The Big Room

On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room.

I hadn’t been able to make the move sooner for a variety of reasons. For one, I like my old room. It’s cozier than the master and it looks out toward the northeast and the Atlantic Ocean — or rather, it did before the asshole put up the oversized monstrosity on the lot across the street. The bizarrely designed box took the place of the small cottage that had been there for decades; the woman who lived there died and the charity group she left the place to sold it off to the new guy. He’s an architect who ruined a nice, stylish beach place down the street a few years ago and the worked his magic on this beachfront lot. But I digress…

Anyway, yes, my old room is cozy and nice. But it is also small. And the bathroom is down the hall, shared with two other bedrooms on the floor.

The master, on the other hand, has high ceilings, a wide-open floor plan and an en suite bathroom. It also has a view of the Atlantic (to the east and southeast) and direct access to the deck. While not an issue with winter approaching, deck access is nice because that’s where I spend a lot of my evenings at home. My usual spot on the deck, accessed through my sister’s room, faces east and northeast, and while nice, has been assaulted by the aforementioned glitter dome. That the palace is lighted all night also lessens the stargazing.

But at my parents’ corner of the house there’s a wondrous shadow. No streetlights impinge on the sky and the neighbors on that side value the night sky as much as I do. And instead of having to carry speakers outside with me when I chill out on the deck in my old spot, now I’ll be able to simply open a window and turn a speaker to face outside and I’ll have tunes to suit the occasion.

So there were concrete reasons why it took me three months to make the move. But there were also more subtle obstacles to be overcome.

For starters, it’s not my room. It’s my parents’. It’s ALWAYS been their room. Moving in there puts the final touch on the fact that they’re gone and the generations have changed hands. It’s like it’s the next, penultimate step in the path of life: birth, cradle, shared bedroom, own bedroom, master bedroom…casket. It’s been weird enough no longer having living parents and moving into the master bedroom makes that fact even clearer.

There was also one unanticipated consequence to moving into the master bedroom: doing so has made the already-too-big house even bigger. When I occupied one bedroom and the shared bath and the hall in between, I was using a good half of the floor. Now, with everything self-contained in the master suite, I’m using maybe a quarter — and the rest of the floor can essentially be shut down. That’s nice financially — the heat can be turned way down in those other rooms and the sun bakes the master room to a high temperature all winter long, which is nice — but it makes the place a little lonelier.

And finally, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to make the master room mine. I’ve hung some things on the wall and put my clothes in the closet, but I don’t know that anything less than a wholesale overhaul — new paint, new window treatments, maybe new flooring — ever makes it seem like I’m doing anything other than sleeping in my parents’ room. Or maybe that’s just a function of time. I guess we’ll find out.

With the finality of my father’s passing, and the fact that my siblings and I are now the oldest limb on this family tree, everything has become a function of time, and finding things out down the road. I guess all of life for everyone is that way, really, but it’s still weird to make that right turn into the master bedroom instead of continuing on down to the end of the hall when turning in for the night.

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Sidebar: People have asked about the future of the house. The short version is this: The house has, for almost a decade, been owned by a trust comprised of my brother, my sister and me. My sister has no interest in the home but my brother and I do so we’re going to buy out her third and keep the place. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how finances work out and that won’t be determined for several months. But I’m living here now and have been since the spring, and I’ll stay here for the foreseeable future barring any amazing job offers elsewhere (hint, hint to anyone reading). On the job front, my goal is to set up some freelance projects (another hint, hint to anyone reading) — consulting, writing, editing — so that I can remain here. And in the meantime I will continue to clean and thin out the inconceivable amount of stuff my we-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-so-we-saved-EVERYTHING parents had stashed all over the place. One dumpster’s worth of stuff has already been removed and another will be needed soon. I also have close to a thousand books to be donated or discarded — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of books I’m keeping because they’re of interest to me personally or they’re first editions or autographed or an antique or some other reason that gives them a particular value. If you’re a bibliophile, give me a shout.

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Untold Stories

Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story doesn’t get told?

I ask all of these questions because one of the great regrets I will take to my grave is that I never got my mother’s stories down on paper. Mom, who lived an amazing, interesting life shaping a field that is the coin of the realm in modern-day America, had stories so riveting that award-winning authors and screenwriters offered to help her get them published. Mom always declined, saying that such privacies and privileges had been entrusted to her by her clients, by her place in her industry, and that she wouldn’t betray that trust. I picked up where those writers left off, telling her that just letting people know what it was like to have worked with these famous people on such high-profile movies would suffice, that she wouldn’t have to divulge any secrets and insider scoop.

In recent years, Mom had begun to lighten up a bit. I bought Dragon Dictate transcription software and we created her profile on this laptop. The plan was we’d talk for an hour or two and after a few months I’d have a pile of notes and quotes that I could edit into the book many had hoped she’d one day write.

We did one brief session where she recounted her early days in Brooklyn and Malverne, New York, but then she put me off a few times and I didn’t press her. Months later, she warmed up a bit again and asked if we were going to resume talking but it never happened, not before she took her fall in October and the chance for us to ever talk again disappeared.

I find myself wracked with guilt over having let Mom take those stories with her. Many people have said I could talk to those my mother worked with and get a similar book, but it really wouldn’t be the same. Who can I ask about what it was like to walk down Park Avenue with Marilyn Monroe for a photographer? Countless other similar tales are now gone, and though there are photos to illustrate the events, the faces on the film are mute and they keep their secrets to themselves.

And now I find myself once again facing the similar loss of equally amazing stories. As has been chronicled in this space, my father and I are currently on the outs, not talking, not really getting along at all. We are, to stay with Springsteen quotes, “too much of the same kind,” it seems. But I’ve written before of my father’s World War II service and how I believe it affected everything in his life to this day. Of how he is still in the Ardennes, almost 70 years later. I’ve written that seeing what he’s gone through, what he’s missed out on, is too high a price for anyone or any country to pay. And make no mistake about it: he saw some serious shit at a way-too-young age not to have suffered.

The tales of those experiences, and those of others like my father, shouldn’t be lost to the mists of time. They should be enshrined so that hopefully we as a society can stop making the same mistake over and over and over again. And on a personal level, getting him to share those stories would hopefully give our family something we’re still seeking: an answer to the question, “why?,” that has pervaded the entirety of half a century.

My father also has some amazing stories to share that aren’t focused on war. There aren’t many people left of whom I can ask, “What was it like to drink with Hemingway in Cuba?,” but my father is one such person. I’ve heard the story many times, but to get it on paper would preserve the tale for my nieces and their children and on down the line.

Maybe, as it turns out, I never was a very good journalist, because I don’t know how to break through the wall to get to the great stories. I let Mom’s stories get away and I don’t know how to reach my father to save his stories. And that’s a shame. Because we as human beings think in language, in words, in stories. And we as societies live in the exchange of that language, of those words, of those stories. If our stories don’t get told and shared and passed down, do we really live?

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I’m Still Here

I’ve started this column/post a thousand times over the past four months. In my head, at least. Getting it down on this piece of electronic paper has proven a bit more challenging. But in the spirit of all the catch phrases and self-help gurus who’ll tell you/me to just write anything, badly, rather than not write, I’m going to spout off a bunch of brackish, murky thoughts for no other reason than to (hopefully) prime the pump for the clearer, tastier water lying deeper in the well.

So for this first gargle, let’s catch up a bit, shall we? In case you missed it, back in the fall of 2012 I was taking steps toward a dream of mine. In early October, I was in Annapolis, Maryland, checking out the U.S. Sailboat Show, looking at a few boats for sale in that area and working with a friend who has a business in the marine industry. With my mother’s blessing, I had given notice that October was my last month in my apartment in Newburyport and was planning on  chasing life once again. The primary plan was to head south toward turquoise waters on a boat of my own sometime around early November. If my search for the right, pretty-much-ready boat didn’t pan out, I was going to head somewhere, anywhere, in hopes of rekindling that fire that I had in 2011 that got me writing again. Something about adventuring always seems to get my creative juices flowing. Regardless of the specifics, my life was going to change.

And change it did. On Saturday, Oct. 6, I emerged from a seminar at the sailboat show to find a message waiting for me on my phone. I dialed my voice mail and heard my father’s shaky voice tell me to call him back, that it was an emergency. I found a quiet corner of the hotel, away from the seminar rooms, and called my father. He told me that sometime in the early hours of the morning, my mother had fallen down a flight of stairs at the inn where they were staying in Maine. My father said that she’d sustained a concussion and a broken arm, and that she’d been helicoptered to the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. I told him I was on my way and would start driving back immediately, that I’d be there around midnight.

Something didn’t feel right though, so I called the hospital back as I was driving out of Annapolis. I was connected to the doctor who said he was glad I had called as he didn’t think my father was thinking too clearly in light of what had happened and then proceeded to tell me what the real story was. Mom had sustained heavy brain trauma and had been revived once already. She was on life support but the prognosis was not good.

I damn near drove off the freeway as the doctor ran through the situation step by step. I was hyperventilating and couldn’t breathe. I was crying uncontrollably and couldn’t see. I focused on taking deep breaths as the phone call concluded and was able to see signs for the Baltimore airport. A quick exit, I parked, grabbed a few things threw them in my bike-messenger-style computer bag and entered the terminal. I found an AirTran flight that went direct to Portland, Maine, in an hour and a half and booked a ticket. I then called my sister and brother out west and told them what the doctor had told me, and that they needed to get on planes ASAP.

I got to the hospital in Lewiston around 6pm. I proceeded to stay up all night by my mother’s hospital bed, but it had been clear to me from the moment I walked in that she was already gone. My siblings arrived around lunchtime the next day and we made the decision to stop life support. That’s one thing about our family: as disparate as our attitudes about pretty much everything are, we are unanimous in our belief that essence precedes existence. Mom passed away very shortly thereafter on the seventh of October.

There was a whirlwind of activity in the week following my mother’s passing, what with a wake and a funeral and getting the process started to deal with her estate. I chronicled some of what was going through my head at the time in the previous two posts in this blog. In those posts, I made it clear that I was not going to repeat the mistakes my family had made in 1985 when my brother died. I was going to get the help and support I needed to avoid drifting off into some abyss, and I was going to do so in an open and honest manner here on TerraStomper. Obviously, since this is my first writing since the eulogy I posted back in October, that didn’t happen.

What did happen was that I left Newburyport all right: I moved three miles east, back to the family home on Plum Island. I was there three weeks later, instead of in London as I had planned after Mom’s passing, because hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast and I didn’t want to leave my father alone to deal with the inevitable mess she left in her wake (and also because I was hoping to get some great surfing in).

With apologies to those in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Sandy turned out to be a big dud here in Massachusetts. But that Monday evening, the 29th, I was waiting for my father to join me at the dinner table when I heard him cry out. I was sitting in the chair my mother always sat in at the table and turned to see him falling backwards in slow motion. I jumped up and caught him before he hit the floor and laid him down slowly. After he rested a bit, we tried to have him roll one way. Too painful. We tried the other way. Too painful. He tried to sit up. Way too painful. At that point, I pulled the chute and called 9-1-1.

Fortunately, with all the hype surrounding Sandy, there was an ambulance stationed on Plum Island in case of evacuation. The EMTs reached the house in no time and immediately determined that dad had broken his hip. Whoosh! They whisked him off to the hospital and I followed in the car. Again, thanks to Sandy, everyone was bundled up in their homes so the hospital was empty and dad was settled into a room in relatively short order.

The next morning, the orthopedic surgeon — who lives just down the street from us on Plum Island and who has worked on a ton of friends — arranged to perform surgery in the early afternoon. Dr. Steve worked his magic and dad’s hip was repaired with a couple of pins: one running the length of his femur and another pinning that whole arrangement in place in his hip. A couple of small incisions were all that showed anything had been done at all.

Except that dad suffered complications. His blood pressure was very low and the anticoagulants that he’d been taking for years as a result of his irregular heartbeat (for which he’d had a defib/pacemaker installed in his chest in August) prevented the wound from clotting and his leg filled with blood. Infection followed, as did an inability to swallow and keep food or liquids down — the result of dad’s intubation during surgery. For two weeks, my father lay on his back at Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, and in that two weeks, what strength he had evaporated.

Dad then spent six weeks in a pair of rehabilitation facilities, improving in fits and starts on the long, slow road to recovery. (The completely and totally fucked-up health-care system in this country will be the subject of a separate, later post.) But through it all, his spirit was slowly waning. The soul-crushing nature of nursing homes was taking its toll. So on Christmas Eve, a good two weeks-plus early I would guess, I brought my father home to Plum Island. He made it home for the holidays, and though the house was pretty empty it definitely provided my father with a pick-me-up. He’s been home for five weeks now, slowly improving, since then and his spirit has made the long journey back.

And that’s where we are at this point. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than just this quick recap. Suffice it to say: these have been the longest, most arduous four months of my life, without question. And therein, I hope, lies some of the growth I had hoped to capture along the way. That I couldn’t find the strength to do so as it all was happening is a testament to the exhaustion I’ve been wrestling with. With this gargle, as I called it, I’m taking the first step back, finally.

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