The Day We Said Goodbye

Chapter One

After the memorial service. August 23, 2008.

I pulled my car into my Mom’s driveway at just past ten in the evening. As bustling as her neighborhood was by day, that late in the evening it was still, at peace, a reflection of a city gone to bed.

And we were coming back from saying our final farewell to my father.

My car was a blue Honda Civic. My Mom’s house was in Santa Ana, California. It was the same house where I’d grown up. And, as it was a Sunday night, I had to get back to my home and get to bed so I could go to work the next day.

My employer had allowed me one day of bereavement after my father died, which I only found out about after being out of work on the day my father died. That was my one day? I thought. Thanks for telling me.

Thanks again for taking care of everything, my Mom told me as I stopped the car. My Mom’s voice came out a bit shaky due to her advancing years. Nearly seventy, she certainly didn’t look it and I’m always grateful for her youthful genes. I should also mention that she was pretty tired. We’d been on the road all weekend.

Sure, Mom, I said. I’m glad we were able to get everything worked out.

My Mom smiled across the car at me, that same smile she always gives, as if she’s just so happy everything worked out. Not just the big things, either. Anything. Everything. She has reason to be happy, I suppose. Things haven’t always worked out for her. That was one of the reasons I felt I should take care of everything for her after my father died.

Don’t get the wrong idea. My father and mother had been divorced since 1970. And yet, she had been invited to attend his memorial service and she had gone. Here was an elderly woman who, for as much as she takes care of herself and as well as she handles her finances, had been asked to cross state lines to attend the memorial service of the man who had divorced her over thirty years before… I certainly couldn’t let her go alone.

And I guess that’s what the smile meant, looking across from the other side of the car.

Are you going into work tomorrow? she asked me?

I shrugged. I don’t have any more bereavement time, I told her.

Disbelieving, she asked, All they gave you was one day?

And I kind of shrugged my shoulders. That’s all they gave me, ma.

My mother had worked for years in a union factory with union benefits. She had enjoyed union pay and certainly more than one day off for bereaving a dead parent, if her tone of voice was to be believed. And yet, as far as I knew, here was someone who voted in every election for a political party that wanted nothing more than to destroy unions. The Republican Party had been doing little else but obliterating the middle-class since the days when she was married to my Dad. And yet, despite any consideration to common sense, she kept voting for them.

And she was shocked that all I got was one day.

I fought another impulse to remind her that her Republican votes had contributed to my lack of bereavement time. (Elections have consequences, after all.) Instead, I told her I had to go home and got out of the car to help her out. I gave her a hug and she kissed me on the cheek and then I walked her to her door and said Good night.

Back in my car, I backed out of the driveway and pulled away, driving past the high school I’d attended almost a quarter of a century before. I ignored that statistic, tapped my phone and called my wife, Vicky.

I’m free, I told her.

You are? she asked. You survived?

I survived, I said and drove home.

* * *

Sean and I met several weeks later and talked over breakfast.

Sean’s a strange combination of elements for a best friend: I hit him the first time we met, he’s certainly not artistic, our adult lives have certainly gone in different directions, and we have little in common. And yet, none of that seems to matter. Despite our differences, we think very much alike. Not only do we get each other’s jokes but we make each other’s jokes. We make each other laugh. Somehow, that’s maintained our friendship. And it’s a good thing, too, because as I get older – hell, as I get old – I find myself with fewer and fewer friendships remaining from my youth. His friendship is just about the only reassuring continuity I have left.

So this short, scruffy red-head with a perpetual beard sat with me in a booth at Keno’s, a Southern California chain of greasy spoons. (I think it may be motor grease.) I was somewhat less scruffy due to my office job. My head of dark and greying hair always fell in my face and no matter how much I rode my bike my gut seemed ever-present.

I think I want to write about it, I said to Sean, having just told him about my father’s memorial service, about traveling with my Mom, and about seeing my family in the wilds of Arizona.

What are you going to write? he asked.

The whole thing, I said. I tucked into my eggs, hash browns, sausage, and pancakes – the usual.

Sean tucked into his eggs, hash browns, bacon, and toast. What do you mean, the whole thing?

All of it, I replied. "The only thing is, I’m not sure how. Do I write it as a novel, so I don’t have to worry about offending anyone? Do I do it like a memoir? Do I make it a philosophy book, like I did with Climbing Maya? And if I do, what’ll it be about? What’s there to say?"

And where do you start? he added.

Where do I start? I took a sip from my coffee, which was actually one part coffee and nine parts sugar. I start where you always start in a book like that. I start at the beginning.

Chapter Two

And on top of that, my father’s dying. July 11, 2008

Have you spoken to Blanche? I just talked to her. Dad’s really bad. The tone in my brother’s voice conveyed everything I’d been expecting, only I hadn’t been expecting it to be conveyed to me. At least, not yet.

Richard, my youngest brother, hadn’t even bothered with small talk when he called. He just jumped right into, Dad’s really bad. While he didn’t come right out and say anything, I understood the purpose to it. After all, I lived in Southern California, in Anaheim. Dad lived with his wife, Blanche, in Chandler, Arizona. Richard lived in Bellevue, Washington and Dwight, my second-youngest brother, had recently moved to North Carolina. Keith, my older brother, had just moved to Vancouver, in southern Washington. And my sister, Audrey, was… well, I wasn’t exactly talking to her.

That was my family. If anyone was going to hop in their car and check on my Dad, it would be me.

And, I won’t lie here, there was something gratifying about that. I mean, I might have been the closest of my father’s children geographically but I harbored no illusions about being closest to him emotionally. Our relationship had never really worked out that way; we were always too busy trying to outwit each other, out-quip each other… I don’t know, avoid each other? Maybe. It just never really happened the way I hoped, maybe the way he hoped, too. So, I was kind of glad to be the one who got the call to go out there.

The next morning, I packed up an overnight bag – a backpack, basically. Even at 42, I hadn’t quite graduated to proper luggage. My wife, Vicky, couldn’t make it out with me; she was in the middle of a work project. I could tear myself away from work with no problem but Vicky was actually invested in her job. She was good at her job. She wasn’t some marketing writer who was waiting for one of his books to get published so he could quit a marketing career that was going nowhere and actually start living the life he had worked so hard to begin… that was me.

Vicky gave me a kiss, nestled and half-asleep in our bed, and I walked out into the half-light of dawn. At 5am, I wanted to get out before the heat of the Arizona, summer sun baked me like some exotic, cannibal’s delight.

I pulled out onto the 91 freeway, popped an Al Stewart disk into my CD player, made my way out towards Riverside where I could merge onto the 10 freeway and take that all the way to Phoenix and… stopped in the middle of freeway construction. The 10 was being widened or engorged or something but only one lane each way was open to allow for traffic to pass. I guess they decided to do this on a weekend when there would be less freeway traffic. Only the construction crews forgot this was Southern California, where there was no such thing as less freeway traffic. Ever.

And so I sat… and sat… and sat.

I didn’t get to Arizona until sometime in the evening, after the summer sun had spent all of its energy wasting my air conditioning and hung drooping in the western sky. Somewhere in California, Vicky was probably watching that sunset and thinking I was already at my Dad’s house. I didn’t call her, though I had just had a new hands-free system for my phone installed in my car. Something about this whole trip felt very private and I just didn’t want to talk about it at the time.

I stepped out into the evening sauna, having parked my car on the street, and walked up to my father’s door. Though my Dad and Blanche had lived in this house for quite a while, it didn’t feel like very long to me, only a few years. I remembered Blanche telling me and Vicky about how they chose the plants for the front of their house. They couldn’t have a lawn in the middle of the desert, or they could and were wise enough not to try it, so they chose some drought-resistant plants. It all seemed unreal in a way, walking up their front path now that my father was dying.

I knocked on the door… and hoped no one was home. Wouldn’t that have been easier? So sorry I missed you. I guess you were out at the movies or spelunking or something.

I wished.

I had known my father was sick for quite a while. Along with the rest of the family, I had read all the email updates on his condition, talked about it on the phone, had shared rumors and guesses. Point of fact, I knew. But I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to be a part of it.

Blanche opened the door with her fingers to her lips and directed me to the kitchen. Their home was a cozy, two-bedroom affair. It might have had three bedrooms but one room was used as an office. It was the kind of small home two people buy to grow old together in. My Dad was old but he certainly wasn’t old enough to be dying, not in this day and age. He had just turned 70 and, okay, he had lived with diabetes and high blood pressure and arthritis and a score of other aches and ailments but he had managed it all just fine. Blanche was ten years younger and, with her short, light brown hair and generous smile, didn’t look a day over 50.

What’s going on? I asked.

Your father just got to sleep. I don’t want to wake him. He’s been having such a hard time sleeping lately, I try to let him get his rest whenever he can, she whispered.

I gave her a nod and she gave me a hug and we both leaned on their kitchen counter and talked. I asked her how she was doing and she told me about the difficulties she faced maintaining some balance between work and home while taking care of my father. He had once simply been what you might call ailing but, more and more, it was clear he was dwindling. She showed me a laundry list of medications and doctor’s reports and appointments and suggestions. What did it all come down to?

That’s the strangest thing. They all say he’s healthy. That’s he’s perfectly healthy, Blanche said. She spoke with the sarcastic kind of laugh of a person who had seen enough idiot doctors. Clearly, my father was not healthy. He couldn’t eat or keep food down when he did eat. He wasted away more and more until he weighed less than a hundred pounds. He experienced dizziness, trouble swallowing, convulsions – and on and on and on. Despite the idiot doctors, he was not healthy!

I gave Blanche a hug, which wasn’t much but it was all I could think of at the moment. I couldn’t bear to see the torment beneath her always kindly face. Blanche always smiles for people but my father’s sickness was eating at her, too. I hugged her and she hugged me back. It was a nice feeling.

Let me tell you something about Blanche. It’s my favorite memory of her. This goes back to the early 1980s, when I was trying to write my first book. I was living with them then, the side of my family that consisted of my Dad, Blanche, Dwight, and Richard, for about a month. We lived out in the desert city of Bloomington, California. In my bedroom, Blanche or my Dad had set up a little desk where I could put my typewriter – yes, this was that long ago – and I did my best to carve out my first novel, to learn what it meant to be a writer. I was sixteen years old.

A few weeks later, we were visiting some of Blanche’s family in Huntington Beach. I had given Blanche a few pages of the novel to read and she was kind enough to take a few moments out of her visit – I was too young to understand how much that meant at the time or how to better time my requests, for that matter – and she sat with me and read the pages.

Her reading stopped at a certain passage and she laughed, just a little.

I was immediately offended.

Okay, so you should know that I am notoriously thin-skinned. Some of my family can be very sensitive, overly-sensitive, and I’m not immune to that. Hell, I take blue ribbons. My novel was not a comedy by any means and there Blanche sat, laughing at it!

… but then, she looked at me with a smile and she read the passage that had brought such mirth, Raphineal walked into his study, the plush carpet a foot thick. She asked, Did you mean for the carpet to be a foot thick?

I guess, I told her, with that teenager’s attempt at plausible deniability.

The thing is, she said, carpet is usually less than an inch thick.

But I wanted it to be really thick, I told her.

She gave me a nod and smiled again. Okay, then, she said. But you might want to make it a little less thick when you rewrite it.

I didn’t know anything about rewrites back then. I knew as much about writing as I knew about carpeting. But what I did know was that nobody had ever been interested in my writing before. My Mom discouraged me. My Dad ignored me. Blanche was, in a very real sense, my very first fan. She read everything back then and encouraged me. And when I made a goof – and I made more than my share of goofs – she let me know in the kindest fashion imaginable.

I loved Blanche in a way that was foreign for me, not because I had to because she was my family but because I wanted to because she was kind to me. And I couldn’t bear to see her kindness submerged in the sadness of my father’s illness.

With our embrace over, she asked me what had been going on in my life. I told her about my wife, Vicky, about her wonderful job and my horrible one, about my recent return to play writing and all of my attempts at selling my books. I wished I could tell her something really good, something that would encourage my Dad and make him feel better in his misery… but I didn’t have anything. All I had was my sarcasm and my humor, so I joked about how rotten things were and got her to smile. We shared a sandwich and realized the hour was growing late. I told her I’d see my Dad in the morning and went to bed.

Bed meant the futon in the spare room. Blanche had been kind enough to set it up, make it with sheets and blankets, and adorn it with pillows so I’d be comfortable. But I just kicked off my shoes and laid down on top of the blankets, still dressed. I don’t know why but I wanted to be ready in case anything happened.

I called Vicky and told her about my trip. We whispered, me because I didn’t want to disturb my Dad, which was unlikely even in their small house, and Vicky because she had been sleeping. It was nearly 11pm. But the sound of her voice refreshed me, washed away my sadness and exhaustion, up until the point where she said, I’ve got nothing else. I need to go to sleep. Say what you want about my wife; she’s a true romantic.

Okay, I whispered. I love you.

Are you coming home tomorrow? she asked.

Of course, I told her. I’ve got to go to work on Monday.

Yeah… she said. I’m sorry about that.

I worked at a company called D-Link and my particular job was the kind where my boss took credit for everything I did, periodically took me into a conference room, closed the door and screamed at me, and told me every hour or so to Look busy. To me, it was a little slice of hell.

Me too, I said.

She spoke in a fading voice, I love you. Goodnight.

Goodnight, I said… and then, slowly, gradually, stayed awake all night long.

I’m what you might call an insomniac. My wife calls it really, really, holy crap is he an insomniac. In short, I don’t sleep very often. How often? In a good week, I probably average five hours a night for five nights out of the week. Of course, when my stress level goes up my sleep level dips down. Between my job, my Dad dying, and my inability to make my dream of being a writer come true… the math gets tricky.

So, I walked their house in the middle of the night, looking at their DVD collection and trying out their sofa. I caught about an hour of sleep there in the morning and woke to find my Dad watching TV on the recliner. Actually, I think he was sleeping, too.

Blanche came by and said, Don’t worry. Your Dad likes to sleep and watch the news. If you want to go back to sleep, go ahead.

I did.

And I awoke at around noon. Blanche and I had a little lunch. She tried to get Dad to eat and, as I was watching her trying to take care of him… I couldn’t handle it. The emotional cocktail of watching your Dad die is a potent one and I did something inexcusable if, perhaps, forgivable. I said, Listen, I need to go for a walk. I stepped out before either of my folks had a chance to respond and I scrammed. In the heat of the July afternoon, I hurried to the corner. I stopped and realized what I’d done.

I had almost literally run away.

Boy, I said to myself. Aren’t you something?

I knew I had to do something; I had to have some reason for being out there. So, I called Vicky.

What’s up? she asked.

Nothing, I said. I was just out for a walk.

Her tone was incredulous. Now? She knew what July afternoons in Arizona were like.

I tried to explain why walking on the surface of the sun, or what they call shade in Arizona, was better than facing my ailing Dad. He’s just a shell of his former self, I said. And he was. My Dad had always been such a robust man – fat, even! Seeing him on that recliner, unable, unwilling to eat… I don’t know if I’ll ever adequately be able to express how that felt.

It wasn’t the first time I had faced this situation. Sean’s wife, Megan, had passed away only a couple of years before in a similar manner. In her case, leukemia had led to graft-versus-host and month after month of slow, wasting death. As she grew smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker, I tried to keep Sean’s spirits up. It was the only way I knew to help.

But this was my father. We all knew he was dying.

It scared the hell out of me.

When I went back to their house, Blanche had moved my Dad to the bed. She said, He understood you had to go out for a cigarette.

For a cigarette? I asked. I didn’t go out for a cigarette. I wish I’d gone out for a cigarette. Though I’d smoked for many years, I had actually stopped smoking the Christmas before and I was trying to keep to that. When I said I was going out for a walk, I actually just went out for a walk, I said.

With my father in his bed, Blanche and I watched a little bit of television as the afternoon turned to evening. I knew I’d have to leave once the sun went down. I had a long drive home. Before it was too late, Blanche asked, Do you want to say goodbye to your father?

Those words, say goodbye to your father, meant more than just a simple, See you later, Dad. I could feel it coming through her words. The time had come for me to say goodbye, to really say goodbye. I said, Sure, or something equally stupid and we both went into the bedroom.

Keith, Blanche said. My father’s name is Keith, the same as my brother. Ken wants to say goodbye.

My Dad muttered something. Urm. Urm. And that sounded to me like the sound of heartbreak because my father’s voice had always been such a clear baritone, a granite baritone. His was the kind of voice I always had a hard time arguing with. Back then, it was a good thing I had sarcasm. Son, he finally said to me.

Dad, I said. I was mentally kicking myself. Say something, I thought. Say something meaningful, something you’ve always wanted to say. This is your chance. I could count the times I had shared with my father when I had the opportunity to speak without being interrupted. Now, I could finally do it. I