On Pluto (26 page)

Looking out over to the reflective beauty of Narragansett Bay, in an epiphany of conflict, I screamed out in my Jeep,
“Screw it! Just Screw it!”
I resolved to focus on my wife, kids, and work, and whatever else happens, it just happens. Screw it. I can't control the rest, I reasoned, nor could my mom. Gotta learn to walk in faith.

Moments later, I found myself smack behind a slow-moving yellow freight truck. Given an affinity for the color, I drew near, and was drawn to a large inscription on the back of the truck. It read: “You are NEEDED.” Needed was in all caps, a sign perhaps of what was to come.

I felt the presence of God within. Call it what you will; perhaps it was my mother looking after me. Whatever, I felt on hallowed ground. I lingered behind for several minutes, absorbed with the message until I realized I had an appointment with a needle. So I passed the truck, and two miles up the highway, my attention was drawn to a digital sign loop at a local hotel, the kind of rotating message you often see off the highway. There was a message flashing. It read: “Thank you for all you can do!”

I was starting to get the point. About 40 minutes up the highway, as I approached the Bourne Bridge, I was back in my pity party, fretting work, family, and life itself.

“This sucks,” I thought.

A car passed me on the left. It had plates with the state logo: “Live Free or Die.” The vanity plate read, “SECURE.”

I felt as though the Lord had taken a two-by-four across my head as I pulled into the urologist's office. Immediately, I emailed my brother-in-law, Lou, in Phoenix, and a close Kansas City extended family member Jerry Riordan about it, both strong in faith, but I would need yet another wallop.

Whack, whack, whack. Big Papi had a banner afternoon. After the biopsy, I began bleeding from those secret places,
front and back, a normal flow at first for the procedure, then the floodgates opened over several hours. I called the doctor twice and was told this would pass, but the only thing passing were pints of blood. I didn't call back again; my self-absorption with pity endured. I thought I had a way out. The discharge cycle, a hemorrhage now, went on for about 24 hours, a loss of an estimated six pints of blood; my exit strategy, I thought, without the guilt of a more hands-on suicide. I saw no upside in the direction of my life, and so chose not to tell anyone about the full extent of the hemorrhaging, not even my wife.

But “nothing in creation is hidden from God's sight,” as Hebrews 4:13 notes. I should have remembered that New Testament verse drilled into my head as a youth.

I knew in my heart that if I fell asleep, I might never wake up, and that I didn't have the right to end it here. And so, with the family asleep and my blood count on empty, I drove myself, dizzy and disorientated, to Cape Cod Hospital about 20 miles away, testimony again to my diminished state of mind and to the grace of God. The emergency room nurse took one glance at my ashen face, sat my sorry ass into a wheelchair, and within seconds, whisked me to an emergency room cubicle.

I instructed the nurse not to call my wife. I wanted to ride this one out alone, particularly if I was heading to Pluto, as I had hoped, for the final trip. To my horror, I was directed to the same emergency cubicle where my father had been taken years ago with internal bleeding, and where my mother, tired of fighting, finally gave in to the demon Alzheimer's. In the cubicle, I bled out another two pints. The average person carries about eight to ten pints of blood; with a loss of four pints, time to call a priest, minister, or rabbi. Losing half your blood, medical experts agree, is a sure way to expire. I had lost an estimated eight pints of blood in all. I was on empty again.

“Do you know you're supposed to be dead?” a nurse asked me bluntly, trying to engage in conversation, keeping a solemn
moment as light as possible, and yet discerning my motive.

“Yeah, but no one had the courtesy to tell me,” I replied.

My mind was racing at the time. I thought of favorite writer Joseph Heller, author of
Catch 22
, who wrote, “He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.” I was trying to die in the attempt and was reaching for the stars, fully detached, and now fading in mind and body. Alone in my cubicle, as doctors tried to discern how to stop the bleeding, I had my come-to-Jesus moment. The light. I sensed a powerful, pure bright light at the end of a tunnel; I was at peace and hoped my mother, grandfather, dad, and brothers Gerard and Martin would be there to greet me, but in my gut, I knew this wasn't my time, not my call. I looked to the ground and saw the pool of blood on the floor, as I had witnessed years earlier with my father in a wheelchair. I cried out on the brink: “Lord, take me home, or bring me back, but please don't leave me in this place.”

Within minutes, I was wheeled into a surgical unit, and doctors determined how to stop the bleeding. There would be no final trip to Pluto today. The flight had been cancelled.

For all of us, there is a cycle of birth, life, and death. And there are second chances. The human body is intent on living, in spite of what happens in illness. Cells keep multiplying, breathing is involuntary; the brain, even when teetering, directs the intention to live and create. My second chance was reinforced with another encounter with Dr. Alice Daley, the physician on call, a caring individual who had presided over my parents' end-of-life conversation. Clearly, we were in an orbital path.

“I hope, Doctor, you're not going to give me the: ‘it's-ok-to-die' speech today,” I said as she entered the room.

Dr. Daley smiled in a way that said I had dodged a bullet, direct to the head.

“Go, and sin no more,” the nurse on duty replied. It was a sobering directive.

****

Apoplectic over news of my hospital stay, my personal physician, Dr. Conant, was far more direct the following week regarding my failed attempt to bleed to death. He scribbled in my medical record after a follow-up visit: “Discussed ambivalent feelings, re: near miss with exsanguination. Very concerned about worsening memory; he has to use maps and tricks to function daily; long discussion regarding risk factors.”

Dr. Conant then took a blank piece of paper and drew a bell curve, as if I were back in the sixth grade. He placed a large “X” on the downward slope. “Here's where you are,” he said, trying yet again to get my attention. “You need to back down on commitments that require high-level cognitive and judgment.”

“Time is running out,” he said. “Things are going to get worse. Do I have to come over to your house and declare you incompetent? If that's what it takes, I will.”

The words were difficult to swallow. I love Barry like a brother, but screw him, I raged in anger. Sure he had my best interest at heart, but, you know, just screw him. Who does he think he is, a doctor or something?

“
Worse
, Barry?” I thought to myself, aping again a line from Christmas Vacation.
Take a look around you, Barry. We're at the threshold of hell!

That afternoon I tried to cut through my angst by mowing the lawn, about an acre and a half of it. Driving my sitdown, I was still stewing over what Conant had told me earlier.

Time is running out?
I repeated to myself.
Really? Yeah, well, Barry, we'll see.

Trimming the slope behind the house, I noticed that my favorite watch, a gift from my wife, was loose on my left wrist. Within seconds, as I cut between the reedy locusts and a thick pine, the watch, to my horror, slowly slipped off my left wrist and fell to the ground. I witnessed the cutting blade suck the watch under the mower and spit out the remains; a small section of the watch band and a silver, oval watch frame were all that was left.

“Time is running out!” The words echoed through my brain. I've kept the oval watch frame and stretch of band in the top draw of my dresser as a reminder of vulnerability.

****

I was feeling particularly vulnerable at my buddy Paul Durgin's 60
^th
birthday party in Milton outside Boston in late spring. The town and surrounding area is filled with overachieving Irish types from Boston who have dropped their “R”s, and have learned to walk upright—surnames like Mulligan, Norton, Corcoran, Cunningham, Mulvoy, Forry, Brett, and Flynn. I'm comfortable with this lot, fully in my wheelhouse, but today I'm listing portside in the wake of more confusion, swamped by memory loss and the failure at times to recognize old friends. I used to work a room like a seasoned politican; they called me “the senator from Cape Cod”—always with a friendly hand out, piercing eye contact, a quip for all. But in the moment, I'm feeling detached and isolated, a full spin cycle from extravert to intravert—a dizzying turnabout in personality. I'm comfortable in my own skin; it's just that now I don't want anyone in there with me.

And so I made the rounds as best I could, trying to reminisce with guys I've known for more than a quarter century, following a script that I've used many times before. I've learned, as a strategy, to keep the chat short, get to the point, move on, and hope that I'm not asked to retrieve information lost. The strategy is tiring, and often “just inches for a quick getaway,” as Jack Nicholson jibed in
Terms of Endearment
, I get sucked into a black hole of conversation, a gravity pull for me that is smothering. After a fretful working of the room that afternoon, I retired to a seat of comfort—outside the Durgin house, behind the wheel of my car parked on the street. I sat there for an hour and a half, just grabbing the steering wheel, trying to understand what had just happened, and hoping to drive off the face of the earth, yet
I knew I was stuck in the present. How did I get to this place?

Reluctantly, I returned to the party, feeling like a time warrior. Paul and his wife, Leslie, knew the drill.

“You back from your planet yet?” asked Leslie.

“Yeah,” I replied, “It was a wobbly trip!”

****

The flight back from San Francisco several months later with daughter Colleen was shaky, lots of forceful air currents rocking the US Airways flight to Boston. I was there on business, and Colleen, as she has throughout my life, was at my side. Doctors have advised me not travel alone. In between meetings, San Francisco was a blissful father-daughter bonding just months before her marriage to Matt Everett, a fine Baltimore lad with misplaced sports loyalties, at least in my silly parochial mind. But that's what I love about Matt; he presses forward against all odds.

So does Colleen. On the direct flight home from San Francisco, the airline booked me next to an Emergency Exit in the front of the cabin; Colleen in the seat next to me. The flight attendent asked if I was up to the task.
Hell, yes
, I thought. Colleen obliged. But it was not a good place for me. Some where over Chicago, I was disoriented from being on a plane for hours, and had to take a leak. Happens. My mind told me that the door to the bathroom was directly to the right, the Emergency Exit; all I had to do was to pull up the level. So I grabbed for it. Just seemed the right thing to do.

“Daaaaaad!”
Colleen screamed in a cry that could be heard in back of the plane. “What the hell are you doing?”

With my right hand on the Emergency Exit lever, I realized from my daughter's chilling tone that this was not a good idea. And surely it wasn't. In a flash, I envisioned being sucked out of the plane with my daughter, along with rows 2 through 30. Helluva way to end a good trip; kinda puts a damper on it.

I envisioned authorities telling my wife: “Your nut of a husband decided to take a short cut home, and things didn't work out well for the rest of the passengers. That really sucks, ma'am!”

Relax. I won't sit near the Emergency Exit anymore. Promise!

****

Dr. Conant's bell curve was beginning to resonate. The bell would toll again on a business trip to Martha's Vineyard, while meeting clients at the Chowder House Tavern, elegantly appointed in oak and mahogany, near the edge of pristine Oak Bluffs harbor. With its gingerbread and camp-style architecture, Oak Bluffs is a fantasy unto itself with its network of curving narrow streets. “Carpenter's Gothic,” it is called here. In the mid-1800s, the town was the site in summer of huge revivalist-Methodist camp meetings in Wesleyan Grove, named after John Wesley, the open-air preacher and founder of the Methodist movement. I was in need of big amen that night.

Looking for my clients as I entered the Chowder House—where I've eaten many times—I saw a snug anteroom to the right that I had never noticed before. It was decorated much the same as the restaurant, with people sitting around the bar seeming to have fun. They were waving at me. I looked closer and saw my clients at a table in the corner. I waved back, trying to determine how to enter the room. I couldn't find the door. I knocked on the window, beckoning the clients to come get me. They started laughing. I knocked again. They waved back, almost taunting me. I kept searching for the door, and in frustration, worked my way to the men's room, thinking there might be access there. No luck. When I returned to the window, the clients were still waving and laughing. I knocked again, then my attention was drawn over my right shoulder. I was stunned at what I saw. My clients were sitting right behind me. I had been looking into a mirror, in the moment peering into infinity, the gateway to a parallel universe, in the vicinity of the Kuiper Belt.