the first gift.
i've probably known George my whole life — i don't remember meeting him at all. he was just always there, in kindergarten, in church, in the neighborhood. in his family he is the lone boy in a sea of older sisters. his father died tragically when we were in late high school. his father's twin sister lived next door to me.
George's mother died this past week at 91, and though i couldn't make her service today, i sat down to write him a note. and then i thought better of it. and called.
when he picks up, his drawl of a voice stretches out for the length of the block where he grew up and where some of his family still lives. he is serious at first, though he assures me that all will be fine. his mother didn't suffer long. his father's aunt — also a member of our home parish — died at 100 only a few hours after his mother, so his extended family stands caught in their grief for both women, our tiny home church fielding two funerals in two days. we talk a bit about that, and then the stories begin, stories that follow a route through memory into laughter and back again.
i'm easily lured. as the last child of a family not kin to anyone in town, our family stories don't extend beyond a generation. But George is kin to practically everybody, by birth or by marriage. and he knows at least one story about almost every one of them. if i had a day or two to sit with him (and i wish i did) i know i would hear them all.
our phone call is cut short (at 45 minutes) because of a business call he has to take, but the time with him on the phone feels so much like the first gift of Christmas that i have given myself. i tend to forget, now that my mother is no longer living in the house where i grew up, how much that house and that place mean to me.
yes, i could have written that note (i will Mama, not to worry), but now i will treasure the story that came because of the conversation. thank you, George, old friend. keep 'em coming.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
Dreams with Daddy
My father sits in a small metal side chair, the kind you find in a hospital room, a blank wall at his back. He wears his Sunday suit, the silver tie he saves for weddings. He crosses his legs, looks at his fingers like I have seen him do a thousand times. Silent, we wait together, for I know not what. I want to lean into him, and I wonder what he is thinking.
Daddy’s fingers are thin and nimble, the skin taut, the kind of hands a doctor needs for his work. I notice he is not biting his fingernails or the skin around them, something he has done most of his life. A tiny thing, but significant, it seems.
We wait together like we used to during my mother’s many surgeries. Broken hips — too many times to count — a knee. Her back. In those times I knew he was worried, so I tried to draw him through it with my chatter — about children, neighbors, work, anything but politics.
This is the first time in many months Daddy has not been lying in a hospital bed, with me trying to keep the one-sided conversation going. I’m talking to him, effusive in my glee at finding him all dressed up and sitting in the chair.
But here’s the thing: It’s a dream. My father died in April.
Right after Daddy died, I was hopeful he would visit me. I climbed in bed each night, wondering when it might be. I had dreamed of others in my life who had died. Why should Daddy be any different?
I was sure he was coming. It would just be a matter of time.
And he did come, swiftly, standing in the front hall of my childhood home in his Sunday suit, next to the mirror, his hair grayer than I remember. I hugged him, feeling such joy at the warmth of him, telling him I knew he would come, and then he melted away.
But he came again, this time sitting in that chair, in the shadows, while the world goes on around him. And that’s where he has been in a half-dozen dreams since. When I see him there I’m overcome with joy. I feel the knot in my throat, thinking I might cry, just watching him sit, in a room that is neither cold nor hot, so thrilled I am, happier than I have felt for a very long time.
And then the alarm startles, the dream fades, and I am back to day, feeling the ache of a world without Daddy in it.
I am a dreamer. Both night and day. Those who know me well know I often don’t hear the conversation, don’t even know anyone is talking to me. Not solely because I have lost some of my hearing, which I have, but rather I am lost in what I am thinking.
Daddy knew that about me. Once, when I was about 9, he called me a liar because I had no idea where my sister was. I didn’t. Had she told me? In my memory, I see her form sliding past me in the family room as she says something. I was lost in a book, until his words stung. Was I that? A liar? Is that all he thought of me? I spent years trying to prove otherwise.
We've been looking at the scriptures of Advent during my writing class at church. We're trying to find where we fit in the story of the virgin birth in the manger with the shepherds and all that.
Since I was a child, I’ve used my dreams to figure out the world.
The ages-old Christmas story takes on a new slant when I read about Joseph, who learns in a dream what he should do with his not-yet-wife-but-oh-so-pregnant betrothed.
So how do I fit in this story? It feels presumptuous to think God is speaking to me in my dreams. Who am I to be that important? Yet Daddy's not the only person in my life who has died but who has come back in my dreams — my mother-in-law, my grandfather, a childhood friend who was not always so nice — and so, I wonder.
In early February, as Daddy lay fighting pneumonia in the hospital where he practiced medicine for 50 years, he told me he would not get better. “You’ll have to take care of your mother,” he said. I knew then would not survive this fight and that this was his directive to be followed. But how in the world would we manage?
In the months since his death, the days and decisions have been dizzying. A new home for my mother, a new town. Our home, an empty shell. And yet, there are days when I’ve almost forgotten he’s not still there, just on the other end of the phone when I call, sitting in his chair with the dog in his lap. Except the number we had my whole life doesn’t work anymore, and only my mother answers the new one.
I don’t want to live in a dream world. I want to be awake and alive. Occupy the now. But it feels like I am waiting for Daddy to say something, when he comes in my dreams. I suppose I am looking for specifics — Joseph certainly got them. Like what do to when Mama won’t take her medicine correctly. Or the intangible, like what heaven is all about. And has he found the dogs, like we asked him to when he was dying, and our grandparents?
I’m looking for comfort, too, that despite the fact that he is not with us anymore, all will be well.
The move was difficult. Watching my mother as her cherished things were boxed up and loaded into the truck proved heart-wrenching. The packers worked quickly, so we worked behind them, gathering up personal items from his desk, tossing some, keeping others. That first afternoon, we found something torn from a magazine in a small catch-all basket on his desk. It was a poem, no given author, that read in part:
You mustn’t tie yourself to me with tears. I gave you my love. You can only guess how much you gave me in happiness.... let your grief be comforted by trust . . . I won’t be far away, so if you need me, call and I will come. Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near, and if you listen, you’ll hear my love around you, soft and clear.
We felt him there, at that moment and knew he had left the words for us to find, right when we needed them most.
So I will keep dreaming, in hopes the next time I need him, he'll show up again and this time be ready to talk.
+ + + + +
To read daily meditations during Advent from the writers of St. Michael's, visit
, and download These Holy Mysteries.
— Susan Byrum Rountree writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
take me home, country road
i set out at dawn, driving down the country road away from the home i have known for 50 years.
the fog lay low against the cotton fields, stretched out like a soft blanket over a child almost ready to wake up.
that's what i wish it was, that fog, my own baby blanket draping right around me, whispering to me that it's not really wakeup time yet, that what i know to be true is not.
what beauty. the vast fields of cotton and soybeans — even tobacco — shrouded in a white pall that bore no sense of foreboding. just dawn about to happen. hope.
a mile on, and the sun spilled over the fields onto the side of a barn.
how must it feel, to stand at the edge of a field and watch the whole world that belonged to you wake up, the sun's first color shining red on your barn, knowing that your work ahead in that day mattered, was about more than what you had already put on that acre?
you know those moments, don't you, when you sense that your world will never pass quite this same way again?
this morning a few weeks ago was that. it felt like i was taking in everything. every. thing. the boy waiting by the side of the road for his school bus, checking his iPhone. the hawk perched on the wire looking down on the peanut field, right where i have seen him almost every time i have come this way in the last year or so. the fog. the flat fields sliding past by me one by one — soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, right ready to be picked.
i have been trying to write it all down for a month, each day sitting down in front of the blank page thinking: i must do this now. and then i don't. maybe i've been thinking that if i don't put it down it just wont happen.
and yet, come monday, we will be well into
what has until six months ago seemed an impossible thing.
we are leaving my childhood home.
moving its contents part and parcel to a new house that has been finely painted and polished, one that will take my mother closer to where she needs to be. one that my father never knew about. had never seen. in these few weeks we have gathered to pack and to ponder.
what looms, seems soon to me — not yet six months since Daddy died — is necessary. just because i am not yet ready to let loose of the walls that raised me up doesn't mean it's not the right thing. what matters is that Mama will be close to family, safe, where she can savor all the years that have rolled out before her like the fog over the fields did for me on that day a month ago now. yes. safe. but sad.
i remember when i first went to college, i was so bent on being away and not looking back on the road that had brought me to the city. but come fall break, i caught a ride with a friend and when we turned at the crossroad toward home, the twilight set in, and i rolled down the window, sticking my face into the country smells, all the peanut hay and the scent of newly-picked tobacco, the cotton bolls ripening and well, i couldn't wait to get there. home.
for years after i was married and living far away, whenever my husband and i drove out the driveway, i waved to my parents on their back porch perch and cried for 30 miles down the road. (and now, every single time i leave, just thinking about that memory.)
every single time i walk in the back door, i see the soft lights of the kitchen, and i feel myself settling in. home.
i can not imagine not knowing that anymore.
it was not supposed to be this way. my parents were going to live out their lives in this house, in this place — Daddy fairly well did — but things we had counted on just didn't come to be.
the night before i drove away from home a month ago, i slept in my old room, tossing, waking often, trying to remember the hundreds of childhood nights and days i spent there, becoming me. our winter-weighted coverlets came from Sears, and we loved them. in summer, Mama would rearrange the furniture and drape our beds with paper-thin covers — white, with blue ruffles and tiny blue flowers all over — and we would sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed just to put a new slant on things.
we found our baby clothes in an old attic trunk and dressed our dolls in them. i played 'school' behind the closed doors, with the chalkboard on the wall. barbies. spend-the-nights. tears. (a lot of those, my siblings would say.) winter nights after lights out, listening to cousin brucie on the transistor, memorizing the words to songs that would define my adolescence — jim croce. james taylor. gladys knight and her pips. the beatles.
Memories that come at night
Take me to another time
Back to a happier day....
i remember the day we moved in. i was 5, and i went home from kindergarten with ralph, our next-door-neighbor in our old house. we had hot dogs for lunch, the ones that swelled when you boiled them, not the red kind my mother cooked, and i couldn't eat them. later, my mother showed me my new room, one i would share with my sister til she was a teenager, with our matching closets and desks that Daddy built that looked like ladders on the sides. somewhere i have pictures.
ours is a story house, full of sounds and smells. the saturday nights when we'd sit at the foot of my mother's bed and watch her smooth her nylons over her legs, attach her pearl earrings to her ears for an evening out with Daddy. the phone ringing at all hours. days when we would climb the ladder to the attic, playing on rainy days when we couldn't go outside. sitting at the kitchen table as teenagers sharing a dinner of steak fondue. or in the living room, on the sofa with Daddy and his banjo, wanting bill bailey, whoever he was, to please come home. listening to my sister play Climb Every Mountain when she had hit a sour note on some other song. the time Daddy gave me honey and whiskey to cure my cough. or the day i was making potato stamps and sliced the tip of my finger nearly off. (you can still see the scar.) the soft click of the pulls on my parent's dresser drawer when we looked inside to marvel at our mother's jewelry. the crinkle of the newspaper as Daddy shined his shoes. it is both present and past tense, will always be that in memory.
the living room chimney Santa came down that never once held a fire. the family room window the tree fell through when the first tornado hit. (there were two, years apart) the dining room window where just last year the squirrel hid in the drapes after chewing out the mullions. the sand pile where the dogs are buried. the front porch where we take our family pictures. the incinerator, where we burned our Christmas wrapping paper and set the yard on fire.
opening the front door for my sister's first date with the man who would become my brother-in-law. closing it on the boy i would not marry.
these are just my stories. my brother and sister have their own. my mother has hers, too. some we have shared, some are private, some only the house holds close.
stories: the bricks and mortar of any family's life, much more, i hope we learn, than the underpinnings of the building we have called home for 50 years.
in an hour or so, my sister and i will set out down the road again toward home. we have business to discuss, lists to make to help this move be as easy on our mother as it can. but in the silence between our chatter lay all those stories, wrapping us up like a soft blanket in the early morning, warming us as we wait to breathe this new day in.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
one saturday with Daddy
the morning i was to be married, i woke up and heard my father crying, hidden behind the bedroom door.
i honestly thought he'd be happy to be rid of me, to have another man take my mercurial soul off his hands.
what will we do? i recall asking my mother, who was not crying at all.
he'll be fine, she said. don't worry.
overnight, Lydia and cohorts had thrown toilet paper high into the oak trees in the front yard, and i remember him coming by my room, asking me what i wanted to do about it. the reception was at home. and then, as i scurried around getting ready for my big moment, i looked out the window, and my father was swatting at the toilet paper with a rake. though he stood more than six feet, his efforts did little to pull the paper down.
by the time he walked me down the aisle he had dried his eyes, smiled a little, and though i don't remember what he said to me i felt certain, probably for the first time in my life, that Daddy would miss my presence.
a small combo played at the backyard reception, and though i had not yet danced with my new husband, Daddy and i stole a few moments away from the guests for a dance, both of us quietly sobbing this time.
no one was watching, and i don't even recall the song.
none of that matters now. because the feeling of that moment lingers, still.
10.10.1981
susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
reflex
daddy's doctor bag sat in the back floorboard of his Ford for as long as i remember. he'd take it out for house calls, or when one of us was sick, opening up the brown otoscope case, popping on one of the the bluish-green tips before pulling open my ear to peer in it to see if i had plugged a nickle in there somewhere that was clogging me up. then he'd pop off the tip, flick on the penlight and ask me to say 'ahh', me hoping i could open wide enough so he wouldn't have to use a tongue depressor.
it was like an appendage to him, that black bag that never quite stayed shut. when he worked in the office, he'd go from room to room, ink pens lining the top pocket of his white coat, stethoscope and prescription pad deep in the pocket at his hip.
on some days when Daddy was in the hospital over the winter, i would find myself in the cafeteria alone, waiting for him to to be bathed, to wake up, for the doctors to come by on rounds. on one of those days, i found myself trying to name everything that the black bag held, trying to hang on to this memory since i knew, honestly, that Daddy would never open that bag again and take anything out.
here is the list i made that day:
stethoscope
reflex hammer
prescription pad
blood pressure cuff
rubbing alcohol
Band-Aids
as i made my way down the short list, i could feel the cool metal of the stethoscope on my back as he listened to my heart when i was a girl. i saw myself sitting in the kitchen chair trying hard not to giggle — and to hold my knee still as stone as he tapped it with the reflex hammer.
i couldn't think of the name of that thing he used to look into my ears, but i could see it.
when i got back to his room, he was awake, and before long the speech therapist came in the room to place the speaking valve on his tracheostomy tube, to see how well he could tolerate it.
they had been doing this off and on, and on some days, usually when my brother or i was there, he was able to talk a little, his graveled voice not sounding much like his pre-hospital one.
daddy, i said that day, i was wondering: what all did you keep in your doctor's bag?
and in seconds he began the litany: stethoscope. reflex hammer. prescription pad. blood pressure cuff. thermometer. syringes. Penicillin usually. alcohol. ace bandages. tongue depressors. otoscope.
otoscope. that was what i couldn't remember. in all those weeks, though he seemed in and out of confusion at times, it took only a moment for him to rattle off the tools of his house call trade.
that day, my brother happened to swing by, and looking at him in his white coat i realized i'd never seen him with a doctor's bag of any kind. he was not Daddy's doctor, but even if he once or twice grabbed a stethoscope to listen to his chest, he took it from Daddy's bedside, not from one hanging around his neck.
to treat a patient these days, a doctor might grab sterilized gloves from one of the boxes on the wall, a syringe from a dispenser in the hall (well, usually the nurse does that), log into the room computer to print out a prescription. sometimes i wonder if all that is better than the laying on of hands my father required to do his daily work.
+ + +
the morning after Daddy died, i went to his car and climbed in the back seat to take in his smell. the rubbing alcohol was there, and i looked around the floor board for the bag, but it was not to be found. made sense, since Daddy hadn't practiced in a few years, that he would have taken it out. seems i recalled that for awhile, it sat on the old chair at the door of my room, where he now kept his office.
back in the house, i looked and it was not there.
a few days later, my sister and i stood in our attic, looking around. there, on the floor was an old doctor's bag, empty and worn from decades of travel, but it was not his most recent bag.
my mother has been looking for the bag for weeks. she has a purpose for it, but though she has been through every closet and looked in every drawer, she's been unable to find the one thing Daddy used every day of his career. it's troubling, like if she opened their closet one day to find his yellow sweater missing, or that someone had misplaced the letter opener that has always been on the desk of the secretary right where he left it the last time he opened a letter. these are the small things that mean much to each of us. especially is doctoring tools.
it was saturday afternoon, and we had gone through closets and sat on the phone to india for 58 minutes trying to get the computer to work, only to find out we couldn't. we had gone through papers and a scrap book i had never seen (that's another post), and my mother, who is back on her feet now, gave me a roll of quarters Daddy had been saving for me since 1968.
then she told me how she had looked for the bag but couldn't find it.
i knew of nothing else to do but begin the search. so we opened the closet in my room and began taking things out.
a portrait of my grandfather from the bank where he served on the board. a box filled with tax returns. old coat hangers, skirts, a robe. a box filled with photographs, still framed, that had come from my grandmother's house.
and from the clothes rack, a new vinyl satchel i had never seen.
i lifted it off the rack, pulled open the velcro and the tears pooled in my eyes. the brown case that holds his otoscope— scratched from his own fingers, so many years of opening — two stethoscopes, the reflex hammer, all well worn and placed there carefully by my father's own hands, hung up like carpenter's tools, a long life of repair finally complete.
those who know more about these things than i do tell me that grief is like this. you go for weeks thinking now i've gotten past the worst of it and have worn out the tears and can go on my daily life without thinking of it, and then one small thing presents itself and there you are, weeping quietly over some small memory from childhood that hits your reflexes like a soft hammer to the knee. no matter how hard you might try to fight it, your throat closes tightens and there you are. there. you. are.
to me, it is like the mercurial atlantic. how one day, the air is still and the sea slick as ice, waves barely breaking, tiny ribbons of foam lining the beach where water meets sand. a day later, swells rise and fall but waves don't break, foamy tides climb up the sand, rip tides form, pulling just below the surface. and then you wake the next day and the sea roils, waves crash into each other long before they ever reach the beach, and you barely remember the calm, ice-slick day, from all the roaring.
susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
Friday with Daddy
daddy never went through the front door of our house.
always through the back, by the carport and into the utility room where he might scale a fish (much to my mother's chagrin) where the dog sat and scratched at the door during our supper, where he stitched up a rabbit my sister found injured in the yard. where one morning when he was in his 40s he collapsed into my mother, sobbing because his friend had died at home while reading the paper in his wing chair and daddy had to pronounce him dead.
the front door was reserved for prom dates and the rare trick-or-treater, for strangers stopping by.
but when daddy came home on last friday — april 19 — they brought him through the front door.
he came home the same way he left town way back in february, in a giant transport filled with fancy machines, a blue tulip-like flower emblazoned on the side.
we had made the decision to bring him home two days before, my family and his hospital team crowded around his bed. he'd been asking to go home for more than a month, to leave behind the machines and tubes and take his rest in his bed at home. pat, my father's pa, carefully listed off the options for a man who could no longer breathe completely on his own. a long-term care hospital. palliative care or Hospice.
when i heard the word 'home' i looked to my mother, praying she would choose that option. in a wheelchair herself, she would be going home herself the next day, to 24-hour caregivers my sister would meet later in the day. my brother leaned into mama, asking quietly: what do you want to do?
'home,' she said. 'let's take him home.'
a week ago now, the transport team pulled up in front of our house drew him out into the crisp spring air. and i was waiting.
'you're home daddy!' i shouted, and he looked around. home, his wish finally granted. i stood there— my family waiting just inside the front door — watching him look around at the sky. they wheeled him into our front hall where the Christmas tree stood in december,
down the hall he had walked so many times in the middle of the night in his pajamas toward the back door and a patient waiting. down the hall, toward the linen closet, that when i was five i was convinced held a witch. they wheeled him to his room, to a bed he had last slept in on february 5, the room he had shared with my mother for 50 years.
it felt like a long ride to me, down our hall. across the creaky floorboard that gave my brother's Christmas morning crawl away. past my childhood room. a mile it seemed, as they shifted the gurney to make room for this 6-foot-two man, squeezing him through the door into a room softened by carpet and soothing blue.
daddy brought with him a host of people. the Hospice doctor and two nurses. a respiratory therapist, Pat, who had been caring for him all these weeks. a priest who's liberal views challenged daddy's conservative ones, but in his years as their
minister, the two had become good friends.
the team to settled him, and my mother's caregivers helped her into place beside him. it was mid-afternoon.
by the time we gathered next to him, daddy wore his familiar pajamas, sat propped against his favorite pillow, talked to us. i took hold of his hand, and he said something i couldn't grasp... what, daddy?
he looked straight at me and said: your hands are COLD! he wanted chocolate milk, but we had only vanilla ice cream. i spooned it carefully into his mouth, he swallowed, not seeming to care that we could not grant his original wish.
the day before he came home, daddy talked to all of his grandchildren on the phone. somehow, after all these weeks of quiet, he had much to say. it was a miracle, really. i talked to him, too, as did my mother and sister, all of us overjoyed at hearing his voice again.
last thursday was her first day home as well, after her fall. we had fixed her crab cakes — the best meal she had ever eaten! — and watched as she pulled herself up on her bed, straighten out that broken leg, beginning the first steps toward her recovery.
+++
when we gathered everybody around in the room, daddy said: we didn't plan for all these people.' for daddy, it has always been about the plan. each day i visited him in the hospital, he would ask: plan. toward the end, when we had no idea, i'd shrug my shoulders — one of his exercises — and say, 'who knows? that's the plan.' which seemed to satisfy him.
this time we had one. we all joined the priest for last rites from the good ol'
Book of Common Prayer
. and then daddy thanked everyone for coming. thanked them, which is so what my father would do. later on, he FaceTimed with my daughter and my niece. strange, that, this 84-year-old dying man saying when asked by his granddaughters how he felt, he said:'pretty good.'
++++
i will tell you that it's something, when your siblings gather round your dying father.
my brother, a physician, is good with those who are critically ill. i have watched him with my father all these weeks. he leans in, speaks softly, but loud enough to jostle daddy awake when need be. this day was no different. i can't imagine how hard it is to be doctor, lawyer, indian chief, son, for he has been all these things since february, and again on this afternoon, our last friday with daddy.
my sister brought the dog in, picked her up and put her on the bed with daddy, knowing just how long he had waited to touch her head.
we spent the afternoon and evening gathered around my parents, telling stories and praying and singing.
After supper, i sat with him and read him the story of his life.
we kissed him goodnight, leaving he and my mother alone in the room.
she lay by his side the whole night, and ruby did for most of it.
and then, a call, footsteps in the hall, my sister running toward the room where i had tried to sleep a little.
it was over.
we surrounded his body, talking and crying, naming all the dogs he was now getting to see. our grandparents. his friends. so many who have made this journey before him.
and then we left the room, all of us, to wait for the next step.
in the wee hours, as we sat up and waited for the Hospice nurse and the funeral director to arrive in the pouring rain, we listened as mama told stories about him and their life together, their early years. Despite all the uncertainty and the trauma we've experienced these many weeks, what a treasure my father's last hours were to all of us.
dawn came, and we called all the children, made arrangements for them to join us in this new life without their Pop B. not one of us has wanted to go there, but at least we will travel together, his legacy to us that he was the magnet that drew us together, keeps drawing, even in his absence.
in the days since daddy died, we have heard a hundred stories from his patients and friends, many reflecting his wry humor, others his humble, caring nature.
'he was quiet, but he was
powerful,' the man, a patient, who has kept up our lawn when daddy no longer could told me yesterday. yes he was.
my father was a great man, so many have said to us in the past week. but aren't all our father's that?
"so with the sleight of his magician's hand, he will end the show,'
i wrote back in 1997.
and i don't know who will miss him more — his patients, or the doctor himself..." those very words caught in my throat as i read them to him one last time just a few hours before he died. words appropriate for retirement so many years ago, and, it turns out, for his last friday with us.
i can't imagine now how much i'll miss him. it still isn't real to me yet. but i am not alone, because i have a full family and a whole town gathered around me, and we are all holding each other up.
bye daddy. guess it was finally your time to hit the road. be careful. and have a safe and happy trip. sbr
ps: thank you to all who have called and visited, who have sent food, cards and facebook messages, who had loved my daddy at times it seems as much as i did. your generosity toward my family is overwhelming. maybe now daddy understands just how much he meant to all who knew him. susan
susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
days with daddy
my fridays with daddy have turned into mondays and other days. it is a roller coaster, and though i wish i could find a more literary term to describe it, that seems apt. how you begin the long slow crawl to what you think is the top, then all things ricochet, up down sideways and backward. then up, down again.
i remember the first roller coaster i ever rode, in myrtle beach back when i was a senior in high school. that trip, like this one with daddy, was all about uncertainty, and it did not end as i would have wanted. i was supposed to love riding the roller coaster, but i didn't. i was scared but i didn't want anyone to know it, so i got back on again.
that's what you do, isn't it? you get back on and see if the next ride will be different. at least that's how it is for me right now. i'm willing to ride again. because i keep thinking one of these days soon it's going to be a joy ride with daddy, and not the scary one we have been on.
years ago, my father and i took a joy ride. it was Ash Wednesday, and when i was little, daddy took wednesday afternoons off. my brother and sister were in school but i was 4, so the two of us set out in a cold rain to ride an hour or so to visit my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. as we drove north, the rain turned to ice, and before long, snow covered the road and the telephone poles leaned toward one another, held up only by the power lines.
i could hardly be a reliable narrator recalling a memory when i was 4, but when i think of that day, i see the wipers swishing hard as the whole world turned white, daddy leaning into the dash, his hands gripping the steering wheel. we didn't turn back. daddy kept that car on the road and somehow we reached my grandparent's house. when we arrived, the lights were out, and we found them huddled around a pot belly stove in an upstairs bedroom, trying to stay warm.
it would turn out to be a legendary storm, the Ash Wednesday Storm, a northeaster that battered the outer banks and caused damaged that took years to repair.
now daddy and i are in the middle of a different kind of storm, but in many ways it's the same: he's driving on icy roads, i'm holding on to the seat for fear of slipping.
on the first day of this week, i sit by his side, watching him breathe in and out, look at his blood pressure (good) and try to cool off from beneath the hot yellow gown and purple gloves i have to wear to guard against infection. he is hard to wake, though when i left him a few days before, he stayed awake for much of the day.
so the only certainty is that there is none.
except maybe in the cafeteria. my father has been housed in the hospital now for 47 days. and he has many, many days left. so sometimes when they say it's time to do this or that to him, i end up in the cafeteria, alone, watching, trying to eat something.
the man next to me speaks into his phone, which he lays on the table as he eats a very large salad. his words could be my own: sleeping mostly, i don't think he knows i'm here. concern. sleeping. update. all words i have used myself in the past day. finally he ends his conversation with 'drink plenty of fluids and get some rest.'
i imagine he is talking to his child, updating him or her on the grandfather's life now in ICU, or somewhere on the floors above where we sit. i say a prayer for them, quietly, because i know what he and his family are going through.
looking around, i recognize: the young woman wearing a beautiful Muslim scarf. she is on daddy's lift team, comes around every few hours to shift him in his bed and who now calls him Pop B, just like she is a grandchild. the hospitalist is there, the one when daddy first arrived those many days ago. he saunters up to the cash register, just as he did that first day to daddy's room... sauntered, hands in his pockets, posture that made me feel he didn't care very much about his patient. one thing my daddy doesn't do, never did, is saunter.
everyone else caring for daddy is engaged and concerned, wanting not to pass the time but to make this critically ill man better. and so i tell the nurses and the therapists and the doctors about where he practiced and how long, try to paint a picture of this man who to them is an very sick and aging man. a man can't speak for himself right now.
i know nothing of medicine, but the longer i stay here with him, the more i just want to somehow to story him well, if that makes sense. telling his story, somehow, has to make him better. right?
friday comes, and it is once again my turn to sit. when i arrive, they've shifted daddy's bed into a sort of chair, and he has the paper in his lap. he wears his glasses for the first time in these 47 days, looks so much like himself that i'm startled. i've brought him a soft ball to squeeze because right now he can't use his hands or arms very well, and squeezing the ball will help him grip the wheel again, navigate this icy road. i drop the ball into his hand and say 'squeeze' and he looks at me and does just that.
behind me, players in the ncaa tournament travel back and forth across the floor, tossing another ball, and every now and then daddy looks up. his team is not in the running, but mine is, and i pretend for a moment to be daddy's coach. we work with the balls, he nodding his head, squeezing and dropping, moving his arms just enough to show me he can. i hold my phone in front of him, showing him a picture of his newest great-grandchild and ask him to hand her the ball. he moves it over and places it in front of the picture, smiling at her, his lips forming the thin line i have known my whole life.
'remember the story of the little engine that could?' i ask him, and he nods. 'that book is as old as you are, daddy.' he was two when it was published. might have read it as boy.
ok, daddy, i think you can, i say, urging him to try one more task — to touch his finger to his nose. i'm allowed to lift his elbow but he has to do the rest. we try but he can't quite make it, so take a time out. a few minutes later we try again, and i say: i think i can i think i can... until his narrow finger meets that nose.
so much of his recovery now depends on this kind of work. this knowing that he has inside him what he needs to keep from slipping back down the icy road. what he needs to get well.
by the end of the day he can put the ball in my hand and pick it back up.
have to hit the road, daddy, i say, exhausted myself from being his coach. i'll be back on monday, ready to let him steer once again, while i sit holding onto the seat.
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sadness, but with hope, for a good sail
But when I think about what I have been putting my mind to lately, it is this: four people in my life are either in the final stages of life, or are caring for people who are getting close to the end of their days. End stage. Hospice. That. And my heart is sad. Though I have witnessed life's end before with my husband's parents, with beloved animals, I am lucky. Both my parents are for the most part pretty healthy for people in their early 80s. And because of that, I can't know what my friends are feeling. And as the good Book of Common Prayer says, there is no help in it. Nothing left to do now but pray. For peace. For comfort. But that does not seem to be enough.
One of the people I love is the 93-year-old mother of my best friend since 8th grade. She lives on the farm where with her husband she raised horses and cows and a daughter to raise horses and cows and three children — raised all of them to be good citizens of this world.
I know her phone number by heart. (Years ago, living in the country they had a party line, something unknown in my tiny small town. At my house the phone was always ringing because of my physician father. At their house, you had to know their ring to know when to pick it up.)
I last saw Nana for a quiet New Years. We shared a toast, a collard, pork and black-eyed peas — traditional talismans for a good year. She was tired, didn't stand by the kitchen sink chopping celery like she used to, but she was still Nana, telling us how to.
She calls me one of her girls, and I think of the nights I spent in her rambling house in high school, sharing life secrets with the child she raised. How she welcomed me to her table, fed me her famous biscuits. How though I taught her to make my yeast rolls when she was 90, I never learned how to make the biscuits.
The day before I got married, Nana swooped into my childhood home and created beautiful flower arrangements for the chest in our family room and anywhere else she thought ought to feel fancy. I want to go to her, to make her feel a little bit fancy right now, but she is just not up to visiting. I hope she knows how much I love her. I know how much she loves me. In all of our meetings in the past few years, she has never, ever, failed to tell me so.
You would think that a 93-year-old is supposed to slow down, but Nana hasn't at all, at least not until the past year. She has watched the July 4th fireworks explode over the Albemarle Sound with us, raised a glass for birthdays, listened to my stories, asked me more than once to taste her potato salad to see if there was enough salt.
When her heart began to fail for the umpteenth time a week or so ago and her daughter called 911, they asked if Nana was confused. No, she was in the bathroom putting on her makeup. And had just asked her daughter if it was the 7th or the 8th of February, to which my dear friend said: Hell if I know, and checked her phone to be sure. That's our Nana.
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Another of my friends nurses her husband as his own end looms. Her email this morning held the familiar: hospital bed, home health care, Hospice, the power of prayer. He has been given last rites, yet clings to life, so they wait.
My friend Pat, West Virginia strong with a shrewd wit, goes to my church, and when I first saw her daughter when she was young, I thought she could easily be mine, she looked so much like I did when I was the same age. Our daughters, just a year apart, have been friends since youth group. I used to teach essay writing in Pat's high school English class, to unruly teenagers who balked at putting sentences together to make a point about themselves. But they loved her.
When Pat retired a year or so ago after teaching all of her adult life, she wrote that after so many years of teaching them, she discovered she didn't like teenagers so much after all. I could read between her lines. Though she really loved those unruly teens, what she needed more was to spend time with her husband. Her emails about their journey are scattered with her wit, and I know this has helped them all stay a little bit sane, in the midst of the insanity of cancer.
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My neighbor down the street has been fighting breast cancer for several years, and it has now spread further into the body that has been fighting it, valiantly. Her daughter and mine danced ballet in stiff crinoline costumes when they were in second grade. My neighbor played college tennis, was fiercely competitive, and I learned years ago that she and my sister had crushes on the same boy in jr. high school, though we lived an hour apart.
In the past year, though her body has been failing, she has resisted help, and so we send her cards, sometimes leaving flowers and casseroles on her porch, just to let her know we are thinking of her. And we send prayers. The last time I saw her was on April 18, 2009, the day of my daughter's wedding. The last time we really visited was in June the year before, when she asked me to help assemble programs for her daughter's big day. I was honored to be invited to sit at her kitchen table, to share in a small way in this passage for her family. How does this happen, that you used to see someone at least once a week, pass them in the grocery aisle, giggle as you watched your girls tiptoe across the stage? But living just down the street from each other now that your kids are grown, the times in between now turn into a year, even two?
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My sister-in-law drove from North Carolina to Florida yesterday because her mother is dying. When I think of her mother, I see an beautiful woman always smiling. I think of her wedding gown, which my sister-in-law wore, scattered with soft flowers, beautiful.
She sends me a Christmas card each year, and I feel badly that this year I sent none. She had cancer before I knew her (over 30 years ago), lost her husband, moved from Delaware to Florida, made a new life for herself. Fought cancer again. Her daughter, whom I have always said brought color into our very beige family when she married my brother, does not readily show her sadness, though when I talked with her this week, I could hear it in her voice. She and my brother are expecting a new granddaughter in May, and everyone has been hopeful the two generations of women can meet.
Marti and my brother love Disneyworld. They took their children often because their grandmother lived close by. And in a couple of weeks, they have plans to take their 4-year-old grandson. They will still do that, they say, because that's what his great-grandmother would want, though she can't be there. Probably nothing will make her happier than imagining a new generation of her family spinning in those teacups, watching the twilight world take shape below on Peter Pan's flight.
I like to think that dying, as God designed it, is supposed to be like Peter Pan's flight. Magical. That you have that chance to watch, as the little ones you love are tucked into bed, listening to a good story, and then you float through the window on a boat with a colorful, wind-filled sail out into the heavens, the streetlights below lighting the path toward your new, fuller moon. Then right toward that second star and straight ahead til morning.thx absu
At least it is my prayer. For all the people on my list.