It Takes a Worried Man (12 page)

One day I bring in and hang up Christmas lights in Kirsten’s hospital room. I do such a crappy job that they all fall down in the night, and Kirsten’s dad does it right the following day. He also brings in a sign that Kirsten and I have been talking about since day one. She has this window that faces the corridor, and she can never really leave the room, so we decide that she needs a sign that says, “Please Do Not Tap on the Glass. It Disturbs the Animals.” She gets her dad to make it because he is the master of clip art, and she wants little pictures of zoo animals surrounding the words. One day I go in and it is hanging up.   I think this may be the only positive thing about this whole experience–who’s going to tell her to take it down? Who would dare? They may or may not find it funny (not, in most cases–as I have noted, irreverence just doesn’t seem to play very well with medical types), but they damn sure aren’t going to take it down.  A few days later, in a similar spirit, I steal a bunch of stickers from her room. They are safety orange and say CHEMOTHERAPY in big black letters, and I have seen them stuck on the bags of crap they are pumping into her, but I stick one on my shirt, and I offer them around at work, and some people politely decline, some people give this nervous sort of “heh-heh” and say “uhhhh…I guess it’s great that you’re keeping your sense of humor, heh-heh” and sort of edge away from me uneasily. I think maybe only one or two people have any idea why I think this is a funny thing to do. I’m not really sure I do, but I think it’s all about changing the power dynamic–not just between us and the medical people, but also between us and the treatment, us and the disease. In the hospital they take these stickers very seriously, as they have to, and I am glad they do because it helps everybody be damn sure which of the five bags hanging on Kirsten’s incredibly heavy IV pole have the toxic substances in them, but the beautiful thing is that we don’t have to take them seriously at all. Kirsten is planning to smuggle out a roll and then surreptitiously stick them on my teacups and stuff.

My mom used to tell me, “nobody likes a smartass,” and while it certainly seems true that the people where Kirsten is don’t know what to make of her and the people where I am don’t know what to make of me, we are completely on each other’s wavelength. and I think I can presume to speak for her when I say we both like at least one smartass.

Early in Kirsten’s hospital stay, my mom moves in.  It goes fine initially, but I’m nervous because the last time I spent any time at all with my mom was for a week last Christmas in Cincinnati. It felt like a very relaxing, laid-back visit. When we got home, however,  I found that my mother wouldn’t speak to me for three weeks. She later explained in a letter that she was heartsick because she felt that we were shutting her out. I had no fucking idea what she was talking about. She was mad about the fact, for example, that when she said she would babysit so we could go to the movies, we went to the movies and came home without staying out for five hours so she could bond with Rowen.

I remain baffled by this, but when I have grandchildren I know I will come to understand and that it will suck. So anyway, that incident was the last long visit we had, so I am nervous about what this one is going to bring.  I guess I lied when I said that my mom doesn’t have any long-simmering resentments, because ever since Rowen was born, there has been this tension about why do we live in Boston, why don’t we line Delta’s pockets and come to Cincinnati more (Mostly because it costs a hell of a lot less to fly one person out here than three people out there).

My mom has developed a story that explains all this. It goes like this: she always encouraged me to be independent, and then I spread my wings and flew away forever. And this is a partial version of the truth, but it leaves out the fact that we got on each other’s nerves to a shocking degree when I came home for summers in college–basically we just couldn’t figure out how to be adults in that house together, so she acted like I was fourteen and so did I. Also, as I’ve said, we weren’t really too connected to my mom’s extended family when I was growing up, and we didn’t belong to a church or anything that would sort of anchor me to the community, and the only thing larger than our two-person nuclear family that I felt connected to was my group of friends. And of all of them, only one still lives in Cincinnati, and even he’s moving.

So the story is just more complicated than I am this independent kid who flew away. I mean, I did fly from the nest, but, you know, I was also pushed. Okay. The corollary story is that I am unreasonably exasperated with her. Now any adult with living parents can tell you that parents are just annoying. I mean, they are wonderful, and they gave us life, and I am mindful of the fact that I am here bitching about the people who are making it possible for me to continue to live my life at all while Kirsten is in the hospital, but the fact is that they are also just annoying. I do not mean this specifically about my mom, or Kirsten’s parents. I do not know any adult who does not find their parents occasionally exasperating. And yes, I am fully, poignantly aware that I will one day be annoying to Rowen, and I hope that my mom is still around when that day comes so she can point at me and say, “See? Adult kids are just a pain in the ass! They never listen to your advice and they get all huffy if you so much as put a plate in the wrong place or make a simple suggestion about how they might do something differently with their kid, but they don’t want to hear about your parenting experience, even though you obviously did a good job, just look how they turned out….”

One night while my mom is here, Kirsten’s parents come over to take us all out for dinner, and we go to this really good pizza place which is almost ruined by the melancholy folk stylings of this John Hiatt wanna-be guy singing and playing guitar. I mean, I’m paying money to go out here! If I wanna be miserable I can stay home! So the story of me as independent wing-spreader who doesn’t sufficiently appreciate his mom and is unreasonably exasperated by her just becomes too powerful when there are three of them and one of me. Now I know how they feel when it’s just one of them and two of us–they must hate it. I am sure we assert the story of them as meddling and occasionally feeble in a way that one of them can’t fight.

I am so freaked out by all this that I run to the bathroom and call Kirsten on the cell phone. I don’t have anything really to say, and I get a really funny look from some guy who comes in to pee, and I’m sure he went right back to his table and said, “Some jackass is on a cell phone in the fucking bathroom talking about nothing!”, but it is enough for me to just hear her voice. I feel better, and the melancholy folk singer slips in a Hank Williams tune amongst the many numbers by obscure depressive singer songwriters, and I am pacified. Also the pizza is good.

One day after I visit Kristen, I find myself stuck waiting for the elevators, a situation that annoys me to no end. There are three elevators and ten floors, but you can literally wait ten minutes for an elevator. They have machines in this hospital that can detect a cancerous spot on your spine only a few millimeters wide, but they can’t seem to get people from floor to floor efficiently. I guess if they have to skimp somewhere, better on the elevators than on the lifesaving equipment.

A woman is there, and we are both nervously checking our watches, because I have to get back to work for a meeting (or at least I think I do–it later turns out the meeting had been canceled before I left work, but nobody told me. ) and she, as it turns out, is ten minutes over on her parking meter, and I say something lame like, “Boy, these are the slowest elevators in the world,” and she says, “Yeah, we’ve been here for three weeks, and I still can’t believe these elevators.”

We are right outside the transplant unit, and three weeks is Kirsten’s scheduled stay in the bubble, so I say, “Oh, do you have somebody in for a transplant?” and she says, “No. you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Well, we’re obviously going to be here for a while, so I indicate that she should tell me and then we’ll see if I believe her, and she tells me that her sister in law came in to give birth, and something went horribly wrong, and they lost the baby, a ten-pounder, and the sister-in-law has basically been in a coma ever since, during which time she had four surgeries and dialysis, and she only just woke up today, and nobody’s told her she lost the baby yet.

All I can think is “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”  What I say is, “Well, thank God she’s alive,” and I mean it–I think about the horror of that experience for the dad, and how awful it would be to go in to the hospital for what you think is a happy occasion and then have your whole fucking family die, and so thank God that she didn’t. The words fall out of my mouth before I have a chance to intellectualize, and it really feels like a prayer to me when I say it, because it comes from a much deeper place than my stupid conversational gambit about the elevators.

“Yeah,” the lady says, “we’ve all been praying for her, and it worked!” and I envy this woman her certainty as we say goodbye, and later on I think , Well, presumably the people who are praying for her now were also praying for her to have a healthy baby. So how can you say it works?

And I know her response would probably be to point to the success of the mother’s survival and ask how I could say it doesn’t. And I know I am asking the wrong question, or something. Faith isn’t scientific, and here I am trying to examine data and make it fit the hypothesis, like life is a lab report for my creepy eighth grade science teacher, or my perverted tenth grade science teacher, or my foxy eleventh grade science teacher. Or something.

So does it work? When Kirsten got good news from her second round of chemo, my mom told me that she thought everybody’s prayers were helping, and she told me how somebody she works with that Kirsten and I have never even met has these two sons who every night when they say their prayers before bed say, “Please make Kirsten’s medicine work.” I am incredibly touched by this–I mean I am sitting here getting teary just thinking about it.  I asked for my co-workers to pray for us, and I asked my prayer group to pray for us, and I love it when we are in church and the minister says in the prayer something like, “we pray for those going through chemotherapy,” or “We remember those waiting for test results,”or something like that.

But God just can’t get off that easy. I mean, if God made the second round of chemo work, he presumably made the first round not work. Right? He presumably gave her cancer in the first place, right? He presumably killed that baby. And then something good happens and we go, “Thank God.”  Well, shit. I can’t make sense of it, and I want so much to be one of those people who believes, I mean really believes deep in their soul in God’s goodness and justice, but I just can’t square it with the data, and I know that’s the wrong way to look at it, but I can’t seem to make myself look at it any other way.

My sort of nebulous Christianity doesn’t really offer much in the way of answers. When Job, sitting in shit and covered in weeping sores, asks, like Nancy Kerrigan, “Why me? Why me?” God doesn’t offer that Job was the object of a wager between him and Satan, he just says, basically, Who the hell are you to ask me that? Shut the fuck up. Go make a universe, and then you can ask me about what goes on in mine.

Fair enough, I guess, but it sure isn’t satisfying. One of those Christian heresies that caused lots of people to get persecuted and executed in the middle ages held that the universe was actually the object of an endless war between an equally powerful God and Satan. Now
that’s
an explanation I could buy! God gets the credit, Satan gets the blame! And they killed people for believing this! Now people who believe this just get TV shows and control of the Republican party.

Sigh. I have prayed less since this whole thing started than at any time in the past year and a half. I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I really wish I had the faith of those little kids, or the lady by the elevators, or my mom, or pretty much anybody.

One day I head down the hall on the bubble floor, and I notice that there is a new sign on one of the other patients’ doors. It says, “please check with nurses before visiting pt.”  I don’t know jack about what goes on on this floor, but this looks to me like it can’t be good news. There are a bunch of people standing around the bed looking sad, and all I can think is that this person is dying.

And they have their TV on, and  as I walk by is this ad for the new gold and silver Game Boys, which in some way that I don’t understand correspond to some new Pokemon games or something. And it just freaks me out. What must it be like to be dying and have fucking Pokemon ads playing on your TV? It seems absurd and obscene and kind of sad to me–like if someone is dying, their TV ought to only show really meaningful stuff or something. What could it possibly be like to watch this Pokemon ad and think to yourself, “this is one of the last things I will ever see”? It strikes me as incredibly depressing. Then it occurs to me that perhaps it is a blessing. Maybe you can look at this dumbshit ad and go, “well, there’s nothing really left for me to stay for here,” and just ease on over to the other side.

Rowen is not freaking out. Mostly. This is very good news. In the first few days that Kirsten is in the hospital, she cries a few times–once when I pick her up from school, we are just walking down the street and she starts to sob. I know the feeling. But she bounces back pretty quickly, and pretty much acts like her normal self, which is to say that she is sometimes angelic and sometimes completely psychotic, which I guess is pretty standard preschooler behavior. A couple of weird things are that she starts refusing to talk to Kirsten on the phone, which is kind of odd because she has never been shy about the phone before, and she never wants me to tell Kirsten anything that happens at home. For example, I will be videotaping to show her the Christmas tree, and Rowen will say, “NO! Don’t Show her! Don’t tell her!” I finally decide that this is about her wanting to be able to tell Kirsten everything when she gets home.

Rowen has this system of affection where she has number one, which has always been Kirsten, and number two, which is not exactly a close second, and that’s me. Which is not to suggest that she doesn’t love me or anything. As I’ve said, we have a lot of fun together, but if it’s a choice between me and Kirsten, she’ll always choose Kirsten.

I have been waiting patiently for the change in positions that everyone says is inevitable, that eventually little girls are supposed to favor their dads, but she’s almost four and hit hasn’t happened yet, so I have pretty much resigned myself to having to wait for her teenage years when that weird mother-daughter tension creeps in and dad reaps the benefits. If, that is, dad can restrain himself from being overprotective and never wanting his little angel to have a date with some wispy-mustached perv of a teenaged boy. Ahem. But some have greatness thrust upon them, and in Kirsten’s absence I have taken over the number one spot. One day I tell Kirsten in the hospital, “I never wanted it like this!”  I feel like the understudy who steps into the starring role because the star met with some kind of horrible accident or something.

And I don’t know why this surprises me, but being number one is somewhat of a mixed bag. It is nice, sure, but it is also kind of exhausting, as it involves a fair amount of clinging. And this is nice because I love her and because it makes me feel needed and important, which is something I think everybody craves (I know it’s something my mom craves, and the fact that she hasn’t gotten it much from us since Rowen was born is probably key to a lot of the tension between us), but, at the same time, you know, sometimes you want, for example, to be able to be at church and go pee by yourself.

So if I am number one, that means my mom has slipped into my number two spot, which is good, I mean this is probably two spots higher than she’s ever been in the affection hierarchy, but it is tough for her because being number two involves a lot of “NO! I want daddy!” and I know from personal experience that that is also hard to take, but I do manage to convince my mom not to take it personally, that this is just the way Rowen is. Rowen apparently throws a couple of screaming fits in the morning, and this to me indicates that my mom has really arrived in Rowen’s mind, because she will really only throw screaming fits at us and is totally silent for people she doesn’t know or especially like.

It is helpful and nice having my mom here. I am initially annoyed by stuff like her using the oven as a drying rack for pots and pans (I ask her not to do it and then yell at her when, a few days later I am pre-heating the oven and have to pull two pots with handles that miraculously hadn’t melted yet out of the hot oven before sticking the food in) and the fact that she has a really terrible sense of direction (on the first night she complained about getting turned around in our house, which has five rooms). Mostly, though, my mom is pretty easy to hang around with, and we have a fairly decent time. I am reminded that I really don’t appreciate her enough one night when Joe comes over to go out after Rowen goes to bed, and Rowen’s bedtime is happening a little later than planned, so I leave Joe with my mom for a few minutes while I finish up the bedtime ritual, and as we are walking down the street later, I am about to apologize for abandoning him with my mom–not that my mom is so heinous or anything, but I think if I went to a friend’s house and was forced into conversation with their mom I had never met before it would feel pretty awkward–but before I can open my mouth, Joe says, “I really enjoyed talking to your mom! She’s really cool!”  He’s right, and I feel guilty for thinking I needed to apologize.

One night she is watching TV, and I come in to join her and she is watching
Providence
, and I say, because I’ve never watched it, “Oh, is this any good?” because she tends to favor the “Quality TV” kind of TV, whereas I like to watch cartoons and rich people throwing stuff at each other, and she says, “No, not really.”  And I say, “but you watch it regularly,” and she says, “Yeah. I just really can’t explain it.”  It baffles me, but I do sit down and watch the entire episode, and it is corny, cheesy, and unbelievable–a total throwback to those hero-doctor shows of the 1970s, except starring this really attractive woman with great hair. In fact, between her great hair and Mike Farrell’s white hair, that just makes me go, “BJ! You’re so old!” because of course I grew up on M*A*S*H* in the BJ years, the show is really all about hair as far as I’m concerned.

Even though the show is awful, it is somehow a nice evening.