Chelsea in her dance leotards, or Jessica with her lacrosse stick, or Tiffany holding her snowboard.

Then I wandered into my grandma's room. On the wall closest to her bed—presumably the one she looked at the most—were her most prized pictures. There was one with her mom and sisters. One of my grandpa Wendell and her in Sun City, where they had a second home. The rest were of my dad and his siblings. I was drawn to the pictures of my dad. I looked at one of him as a high schooler. He had gigantic ears, a chipped front tooth, and was going through a shaggy-hair phase. He looked like the type of guy you'd want to be your friend: not a jock, but not a complete nerd. Just a good guy. Strange to think that this good guy was destined to get Lou Gehrig's disease later in life. I sort of wanted to take out a stamp and stamp
TERMINALLY ILL
across my dad's boyish face. I wondered if they sold stamps like that.