Until I Say Good-Bye (19 page)

Letting Go

May–June

Swimming

T
oday, June 21, is the summer solstice. Not today in the book. I mean that I am sitting in my Chickee hut right now, writing this sentence with one finger on the longest day of sunlight of the year. One of my favorite days.

I am a sun baby, born and raised in Florida, where sun chaperones our lives. I brown up like a coffee bean. A Greek gift (thank you, Panos), so I have always enjoyed full sun.

Take me to a restaurant, and I'll elect the sunny seat. Take me camping on nearby Peanut Island, and I will while away the entire day standing in waist-deep crystal water, hand-feeding the fish or snorkeling the cove, searching for manatees.

Did you know small fish will eat dog biscuits straight from your hand?

I was a scuba diver years ago, and one of the highlights for me was looking to the surface of the ocean from sixty feet underneath, seeing the sun's rays shooting silver through the water. At that depth, on a sunny day, the ocean's surface looks like mercury.

I used to float near the shore as the waves rolled in, churning up shells. If you are still and listen underwater, you can hear them tinkling. Delight.

My friend and I used to stand on one another's shoulders in the water and front-flip off. I once kneed myself in the eye doing this, leaving a shiner.

Yes, I could sun and swim all day, every day, my solar chaperone following my every move, toasting my shoulders and back. No sunscreen.

“I musta been a reptile in another life,” I used to say as I baked.

I fell for John, a tan collegiate swimmer, in his Speedo. Behind my dark Ray-Bans, I tracked his fluid freestyle strokes. His muscular arms—his “guns,” as he jokingly calls them—zipped him through the water with nary a splash.

(A typical John crack: “I need to go to the vet.” “Why?” Flexes his arms. “Because these pythons are sick.”)

I too was a competitive swimmer. Not a great one. A decent one. So John and I would work out in the pool.

“Okay, sprints,” he'd order.

I'd buzz fast as I could across the pool, convinced I was windmilling my arms faster than Janet Evans, the tiny woman who Roto-Rootered her way to umpteen gold medals in the late 1980s and early '90s. And John would say: “No. Let's sprint.”

“I am.”

“Really?”

I think of that now as I stare at our backyard pool on this sunny summer solstice. Recently, some friends and I were hanging out around that pool, drinking a beer, when I asked to go in. Two people—it now takes two people, if they aren't experienced like John and Steph—helped me onto the pool steps. I sat there, half submerged, drinking my beer through a straw.

My back was to the group, so I tried to float onto my stomach and face them.

As I turned, my head dipped and I inhaled water. Like a child learning to swim, I felt the burn up my nostrils. I was shocked. I opened my mouth and inhaled more.

Didn't have the strength to lift my head.

The folks heard me sputtering. Four hands grabbed me, pulled me up.

“I'm okay,” I said.

I returned to sitting on the step with my back to them. I realized I could probably no longer swim.

This was not something I announced, trying not to trigger the cascade of I'm-sorrys. I struggled with that fact alone.

Since then, I have not asked anyone to get in the pool with me to test my hypothesis. Truth is, I don't want to know. If it's gone, it's gone. Nothing I can do. Slipped away like a charm off a necklace.

So how shall I handle it? Pine away for something I can no longer do? Something I adored?

No.

For that is the path to the loony bin. To want something you can never have.

“I am the master of my mind. I have a choice about how to feel,” I tell myself all the time.

I have practiced this again and again over the last few years: the art of letting go.

I used to be a regular in the hundred-degree room at a local Bikram yoga studio. The heat of the room helped expand not only my muscles but my mind as well.

Yoga was my refuge from the Chinese fire drill of modern life. I could walk into a Bikram class hoarding angst, and exit with my muscles stretched and my mind swept clean by ninety minutes of exertion so intense I didn't have the energy to worry about a thing.

When I realized I could no longer grip with my left hand, I refused to accept my loss. I put on a weightlifting glove and kept going to yoga. Then I noticed the fingers of my left hand would no longer lie neatly side by side.

When I lifted my hand above my head, it looked like a star atop a Christmas tree.

I did yoga for my neurologist, right in his office. Lifted my left leg up, up, up behind me, gripping my ankle in a standing bow, one of Bikram's most difficult positions. Nailed it. Proof, I insisted, that I didn't have ALS.

I lost yoga six months later, with sadness.

A year after that, I casually mentioned to John, “Did you know I can't jump anymore?” as if it were an observation about a recent shopping trip.

When our neighbor told me she no longer wanted me to drive with her children in the car, I fumed. I told John, still angry hours later, and he said, “Susan, I don't feel that good about our kids riding with you either.”

Now that hurt.

Two months later, driving my beloved BMW, I pulled over to the side of the road and told Stephanie, without tears or drama, “I don't think I should drive anymore. I'm having trouble steering.”

Acceptance.

Control.

Remember child killer Nathaniel Brazill? He was a seventh-grader when he shot his teacher at the classroom door in 2000. The incident took place a few miles from my house. I was the first reporter to view the surveillance tape, one of the biggest scoops of my career.

A decade later, I interviewed Brazill in prison. “Prison's not a bad place,” he told me. “It doesn't really seem like punishment.”

I wrote the story for the
Palm Beach Post
, and people were disgusted. They called his attitude “evidence” that he was a cold-blooded criminal.

I called his attitude “survival.” Nathaniel Brazill had to reinvent his environs to survive. Prison is not a bad place, he convinced himself.

And not swimming, after a lifetime of doing so, doesn't have to be so bad either.

Aubrey's Birthday

J
une 18, 2012, five days ago, was my son's birthday. A day to stop. To contemplate and be proud. My Aubrey was turning eleven years old.

What a memory, the day he was born! I was fully preggers. Overdue, in fact. My due date was June 14, but I asked the doctor to wait on the C-section. I wanted June 21, the summer solstice. I envisioned his birthday parties stretching into the eve on the longest day, the sunlight lifting him.

On June 18, I reported all day from the courthouse. I was lying down afterward, resting, when three-year-old Marina started jumping on the bed.

“Stop!” barked John. “You may hurt Mommy.”

I got up, went to the bathroom to pee, and felt a whoosh of water. John and I stood over the toilet examining the liquid. Yes, staring into the toilet bowl, trying to divine our future.

“You think your water broke?” he asked.

“No, it can't be.”

I had such a plan for how I wanted my baby born, I reinvented what was happening. No, the liquid running down my leg was obviously incontinence. And the viscous spots in the toilet water were, oh, something else.

I laid back down, still dreaming of my summer solstice baby.

Then I had a contraction.

Marina had been born by C-section, after that school bus ride in Bogota. I'd had no labor, no experience with this vise grip on my abdomen.

If there is one thing in the world that will fast-forward you right into reality, it is said vise grip. And the horrific thought of a breech birth, a foot emerging and the doc tugging out the tangled little soul.

In no time, we were on our way to the hospital.

Now, John and I had been disagreeing for months over names. John wanted . . . okay, I can't remember what John wanted, but he was not keen on the name Aubrey.

“It sounds like a girl's name,” John kept saying. “People will think he's Audrey.”

After a while, I stopped talking of it. But I never let the name go. It was important to me.

You see, Aubrey was an older cousin of mine: Aubrey Motz IV, to be exact. That Aubrey was a severe hemophiliac. His blood would not clot properly. Bump him too hard, and he would bleed internally.

He once went for a boat ride with us and ended up hospitalized with a bleed on his brain. He is the reason, I think, my parents decided not to bear kids of their own.

Aubrey Motz used blood products all his life to help his body clot its blood. Sometime in the early 1990s, before blood was vetted for HIV, he received an infected batch. He died of AIDS in 1999. He was thirty-nine years old.

Aubrey was my favorite cousin. He was intelligent, funny, kind, and—the juggernaut for me—he never complained. He had not an angry bone in his frail body.

Life served him a double whammy, first a chronic illness, then a fatal one. Yet Aubrey lived with joy and no self-pity. He went to college, he traveled, he married. He lived.

After he died, I thought of him often. I still do. I try every day to emulate him. I didn't want four generations of his name to die with him. I wanted to honor his memory.

So I waited until I was on the operating table, ready to be sliced open. After nearly vomiting—an effect of the anesthesia—I brought up the name again.

“Please, let's name him Aubrey.”

What could John say at that moment but yes?

In exchange, John got to name our third child. He chose Atticus, after Atticus Finch in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, his favorite book. We've never called Wesley by his first name.

On my first outing with baby Aubrey to the library, I heard a mother calling, “Aubrey!” and saw her daughter toddle over. Ruh-roh!

Then Aubrey's first birthday cake came back from the bakery with big frosted letters: “Happy Birthday, Audrey!”

Yet I am so glad I named my boy Aubrey, for there is value in a family name. The continuity. The memories. I tell my Aubrey about his namesake. I note how he never complained, because truth be told, my Aubrey's chief negative trait—and by Jove, we all have 'em—is, he's a complainer.

Just the other day, when I told him he wouldn't get his BIG birthday present until 7:00 p.m., the exact hour he was born, he rolled his eyes. “Oh, gosh!” he said. “I am not even eleven yet.”

Of my three children, Aubrey is the one I worry for the most.

His brother Wesley, insulated by Asperger's, doesn't crave affection and remains blissfully unaware of my impending death. Wes's chief concern is that HE be the one to push my wheelchair when we go out.

His sister, Marina, has the ginormous distraction of boys and friends and fashion and high school.

And then there's my Aubrey. The middle one. Squashed between his special-needs brother and a teenage sister who currently regards him as a sixty-five-pound pain in the ass. My most sensitive and sentient child.

At his parent-teacher conference this year, his teacher told me: “Aubrey's an old soul.” Which broke my heart. For old souls are wiser souls. Wise to what's going on around them.

Indeed, Aubrey was the first (and so far only) of my children to ask directly about my condition.

Aubrey was the first to offer to help me without prompting. When my walking began to falter, he would step beside me so I could put my hand on his neck for balance.

He checks on me often, popping his head out our back door, hollering to me parked out in the Chickee hut writing, “You okay, Mom?”

Perhaps this is his old soul. Or perhaps it is the fact he's seen me in some pretty pitiful states.

Like the time, a few weeks after I got back from the Yukon, I went to pick him up from school. A new opportunity I treasured since leaving work. I was early that day, so I went inside to use the bathroom. I was walking down a little-used hallway when I slipped and fell, ker-plunk, flat on my back.

I wriggled like a beetle, unable to get up. Wondering what to do.

Then Aubrey and another boy happened to walk by.

“Mom!” he said, running to my side, but not before glancing at the other boy to see if he was watching.

For the first time, I felt my condition embarrassed my son.

The other boy walked off, and Aubrey started trying to hoist me up, grabbing me under the armpits, tugging me toward my feet.

“Whoa, Nellie! Slow down,” I said. “Let me catch my breath.”

His hazel eyes were flung wide. “Don't worry,” I said. “I am fine. Ready?”

He tried again and nearly toppled over. I laughed, so he started too.

“Okay. Help me turn over on all fours and crawl to the door. I can grab the door handle.”

When I reached the door, I directed him to grab the top of the back of my pants and pull. “It's okay. Give me a big wedgie!”

It worked. I got up. I went to the bathroom and walked out of school with my son by my side, my arm draped around his neck for balance.

A few days later, as I exited school with Aubrey, some woman walked up to me and blurted out, “What happened to you?”

If Aubrey had been not been standing there, I would have replied, “What happened to your face?”

Because it hurt. How must I look, I wondered, if that woman spoke to me like that?

Soon after, I sat down and wrote an e-mail to Aubrey's and Wesley's teachers. I knew they had seen me stumble and slur. I didn't want them to misunderstand. I told them I didn't have a drinking problem. I had a disease.

Then I stopped picking my kids up from school. Dad took over. One more favor asked. One more thing I couldn't do.

One thing I never thought I'd miss so much.

Now, six months later, I worried I was disappointing Aubrey again.

I have always made a big to-do about birthdays. I buy two or three colors of streamers, and the night before John and I string them from the center chandelier to all corners of our Florida room—the tropical equivalent of a den. The child awakes to a canopy of color.

This year, I could no longer zip myself over to Party City. And I forgot to remind John.

Aubrey awoke to the same old house.

Then there was the cake. I always bought special cakes, covered in silky fondant or glazed in ganache. Or made my own, not nearly as fancy, but not for lack of effort.

Last year, I got out my Wilton icing tips and icing bags and piped a fancy trim on a homemade cake.

Aubrey's party was at a local water park in full Florida sun. By lunchtime, the piping was dripping off the cake like sweat. Aubrey and the gaggle of ten-year-olds ended up ravaging it with spoons.

This year, I couldn't manage a cake. So Steph stepped in and took Aubrey to the grocery store. He chose a Smurf cake. Yes, Smurfs. A bastion of blue icing. Stephanie made him a steak dinner as I napped with Gracie.

In the evening, we gathered for cake and presents. A few days before, I had upgraded to another iPhone and wrapped up my old one for Aubrey. Marina had gotten a new phone for her eleventh birthday, some cheapo model. I reasoned old was okay, since Aubrey was getting a much nicer phone than his sister had.

We sang “Happy Birthday” and ate blue cake, the liter of dye leaving everyone looking cyanotic with blue lips.

Aubrey opened the phone, in its original packing box. He loved it. Immediately began plugging in everyone's numbers and texting away.

Hmmm. Still no complaints? Perhaps I was the only one who missed traditions so.

About an hour later, Aubrey came to me in the Chickee hut. “Look, there's a scratch. Is this your old phone?”

“Yes.”

“Marina didn't get a used phone!”

“Marina didn't get an iPhone. Quit complaining.”

He sauntered off into the house and texted me: “Thank you.”

The next day, while at a friend's house, he texted me: “Are you ok?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Then he texted me symbols. “Eye-heart-u.”

“Eye-heart-u too my son.”