It Takes a Worried Man (16 page)

Thinking about God, I can see the appeal of a lot of those old, dead religions that are now, because there are no adherents around to get mad, called “mythology” because they tend to include wacky trickster gods. Well, it’s tough to pick out the tricksters in Greek mythology, since they all pretty much are jealous, murderous, lustful, and deceitful, and humans quite frequently come out on the wrong end of those traits (Zeus the serial rapist literally originates the “golden shower”! It’s true! Go check your Edith Hamilton!)  These old religions include as part and parcel of the whole thing the idea that the Gods are fucking with you just because they can.

Here is more theology that seems to fit the data of my life, especially recently. For example: Christmas. Outside of marveling at the genius of Phil Spector, I tried really hard not to get into the spirit. I even blew off church, which I think I have done maybe two other times that I can remember in my whole life, because even as a kid we used to go to mass with relatives on Christmas Eve, but this year I just couldn’t be bothered. I just didn’t want to go without Kirsten, I didn’t want it to feel like Christmas, but, like the Grinch, I found that I couldn’t stop Christmas from coming–it came just the same. Church or no, I felt this horrible void on Christmas.

Then, after the lowest day yet, the next day Kirsten is prowling the halls, practically bouncing off the walls ready to go home. And I am happy, and grateful, but my first reaction is like, “are you fucking with me?”

Then I have my moment of absolute happiness, but then I wake up in the middle of the night and puke up my spring rolls in my freshly cleaned and disinfected toilet. Ok, I did have another stout, and they were pretty high-octane, but still, we’re talking about two beers. And about eight really inexpertly fried spring rolls that were just dripping with peanut oil, and I am very vain and usually annoyingly immodest about my cooking ability, (like when people at work see me heating up leftovers and say, “that smells great,” I am an incredible wiener and say something like “it is great. I made it”) but I can’t deep fry anything for shit, so after the best day and night I have had in weeks, possibly months, there I am hunched over the toilet in the middle of the night puking up acidy, oily goo.

What am I to make of all this? We have a wonderful, healthy kid, and this causes our neighbor to get in touch with the asshole within. We get a great deal on a new house and then find that Kirsten has cancer. Kirsten tolerates the chemo very well, and then we find out it doesn’t work. I am grateful that it’s not all bad, because God knows there are plenty of people in real life as well as in Dennis Lehane novels  who live lives of unrelenting misery–I am still incredibly grateful for the night with the spring rolls. The memory of that moment is not tainted or ruined by the fact that I puked six hours later. I feel like that’s good, like that must mean I’m making progress, but still… I feel like someone’s fucking with me.

And I am worried, because now, three days later, Kirsten is home from the hospital, tired but herself. It is just magical to have her in the house again, things feel right, I feel whole, Rowen is happy (I slipped down to number two parent in a hurry, but I am not taking it personally), and I can’t shake the feeling that right now while I’m standing up, some asshole is putting a tack on my chair.

Kirsten returning home is like a second honeymoon or something: we spend the first two or three days just saying, “I’m glad you’re home,”or, in her case, “It’s good to be home,” and every night that I crawl into bed and she is there pressing her freezing cold feet against me I am just so thankful to have her here.

After two days, she has to go to the hospital for a checkup, and they tell her she’s dangerously dehydrated and keep her there all day pumping fluids into her veins. They tell her she has to be much better about drinking, so the rest of the vacation she is constantly drinking something, and when she’s not, I am going, “Can I get you something?  Tea? Soda? Water?” and she writes it all down in her drinking log, until her mom tidies up her drinking log by mistake one day (because it’s scrawled on the back of an envelope–it’s an easy mistake to make), so Kirsten takes to wearing this stitch counter that she has for knitting projects and using it to total up her daily fluid intake.

Saturday we are expecting a big snowstorm–six to twelve inches. I think about getting a snowblower, but by the time I get my lazy ass over to the Home Despot, they are all sold, and anyway they are hugely expensive, so I figure well, it’s vacation, I’ve got time to shovel, no big deal, so I buy 50 pounds of salt and 50 pounds of sand and one of those crooked-handled back saver shovels and figure I’ll make do the old fashioned way.

I am once again right across the giant, treacherous, freezing cold parking lot from Toys “R” Us, so I once again go and ogle the game selection, but I haven’t even really gotten good at the ones I have yet, not to mention the fact that Toys “R” Us after Christmas looks kind of like this bare-shelved Soviet-era toy store, but also I realize that really it’s just about owning them. It’s not about wanting to play them. I want to own lots of them. And then..what? I won’t die, or Kirsten won’t die, or somehow sitting on our broke asses amidst a pile of game cases, we’ll be secure. I end up not buying any.

I would like to add that video games sure have changed since my day (yes, I know, stupid old man comment). What I remember about video games was that you could usually get past the first level, or screen, or opponent, or whatever with very little skill, and that with a lot of time and/or quarters invested, you could get good enough to move on.  But these games are incredibly hard to even start.  The game that Kirsten’s brother gave me has this little test you have to pass in order to continue the game, and I have been trying for three days, and I’m almost there, but I still haven’t gotten into the real game because I keep failing the test of driving skills.  I guess these games are designed with dorks like I used to be in mind, rather than with dorks like I currently am in mind. I mean, yeah, if you’re sixteen, what the hell else are you going to do except sit in front of your tv for fifteen hours trying to figure out a game, and anyway it cost you the equivalent of maybe 4 or 5 hours of folding sweaters at the Gap or whatever, so you’re going to be pissed off if it can’t hold you for a long long time. Whereas if you’re 32 and get to play an hour every other day, what you really want is something you can be kinda good at without really trying, and that you can get steadily better at. Like Defender, or Pac Man, or something. Sigh. Time has moved on and left me in the dust clutching my joystick.

But I was talking about the snowstorm. So the thing is that one of Rowen’s classmates has a birthday party scheduled for that day, and I call in the morning and it’s not called off, and it is half an hour away at a location of small children’s activity centers, so I am annoyed going over there, and I am hoping that it’s going to start snowing early in the morning so we can beg off, but of course what happens is that the first flakes start to fall as we pull into the parking lot.

And there is something about parties that just brings out the misanthrope in me these days. I see all these other parents, and I just can’t stand them. I guess because there is this gulf between us. We are not good friends (not because I hate them or anything, but, you know, I have never seen one of them socially, so I don’t really know them very well), so I don’t feel comfortable taking about what’s really happening with us right now, and yet I am also completely unable to make pleasant conversation. I have always been terrible at this anyway, but my meager abilities at making small talk have completely disappeared. So I just kind of sit and sulk, and Rowen clings to me, which I think is sort of strange because the kids at this party are the same kids she spends all day playing with. I look at her and remember being shy as a kid, and how I was just so afraid of joining in with groups of other kids (looking at my behavior with adults, I guess not too much has changed), and I see her doing this, and it just kind of makes me sad, because I think I missed out on a lot of fun as a kid because I was afraid.

And yet, looking at what’s happening here, I sort of have to applaud Rowen’s discernment. We are at this Children’s Activity Center™, and there is this woman kind of running the show, and I have to say that whoever put this “curriculum” together knew a lot about little kids, because this woman sings a song, leads some kind of activity, and then tells the kids they can run around on the play equipment for a few minutes. All of which is cool, but this woman is just so obviously not into it even though she sings well, (making sure to mention the corporate name in just about every song–ie, “we’re spreading out the parachute, parachute, parachute, we’re spreading out the parachute, here at Children’s Activity Center™,” which I find kind of creepy). Still, most of the kids have a great time and get to do some kind of rambunctious play on a shitty day.

We leave, and the drive home is not too bad, because the snow is really slushy, so it’s not too slippery, and as we get home, the snow turns into rain. Which is pretty close to a quote from a Dan Fogelberg song, if I remember correctly, and as much as I think he’s a cheese merchant, I have to give him credit that that’s a pretty good line for summing up something magical turning into something depressing. (How about that “Leader of the Band” song, though–what’s up with “his blood runs through my instrument”? Eeewww!)

And I get cranky and surly that this storm that I was dreading driving through has fizzled into a crappy rainstorm, because I love snow. I think this pretty well typifies my attitude these days: I am pissed about having to drive through a storm, then pissed when the storm turns out to be not as hazardous as I feared. As much as I have questioned God through this whole thing, on this day I can just imagine her (I sort of like to think of God as female, cause I think, well, if God were female [and yes, I think it's kind of puerile to assign God a gender, but what the hell, so is quoting Dan Fogelberg] she would pretty much have to be a total babe. )–ahem, I can just imagine God looking down at me going, “Jesus! What the hell do you want!?  There’s just no pleasing you, is there?”

Nope.

While it is of course wonderful to have Kirsten home and it is lucky that she is released during a time when I am off of work anyway, I find that the hustle and bustle of the time when she was in the hospital was in some way easier.

I mean, yeah, I complained a lot, but when you are just go-go-going all the time, you don’t have much time to stop and think. Whereas when you are not go-go-going very much at all, there is little else to do. I should say at the outset here that I don’t do vacations well. I never have. That is to say, if I go away, I can do a vacation just fine–I am happy to hang out, take naps, and basically do nothing at all for days at a time. But when I am at home, I start to get squirrelly after a few days. It’s a kind of funny contradiction, because on the one hand, I consider myself to be fundamentally a pretty lazy person, but on the other hand, I have to work or I go insane. Go figure.

So I always start getting bored and depressed after about a week of time off at home, and this is no exception. In fact, it’s much worse than usual, because now I am thinking about our situation all the time. Since I have nothing else to define myself by, I become Brendan Halpin, Spouse of a Cancer Patient. And since I don’t have to run anywhere or do anything, I get to contemplate all the stuff I wasn’t thinking about before. When she was in the hospital, I just took it as a given that this treatment would work. But what if it doesn’t? And even under the best of circumstances, we’re not really talking about a cure here. We’re talking about keeping it at bay for a period of time.

Now that Kirsten is out of the hospital, it makes contemplating the next round that much harder, because we know what it’s going to be like, but also, having just come out of something so difficult, I am now sick to fucking death of this whole thing. I have found this before–you know, the job, or the apartment, or whatever that you have had for years suddenly becomes intolerable after you know you are going to leave. At least that’s the way it’s always been for me–I never got all misty-eyed thinking of the colleagues I’d never see again, or thinking of the street I’d rarely walk down again. My reaction has always been, “I can’t wait to get away from this horrible place and these horrible people,” and while it would seem logical that little annoyances would bug you less in these circumstances, they get magnified, so you’re just like, “I can’t fucking wait to get out of this fucking place!”

Well, I can’t fucking wait to get out of this fucking place. I am sick of being sad, I’m sick of worrying, I’m sick of having people look meaningfully into my eyes and say, “so how
is
Kirsten,” I’m sick of having to rely on people’s kindness to keep my house clean, I’m sick of thinking about it, I’m sick to fucking death of living in the shadow of cancer and of having that be what defines me, and Kirsten and Rowen to everybody else, and to ourselves. There they go, that brave family, how do they keep their sense of humor through all this, isn’t it sweet how he shaved his head, my but that kid seems to be doing well, considering, I just don’t know how they do it, I know I would fall apart if it was me, thank God it’s not me. I just want to be a normal person again.

And the thing is, I can’t. I can’t ever. I realize that I have been fooling myself. I have been thinking that once the second round of treatment is over, that that’s when we get our normal lives back. But the sad fact is that we never ever get our lives back like we had them before. There will always be appointments, and drugs, and possibly surgeries, and maybe new drugs, and encouraging test results and discouraging test results, and unless I fall over dead in three years like my dad, I will probably, in ten years, or fifteen, or twenty, have to put Kirsten in the ground, or else burn her up and try to figure out how to live then. And I don’t even know how to live now.

I have been feeling like I’m on hold, like I’ve been on hold for three months, (please continue to hold. Your life is important to us) and my thought has been, well, as soon as we get our lives back, I can stop eating like a hog, as soon as things are back to normal I will stay on top of my planning and correcting, as soon as this is over I will take a deep breath and get back to living like a normal person again. But I won’t. This disease has stolen that life from me, and from Kirsten, and worst of all from Rowen, and we can’t wait for later to figure out how to put a life together. We have to do it now. And I don’t know how.