Over the Rainbow

I am, I know, as I slip up on sixty, entering the age of imminent death.

Indeed, on any given day when I see palliative care patients, some, sometimes most, bracket my own age. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, no different than me living mine, than many I know or love, until life tosses a stick into the spokes and sends them over the handlebars.

Such a spill, in younger days, only meant scrapes that soon scabbed and healed.

But in my world now, over the handlebars too often means over the rainbow.

And bluebirds?

Not sure.

As for dreams that you dare to dream, all that’s important is all that ever was important, that they really do come true.

Which, of course, makes dreams still worth their dreaming.

And time, time all the more to cherish.

As in this, this very moment…


© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

“Don’t put me out with the trash…”

His smile meets mine from the corridor, as I gown and glove to see him.

“I’m not contagious,” he tells me, weakly, his face still a smile, one nevertheless showing concern, even if his only contagion is he himself, his life, what he learned along the way, what he, my new friend, may now teach me.

“You’re not contagious,” I say immediately from the doorway, knowing that he is thinking only of the cancer, that wolf, the one as real at his throat as the central line taped to his jugular, and me, myself, thinking mere MRSA, mere VRE, bugs as ubiquitous in hospitals these days as charts or IVs, so common as to be irrelevant, certainly now, now in the face, the very face, of this man, this one man, and this cancer leaching his one life.

“The hospital has rules,” I say, arms into gown; “I have to abide by them,” hands into gloves; “I’m not worried, nor should you be worried,” me, stepping into the room, finally and quickly closing any space between us.

“How are you, my friend?” I ask, my gloved hand reaching for his, his own as bare, as warm, as human as his God first made it, that hand his mother once held, and this — both of us so well aware, both the sons of mothers killed young, so very young — the day before Mother’s Day, “How are you feeling?”

Go ahead.

Go ahead and dismiss him as yet another disheveled 57-year-old, any better days long behind him, one of those prior-to-his-hospitalization, living-in-his-own-care, living-in-his-own-car guys, and this, in a Wal-Mart lot, at that, a dog his only companion, a dog loved and loving to this, a bitter end.

Go ahead.

57, just turned, looking 77, and that generous.

Found by whomever in the car he called home.

Brought to the hospital. Noted to have a blood pressure of 60/30, something you wouldn’t want. Hemoglobin 5, and ditto on the you-wouldn’t-want-that list. Badness, in a familiar term familiar to physicians, lurking, with more tests pending. An interesting patient. And, from any patient’s perspective, you never, ever, want to be interesting to a physician.

But whatever you’re now thinking, none of that matters.

Not the necrotic, metastatic cancer in his belly, as in tissue dead and tumor spreading from somewhere. Not the fact that he is the very vision of cachectic, as in skin over bone. Not his anemia, that ebb of a blood pressure, his critically low potassium level, not anything anyone but a physician might care about, at least by the numbers physicians so care about.

“Don’t put me out with the trash,” my new friend suddenly tells me. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

His face is all eyes, eyes the color of sky.

Eyes as blue as the bluest June meeting mine, my one hand covering his, my other embracing his face, the two of us a kiss, my yellow gown papering my bent form, white sheets shrouding the little left of the man who’d been, the two of us carving pietà from the room around us, from time itself, from all of time.

And his face shrunken by cancer to bone. His teeth rotted by time, by disease, maybe, it might be thought, by meth — and who cares, who cares now.

But those eyes, those blue eyes.

Listen to him, and you only guess at what those eyes have seen…

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes…”

“A marriage gone wrong,” he goes on, me letting him talk, my own plan to get home early after rounding, now nobody’s undone plan but mine, a plan all at once abandoned, as I let him talk — and talk.

A girl he loved. A girl at 17. A girl he, of course, had to love.

And children.

Later, a farm in Ohio, a farm lost, lost to another woman who took him for what he was worth.

A job in Iowa. Lost, too, with lost benefits. The flood in Cedar Rapids in 2008, it taking anything left.

And then a car.

A car suddenly a home.

And those kids, also lost now, so sadly lost. And his eyes saying that, just that. One son local, who can hardly bear to see him, even now, especially now. Two other sons in Afghanistan, both wishing dad dead.

And now this. Those sons all but getting their wish.

Cancer that would make Christmas of a PET scan, and no joyeux Noel in that.

“We all make mistakes,” I tell him, after he tells me that he had done that and more.

“I’m no angel," I go on to confide. "Just ask my kids.”

His face tilts to mine, skin stretched over bone, lips taut over teeth only remotely teeth. And those eyes, those eyes, my one gloved hand on his, my other on his shoulder.

And my own eyes, I confess, all at once a lover’s…

“Don’t put me out with the trash…” he pleads. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

“I won’t,” I promise, meaning it.

“I trust you,” he says in a whisper, his hand tighter on mine. “I trust you,” the voice ever so stronger, those eyes again on mine, those blue eyes.

Twenty minutes later, note dictated, orders written, I leave the hospital, into Saturday, into sunshine, into May and all its warmth, toward the car that will take me away from this, from all of this, and me, me weeping as I walk.


© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

Now, Karen, now...

Sunlight this night splayed by blinds and splashing, splintered, across the living room’s wooden floor. And again, and from more of a distance, some neighbor’s mower grinding air, to no effect but sound, to no effect but sound, that clamorously insistent sound, and, in its wake, plumes only of ground grass.

And me here tonight, one day nearer sixty, still contemplating now what…now, for goodness sake, what…and all the more so with yet another job offer now in the offing.

No need now to trouble readers with details; those are mine, as they have before been mine.

The question, rather, is older, as those who have long considered such questions were themselves so often older: who am I, what have I done, what more might I yet do?

To my son, Brendan, the answer is likely quicker: I’m 26, have so distant an end conceivably ahead, have already worked for years for others in New Orleans after Katrina, have twice been to Haiti and am now poised for post-tsunami Japan.

And my son is, truly, my son.

A younger me had similar inclinations, if fewer opportunities, with, alas, the shadow of the Vietnam War graying my teens, my early twenties. And time, as it is wont to do, then made itself the thief of later opportunities, with responsibility freighting daily, weekly, inevitably by the decade, any hope of, well, any hope.

Until now. And still now.

And still tonight the chance to do good, to do what I once set out to do, to not do what I’ve since done, what, arguably, is merely offered again. And now, my love, mindful that similar offers earlier have only gotten us here, now.

Here.

Now, Karen.

Now…

Just April…

My neighbor is this evening mowing his lawn, and not just mowing, but giving it a burr-cut, the air around and between us just noise, just noise.

Still, we’re talking April 24th, as in April…again, just April. The same April that saw 85 degrees on the 10th, and me that day cursing every degree over freezing; me that Sunday in my drawers and only my drawers, in the living room, the windows open, fans fanning, the air otherwise dead and me, again, loudly cursing every degree over freezing.

Back in the Vermont I knew (and, yes, I already hear my children moaning, “There goes Dad again about Vermont, those perfect summers, winters walking through head-high snow—and that’s only after shoveling—and, any god knows, you were the better for the shoveling!”), April was April.

If lucky, April was a muddy month, and muddy only by inches, given how feet-deep the ground had frozen by winter’s nadir and how slow any thaw in any year.

And snow, in Aprils then, was still the not-unexpected stranger at the door. In fact, our youngest son was born on an April 17th, during a night softened by eight inches of snow, a snowfall that slowed the midwives and made their one-hour trip north, two, but still in time. And Mother’s Day, one year, yes, Mother’s Day in the middle of a month wanting to be May, itself dawned to eight inches of snow, although by then, by anyone’s reckoning, winter’s back was surely broken, and that particular snowfall, doomed at the outset, little more than fertilizer.

In April, in Vermont, no one would ever mow a lawn, not unless there were some question of sanity.

April was a month to be enjoyed for the temptation it was, and undoubtedly still is there—the odd day warming to 50 degrees; the night again reminding you of winter; the road ruts, warmed in the day’s sunlight, freezing again overnight and, in the chill of morning, claiming the odd water pump (our car’s, one year) or exhaust system, only for the wrong choice of a rut. And any snow then was short-lived, blanketing, only momentarily beautifying, with the writing already on the sky: the days longer, the nights less, any chance of any snow lingering for hours, let alone days, increasingly just that, a chance.

Spring when it came, when it truly came, was a gift and, almost always, languorous; no all-at-once pushing-90, no instant lawns, no mowers robbing this, or any, April evening of the peace April has earned and deserves.

What I remember, instead, was one day only gently warmer than the day before, spring greening the landscape by leaf and branch, a green barely green, its shimmer pilfered from an impressionist’s palette, a green which, as it deepened, melted the winter that had been.

And sometime, maybe May, more likely June, the need to mow.

Second Son, Second Stint

I left you last with Brendan talking Haiti.

Here’s what I’ve not told you: That Brendan went to Haiti. Started a blog. First link all about almost being kidnapped. Accosted by a car, guns bristling from windows.

Almost, happily enough, was the operative word.

Still, this, in an e-mail, was his first mention of his blog, as in, Brendan, this couldn’t wait until the ride home to Iowa from O’Hare?

O’Hare came. Went.

And a few months more. And back again to Haiti. This time only for weeks, not months.

Still…

As the father who loves him, I can only admire, even as I worry. This, my beloved son, in whom I, echoing an even more paternal father, am well pleased.

Brendan is now home again, home for him, back in New Orleans, and safely so, back where he has been almost since completing college, only a year or so after Katrina, ever since doing what he could do to undo what Katrina did.

And Brendan has done what I’ve not done.

I am a doctor, but…

Brendan, newly graduated from Beloit College, went to New Orleans, built homes, dozens of them, his mother, at one time, for a week helping to hammer nails.

I am a doctor, but…

Brendan left New Orleans for Haiti. And I, doctor that I am, hoped to join him there, but didn’t.

And Brendan went back to Haiti, and I am still doing what I do in Cedar Rapids.

And what I do, in light of what Brendan has done…

So alone...

It is July’s swan song today — or, more to the point, here in Iowa, July’s cicada song — the bugs, those buggers, take your pick, in their way, their accustomed way, claxoning mid-summer and providing point to this summer’s counterpoint of unexampled heat.

Two days earlier, on the 29th, and sixteen years before, my father was his own cicada, his own last summer, his life, that day, that very dawn, at an end, his song — his song, all but ignored, as it rep-ratcheted, trilled, rep-rubbed to an end…an early end.

A date, sure, on a calendar, of course, on my calendar.

And, in my case, my mind, the morning I could never again say, “Hi, Dad!”

“And did I tell you, Dad? I love you.”

"That I loved you then. "

"That I loved you always. "

"Always, Dad. "

And, sixteen years later, who could have imagined this.

That, this, that dead man’s oldest son, then a writer, would now be a physician, a physician teaching, each day, other physicians. That that same man’s youngest son would also now himself be a physician. The two of us carrying forward all we learned before.

The hurt then.

The love mostly now.

And, sixteen years now to the day, I am in Kansas City.

At this, the annual medical student conference.

Me, a physician.

Thinking of my father, my father, my dead father these sixteen years later.

And me laughing.

Me laughing with students.

“Yes, this is a great program,” I say, my eyes hiding my life, my pain, this day. “Yes, the residents are terrific. Yes, the faculty are all you could ever hope for. And, yes, you, you, belong here.”

And, yes, me laughing.

Even as I try to hide what I cannot hide.

Me, again, laughing.

“Yes,” I’d tell then, if they’d asked, reading my eyes.

“My father died sixteen years ago, this day, this very day, this very morning. A phone call. A phone call at four-thirty. Yeah, Eastern Time. Me in Vermont. A phone call from two brothers at a phone in Seattle. ‘He’s gone,’ one brother tells me. 'Dad’s gone. Few minutes ago. Gone. Maybe it’s for the best.’”

For the best, maybe.

But my father, my father, is dead and lost to me and anyone near me.

And, yes, yes, I still hurt, yes…I still hurt.

And you don’t know that. It’s not your fault, I know.

But still, I hurt, I hurt…

And no one in Kansas City knows to care. And I’m now in Kansas City.

And, yes, in this sea of med students, residents, most young, most so very young, all with lives to live, with lives so much to live, I’m alone.

So alone.

My son, our son…

My son, our son, Brendan, who for almost three years had been in New Orleans, doing what he, by himself, could do to help those he can to recover from Katrina, is now in Haiti.

Keep in mind that when he went to New Orleans, this parent’s advice was pretty much limited to, “Watch your ass.”

“Yeah, Pops,” I think he, hardly convincingly, told me then.

And then there was that bullet.

That bullet.

Shattering the drywall, only inches above my son’s head in the shower, while my son, my loved son, himself showered.

And, then, more bullets.

In rooms below.

In the very same apartment. From somewhere in the street. From somewhere in the street that might have, could have, killed my son.

My good, my loved, my second son.

And now Haiti.

“Watch your ass,” I tell him again on the phone.

“Ten days, Pops. Ten days, I’m off to Haiti,” he tells me.

This, the reckless son.

He, as a boy, given to barreling full-speed down a Vermont dirt-road hill on a bike, his mother holding her breath behind him, his father never knowing until years later.

He, who, as a kid, saw an electrified fence and saw an opportunity for a charge, even if it meant putting his stream of pee in the line of fire.

He, who showed up for his college graduation road-rashed—chin, legs, arms—after doing a handlebar-sault racing, pre-grad, post-alcohol, to a bar.

And now Haiti…