Russ in Deep Waters

Russ in Deep Waters

I saw him for the first time in Toys-R-US. I was twirling a pink plastic hula-hoop around my skinny eight-year-old waist; I noticed him stop and watch in amusement. I did a little show, making funny faces while walking and twirling at the same time. I love an audience. Finally gravity pulled the oversized hoop around my ankles and I took a deep bow.

The man I performed for had very curly hair, and I thought he looked a little like Richard Simmons, the energetic aerobics teacher on TV. His teeth we crooked, but his smile came easily. Before I could say hello (as I did to everyone I saw on the street), my mother made the introduction,

His name was Russ Waters. This was the new friend she had mentioned to me once or twice before. I quickly went to him and embraced his legs. This was a typical act for me, having been raised in an Italian family where hugs were as much a part of life as breathing. My six-year-old sister, Laura Dawn, was different. She hid shyly behind my mother. Mom asked what she thought of Russ. Laura peaked our, made a sour face and said he was ugly. Then she hid again.

After that first meeting in the toy store, visits with Mom’s new friend Russ became a Friday night tradition. He made the ‘separation’ between mom and dad easier somehow. His quick humor and willingness to spend time with two squealing girls made it fun for my mom to take us to his house. Like a good friend, he joined us playing board games, watching movies, and telling jokes. Sometimes we went out for dinner at a pizza place that had a mini choo-choo train circling the ceiling and loud music blasting children’s songs.

Russ quickly became a special person in my eyes. When my mother asked Laura again what she thought of Russ, Laura smiled. She looked hard at Russ and said proudly, “I think he is cute, cute like a chicken.”

There was something about this man who walked into our lives that someone form the outside could not see. He was sick, very sick. Soon after we met him my mom informed Laura and I that Russ had a liver disease called scelerosing colangitis, a disease that not many people in the United States have. A big scar on his stomach shows where his large and small intestines have been reworked. The stories he told about the scar made it much easier to accept. The first time we saw the scar, he told us he was scuba diving and he had to rescue his best fiend from a shark. The shark grabbed on to his middle. The hit the shark on the nose while holding on to his stomach and his friend. That story made Russ our hero; yet knowing what really had caused the scar made him an even braver man in my eyes.

The doctors at Stanford Medical Center told Russ his time with us would be short. And, indeed, he slowly began to turn yellow and itch all the time. Visiting him in the hospital was on of the most difficult things I had ever done. When I saw him lying in the metal bed, all I could think of were the times we hiked, boated, and fished while on vacation only months before. While I was in shock and denial, Laura Dawn knew just how to fix our friend Russ. She threw a fit about wanting to go to the grocery store, because “that’s where the livers are!” she wailed. When we got to the store Laura Dawn raced back to the meat section and grabbed a package of beef liver. “Here mom, here. We can give this to Russ and then he will be fine.” That package of hope is still with the family, safe and cool in the freezer if needed.

Two months before the time the doctors said he would be gone from our lives, Russ was determined to make the most of each day. He married my mother, even though they spent most of their honeymoon bouncing from hospital to hospital having blood tests done. Because my sister and I loved him so much, it was easy to welcome our best friend into our family, even if would only be for a short bit.

Wanting to solidify our bond before he passed on, Russ bought us all kayaks. He thought kayaking would be the perfect way to remember him, as he was once a scuba diver. We could paddle our little boats remembering we were splashing on the surface of his favorite place. For weeks we kayaked together, wondering which outing would be our last. For weeks we continued paddling, no longer focused on that question.

I am going to turn 30 this summer!! In celebration of life, I dipped my kayak paddle into the cool waters of the Puget Sound last week, and breathed a sigh of freedom. I looked over the glistening water to see Russ smiling at me with the same smile I had seen at Toys-R-US. He was amused. I was trying to snap on my spray skirt without luck almost tipping. “Come here,” he beckoned. “I’ll hold you steady so you can get it without ending up soaked.”

           In the past twenty-one years I have grown closer to him than to my bio-father. Behind Russ’s back, making certain he can hear me, I proudly call him “my dad.” Sometimes I forget he still has a liver disease, he is just my dad. Any of our loved ones could die at any time by disease or accident. For some reason Russ Waters has held onto this life and our family very tightly. I am so lucky he loves us so much because I have needed him so much over the past two decades and he has been there. Always.

In my early teen years I suffered my own illness, a mental illness. Where some families would have turned and ran, my mother, my sister and Russ helped me through it. They educated themselves and talked to my providers. I was hospitalized, just as Russ had been. I had to take medication, just as Russ does. We turned my “mental illness” into “an illness like any other.” By doing so I came to accept and embrace my strengths and be aware of my triggers. I take life one day at a time, sometimes one moment at a time. If I ever forget how far I have come in my wellness, if I dip into depression; I know all I have to do is reach out to Russ or my mom. They gently remind me how far we have all come in mind and body. My little sister Laura Dawn has been a little hero her self, together we have been cheerleaders to our parents and each other to “Keep Living!”

Incognito

Incognito
Miriam Sagan

     When we were children, my father was not very available. He came home after dinner, worked late on Thursdays, and a half day Saturday. He and my mother went out Saturday night until he put a stop to that by abruptly refusing to socialize ever again. No parties, no dinners, no couples. He announced this at age forty, and pretty much held to for the next forty-eight years. 
     When he was home, my father often said he was “incognito.” I thought this was an actual place, called Cognito. Perhaps it was, as it meant he was in his study with the door closed. If he emerged briefly, he refused to answer if spoken to. He was not to be disturbed, and never was. 
     From this remove, I have the urge to diagnose. Sensitivity? Hypoglycemia? Asperger’s? Whatever it was, my father believed that his preferences and reactions were right, the morally correct course. A hatred of small talk was not just his quirk, or a personal preference. It was an elevated position, one that any superior person would automatically take. I, who even now enjoy a chat about the weather, fruit trees, real estate, gossip, and clothes, had to rally my childish resources to discuss the ancient Greeks. 
     Surprisingly, my father had four children. That was a lot of people to fend off. He eventually had five sons and daughters in law, and seven grandchildren. And he did not really want any of us under his roof. 
     Once, after an extraordinarily rare visit with a friend, he complained about the vagaries of being a houseguest. His hosts were so picky about the kitchen, the sponges, the faucets.
     “Yes,” I agreed. “And it’s not just hard to be a good houseguest but to be a good host.”
     “True,” my father said. “and you know, I’ve had a lot of houseguest.”
     “You have?” I was surprised. I could literally not come up with an instance when a visitor not of my own generation had slept under my father’s roof.”
     “Of course…you, your sisters, your brother…”
     So after our lives together my father regarded his children as guests. No wonder he most often tried to dissuade us from visiting, citing the domestic upheaval of having to change the sheets. Once, in my fifties, I offered to bring a sleeping bag, but he didn’t laugh.

On My Father’s Yahrzeit

On My Father’s Yahrzeit

Pamela Joyce Shapiro

My parents were married on July 3rd.  Countless times, growing up, I’d hear that Independence Day marked the end of my father’s freedom.  It was a good natured quip—they were happy.  That changed when he became ill.  At 44, he was too young and my mother too sheltered to deal with the years of treatment, uncertainty, and financial burden cancer would bring.  This was not the life she had chosen and as the years passed with only brief periods of respite, her fear and sadness turned to anger.  While he battled cancer, she battled life.  We tiptoed around her hoping to escape landmines of bitterness. 

Through it all, he was remarkably resilient, reporting for chemo and radiation in the dark of icy winter mornings before heading to work.  My father kept the details of his disease and shifting prognosis secret to shield his children from worry.  He began a new course of treatment the morning after my wedding, having postponed the first infusion to be there.  My parents kept it from me so the news of yet another relapse wouldn’t mar the day. 

A few years later, an extended period of remission allowed him to recover physically and financially.  In July of ’79, he and my mother bonded in joy over the birth of my first son.  For two years they seemed happy again, sharing delight as their grandson grew from infant to toddler.  But the cancer returned, another job ended, and options for treatment were limited.  A family friend in New York provided a job with benefits and my parents moved out of state for the fourth time in 12 years.  My father began outpatient treatment at a county hospital before transferring to a private research institute for an inpatient experimental protocol.  My mother raged—oncologists, nurses, administrators, friends and family—no one could escape the vitriol of her stolen life.

No longer able to work at all, my father filed for disability and returned to Pennsylvania to be near his children and grandchildren. He lived his life with silent understanding, accepting my mother’s escalating discontent and unpredictable frenzies, never judging and always loving.  She smashed glasses and, in a grand symbolic gesture, tore up a cherished pastel portrait of her younger, once contented self.  Eight months pregnant, I distracted her with lunch outings and shopping trips for baby clothes.  The day trips provided welcome relief for them both.

He grew thinner, sicker—wan with half moons dark as bruises beneath his eyes.  We knew he was dying.  I’m not sure he knew.  Always wanting life, he asked for more treatment but the doctors refused.  Weak as he was, he came to the hospital the day my second son was born and cradled the sleeping infant in his arms.  A few weeks later, on July 4th, I was home chatting with company when my mother called saying only, “Come now, your father wants to see the children.” 

We arrived to find her uncharacteristically calm.  They had spent the previous day, their 36th anniversary, making peace.  My father held the baby for a long time, then turned to my older son and said, “Come give Papa a hug.” But this was not the Papa my son knew and he seemed frightened, hesitant. I recalled how, as an inconsolable infant, only my father’s touch could sooth him, and how they played and laughed, lighting each other up.  I prodded my son to go to him.  Understanding as always, my father asked his grandson if he would shake Papa’s hand instead.  And so they sealed their last goodbye.

That evening, while my husband and older son attended nearby fireworks, I put the baby to bed and called my mother.  There was no answer.  I dialed again and again, and then I knew.  Three weeks shy of his 57th birthday, while others celebrated Independence Day with booming rockets lighting the nighttime sky, my father looked up at his bride one last time and passed quietly.  He lived 13 years with the tyranny of a slow and relentless cancer, and now he was free.

Two Poems

Absence

Stay put I tell my dad, like a parent warning an impulsive child to behave
in her absence. I leave the car running, heat blowing, knowing he can’t follow me on his blown out knee even if he forgets why I left him or who I am or when I’ll return and I will not let him freeze
in my absence. Coatless

into the wind I cross the lot, halogen
lit, past freezing cars, parked without passengers, fingers stinging and clutching his prescription for pain. Inside, I follow

signs and more signs through a maze of make-up, of medicine, to the rear where I wait and keep waiting, while behind the counter

the pharmacist under bright lights is rushing, and then I am too, back toward the exit – but here he comes, limping through the electric door waving my coat sleeves open like a father tracking a forgetful child - like a father who won’t let me freeze.

Copyright 2013 by Kelly DuMar. Published in "Kindred," 2013 and "All These Cures," 2014 by Lit House Press. 

How He Asks (After Alzheimer’s)

Where did you come from? By this I mean what fills

your days and how did you lose me, I mean when did

I leave you and how did you find me somewhere?

Let’s go back to the beginning.

How did you get here? By this I mean tell me how I

brought you into this world and what you are doing

with the life you’ve been given?

Are you doing the wonderful I knew you could do?

There’s something you forgot. By this I mean tell me

the news of all the everyone we have back where who

matters so much and when can I see them to tell them

how whistling and crackling and sunny they are?

Are you leaving?

Let’s go back to the beginning.

Where did you come from?

Did you come in a car?

Do you know the way home? Take me home now so you

will see how we got here from there and by that I mean do

you know how much your life matters to me?

Copyright 2014 by Kelly DuMar. Published in The Milo Review, 2014, and and All These Cures, by Lit House Press, 2014; reprinted in The Maine Review, 2014

I Get My Ear Problems from My Dad

                                                     I Get My Ear Problems from My Dad

Catherine A. Brereton  

December

I get my ear problems from my dad. Every day, after showering, I take the tip of a cotton bud and roll it between my damp fingers to squash down the soft fibres. When it is denser than dense, and almost hard, I push it inside my ear, as far as I can stand, and wiggle it until the back of my throat tickles and I cough. It’s always dirty when I pull it out, globbed up with sticky, shower-warm wax that ranges from the colour of pale apricots to the colour of the fake teak table at which I now sit, sipping hot tea, remembering exactly who I get my ear problems from.

I know I shouldn’t treat my ears this way. Countless people have told me and countless internet articles and medical books have warned me that all I succeed in doing is to over-stimulate my ears, and that the more I prod, the more wax they’ll create and besides, everyone knows that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, put anything in your ear. Not ever. But I refuse to heed their warnings and poke away anyway, every day, even though my grandma once had the tip of a cotton bud come off its pastel-coloured plastic stem and become lodged deep in her ear canal, well beyond the reach of a fingertip or a pair of tweezers. She had to have it medically extracted, so I’m told, but I don’t think it ever stopped her poking things inside her ears. Perhaps that’s where Dad got his ear problems. He is his mother’s son and I am my father’s daughter.

I haven’t seen my dad for two days short of two years so I don’t know how his ears are these days. He’s rarely home when I call, but then I rarely call home. By the time I get to a breathing point in my day I know that he’s probably enjoying a whiskey-fuelled nap and he’s never been a great talker anyway. The last time we spoke was back in June when Granddad died, and Mum wasn’t home; he was forced to answer the phone. I forgot to ask about his ears. Plus, it seemed a little odd. “Hey, Dad, sorry about Granddad. How are your ears?” When I talk to Mum she doesn’t tell me how Dad’s ears are, but then she only mentioned in passing the deaths of my Uncle Guy and Aunt Joan so I assume that the state of my father’s Eustachian tubes is not that high on her list of things to be communicated with the absent daughter.

It is his right ear that gives him the most trouble and it is my right ear that gives me the most trouble. I am sure that this is not merely co-incidence. The most trouble that I can complain of was the need to have them flushed out a couple of times in the ten year period between 1996 and 2006. My right ear would get so stopped up that I couldn’t hear anything other than low, background noises, amplified to a deafening roar by my distorted ear canal. Oh, the relief of that pop when the warm water finally worked the wax loose. I was never anything other than amazed by the sheer quantity of wax that one small, regularly cleaned ear could hold. I hoped the nurses were not disgusted, but deep down I believe they probably were.

Small potatoes, though, to the trouble that Dad had ten days short of ten years ago, when an ear infection went horribly wrong and settled deep, deep, deep in his inner ear, beyond the reach of antibiotics. It grew and spread to the base of his brain. Bacterial meningitis. Swift. Frightening. Lethal.

Dad was delirious, hallucinating, barely able even to moan when the ambulance fought its way up the mile-long, un-tarmacked, snowbound track that traversed his beloved moorland, barely connecting his truly out-in-the-sticks house with the small, rural, and hospital-less community beyond. It took far too long to get him to a hospital; it was touch and go for seemingly endless days while his body was pumped full of drugs and Mum complied with the rules by reporting his illness to the government authority responsible for monitoring serious diseases. They were to decree whether the out-in-the-sticks house should be quarantined for public safety. I joggled my six-month-old daughter on one hip and held the hand of my four-year old, all while watching them both for signs of illness.

When I last saw Dad, he’d been battling another ear infection—this one a year old—which caused a nasty yellow discharge to ooze constantly out of his ear. He always had a handkerchief at the ready and tried hard not to complain at the pain. In the back of my mind, unspoken, was the rare, but ever-present threat of his meningitis recurring. The doctors, with dizzying indecision, put in, took out, and put in grommets, small tubes of plastic designed to ease the pressure in his inner ear and reduce the frequency of infection. I wonder, from 4,000 miles away, whether his ears are grommet-clad or grommet-free these days. I have lost track and it’s not the sort of thing one readily asks.

June

For the first time in almost a year, I spoke to Dad yesterday. It was Father’s Day and I’d put off calling him until late in the day—I don’t quite know why—and by the time I tried to call him my international calling card wouldn’t connect, probably because of too many absent children all trying to make phone calls to their distant dads. Instead of doing battle with the tinny telephone line and the two second delay on either end, I hooked up my webcam and signed in to Skype. Mum—who is much more adept with computers these days than I ever could have imagined she would be—set the laptop down in front of him and disappeared to make a cup of tea. Dad panicked, anxious that something might go wrong and he’d have to touch the strange piece of apparatus that was transmitting my moving, talking image (no doubt by some kind of sorcery) from 4,000 miles away right into his living room. Dad is getting old. His hair is short now, cropped close to his head, barely an inch long, but it doesn’t disguise the white that has spread from his temples back across his scalp. His moustache looks thin and grey and his skin has deep crevices cutting through his weather-beaten tan. His eyes crinkle up when he listens to me, and he screws his face up in an effort to hear me more clearly. He’s going deaf, I know. I should expect that, I suppose, given his ear troubles.

We talk for 45 minutes, although much of that time is spent in repeating myself and waiting for him to fumble for words to answer. He’s not that old, really, he’ll only be 65 this year, but suddenly he seems to be just a short distance from frailty and I swallow down my anxiety at the distance between us. Innocently, he asks me did I know that Mike Wilde died? And Uncle Paul? Oh and last week Alan Hadfield died too—he was only 61, you know. My anxiety creeps up another notch and I get up from the kitchen table to pour a drink. I ask him if he got the socks I knitted for Father’s Day but they haven’t arrived yet, and I make a mental note to knit him a balaclava for his birthday in November, something that will keep the weather off his face and his ears protected when he’s out walking the moors with his dogs.

I’m cheated out of goodbye. My laptop, which has been temperamental since the day I bought it, suddenly overheats and the screen dies. Skype emits a strange sound as it disconnects us mid-thought. I wish I hadn’t left it so late in the day to call him. He’s gone and I’m left contemplating the best yarn choices for his balaclava and whether we can afford a flight to England soon.

March

My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. I swallow down my latest mantra alongside the enormous antibiotic tablet I’ve been prescribed for my latest ear infection.  Just ten days ago, in response to an over-vigorous nurse’s attempt to flush out my ears, my balance system gave out. The doctor diagnosed labyrinthitis with a secondary middle ear infection, loaded me up with a cocktail of drugs, and sent me on my way. Four thousand miles away, Dad lies sedated in an intensive care unit, a similar—albeit far more potent—cocktail of drugs being pushed through his bloodstream. The chances were so very slim that there weren’t even odds for it. He’s three days from retirement and I’m three days away from him, if the weather co-operates. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

Mum is at his bedside; my brothers are travelling to be with her. Dad doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. I call my doctor who tells me not to fly if I can possibly avoid it, but I’m already looking at flights.  My medications sit silently on the kitchen table; my suitcase is on the floor. I don’t know what to pack. There’s snow on the ground in Kentucky; I think it’s probably only raining in England. No use asking Mum. She hasn’t seen daylight for two days now; there are no windows in an Intensive Care Unit. I stuff in extra underwear and two balls of yarn. I can knit Dad some more socks on the plane, maybe. I wonder if he ever wore his balaclava. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

I have my phone in my pocket, vibrating other people’s thoughts and prayers. I take another tablet, this one for the wash of dizziness that threatens to overwhelm me. My lover tries to hide her anxiety. Our house has never been cleaner, and there’s yet another pan of soup bubbling gently on the stove. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

We both jump when the phone rings. I fumble to retrieve it, fumble more to answer, repeatedly yell “hello” while the international line stumbles to connect us. I pause, finally, remembering the distance and the inevitable two-second delay. I’m standing in the kitchen, staring through the brown bamboo blinds at the six inches of snow on the roof of our car, watching the birds heave huge chunks of the homemade bread no-one could eat last night. The soup bubbles behind me, I can’t even remember what type it is. My brother is low-voiced. I strain to hear through the thickness of the infection that lines my ear, rigid with terror. My lover steps across the room and softly runs her fingertip across my cheek to catch the one salty tear I couldn’t prevent from escaping, and my ear throbs painfully as the room starts to spin. Through the increasing hum I whisper to her, “My dad is not dying…”