Home Is Burning

by Dan Marshall

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  Dedicated to anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer or ALS

  PREFACE

  Hello. I was once told that the best way to make new friends is to compliment them, and I want you to be my new friend, so let’s start with a couple of compliments.

  First, you have nice eyes with which you read these words. Or, if you’re blind and doing the whole Braille deal, then you have silky smooth fingers made from a thousand angels’ wings.

  Second, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I love you already. Without you, dear reader, these words would just sit on my computer next to a folder called “Graduation Plans” where I hide some porno clips, and by some, I mean a lot.

  Okay, now that we’re already best friends and you love and trust me like a brother, let me quickly go over a few other things before we launch into the crazy, crude, sad, intense, and slightly inspirational story found on these pages.

  As you know, this book is a supernatural memoir set in the year 3928—shortly after the first robot ghost was elected president, but before volcano monsters took over earth and added its second moon.

  Just kidding.

  Just a little goof up top. Sorry to stall. It’s just that the subject matter of this book is pretty heavy, but fuck it. Here goes. This is the story of what happened to my family over the course of two years when my mom, Debi, was battling terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and my dad, Bob, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a terminal neurological disorder more commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  Boom, there it is. Two terminally ill parents slammed with misfortune at the same time. Sort of an extreme situation, I know. That’s why I started with that bullshit about the robot ghost.

  My four siblings and I had no idea what we were doing. No one really does when dealing with life-altering tragedy, but we did the best we could, which wasn’t great.

  Before you decide whether to take the plunge and dive into our family tragedy, you might want to know a touch more about me. I’m Daniel Joseph Marshall. I have also gone by Danny, Dano, Danny Boy, Big Dick Dan (self-applied and untrue), Dickhead Dan, Mellow Yellow, Marshmellow, Marsh Marsh, D-Marsh, and Turtle Fucker, for reasons I’d rather not get into right now. Oh, and DJ. My dad called me DJ, short for Daniel Joseph. This nickname was fine until Full House rolled around and created a female character named DJ Tanner. I then had to request that I stop being called DJ in public so mean kids wouldn’t tease me so much. Though I went by Danny for most of my life, I made a switch to Dan recently, because I think it’s a little cooler and doesn’t sound as childish as Danny.

  Physically, I’m five foot nine, though at a recent doctor’s visit, I was told I’m closer to five foot seven. It’s pretty shocking when you spend your whole life thinking you’re one height and then find out you’re another. I still consider myself to be five nine. That doctor and his stupid science measuring stuff were full of shit. I was born weighing six pounds, twelve ounces, on September 17, 1982, in Pekin, Illinois, though I’ve gained a significant amount of weight since then. I currently weigh in around 175 pounds. With my semishort height and my weight, I’m a little dumpy. One friend described me as being a sad little cannonball. I feel that’s accurate.

  My favorite foods are pretzels, beef jerky, gummy bears, sunflower seeds, and Hot Tamales, which might explain why I’ve gained so much weight since birth.

  Though I was born in Pekin, Illinois—where the high school teams were called the Chinks from 1930 to 1980, before being changed to the much less racist Dragons—I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. My family and I are not Mormon. Like most non-Mormons in Utah, I got out of there as soon as I could. Don’t get me wrong, I love Utah. It’s a hidden gem in this generally ugly world. Most people don’t give it a chance because they view Mormonism to be a weird religion. Mormonism is certainly a weird religion, but aren’t all religions a little strange? And who really cares what other people believe, so long as they don’t believe in rape or kiddie porn? Like Catholics. But no one should live in Utah his or her whole life. It’s too much of a warped reality.

  So I left Utah for college. I was looking for a place that was at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, so I decided to attend UC Berkeley. Berkeley is a strange mixture of academics and homeless people, and a refreshing place to live—the type of town where you can be as kooky as you like but also go completely unnoticed.

  From Berkeley, I got a job working at a strategic communications and public relations firm in beautiful and scenic Los Angeles. I love traffic and pollution and assholes speeding around in BMWs, so Los Angeles was a great fit for me. I had started a pretty nice little life in Los Angeles. I lived in an apartment off Sunset Boulevard, had a job and a girlfriend I loved, and owned couches with built-in recliners—sort of the American dream in action. I was following that path we’re told to follow: go to college, get a job, start instantly planning for retirement, find a significant other you enjoy being around who makes you feel like the world is bright instead of dark, be fun and happy and successful enough to have said significant other fall in love with you and see you as a long-term-provider-type figure, get married, buy a home, start a family, stay away from drugs and alcohol so you can raise that family in a functional way and thus give them a shot at following a similarly safe and happy path and pass along your genes, be proud of your children for doing well with the opportunities you gave them, retire, watch yourself wither away while reminding young people to live it up and have as much sex as possible while they can, etc.

  The whole dying-parents mess interrupted that path. I was pulled from what I thought was the real world into a situation that made the real world seem fake.

  * * *

  Full disclosure: there is a lot of bad language in the book. Best to explain that up-front so you’re not completely shocked when you see words like fuck, shit, fart, hell, son of a bitch, asshole, and motherfucker next to words like dying, death, cancer, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s very difficult for me to write a sentence without using a bad word. That last sentence, for example, was fucking impossible for me to write.

  My family has a very crude sense of humor. Our swear jar was always filled to the brim. When times were stressful, we’d take breaks where we were allowed to yell any obscenities we wanted at each other—sort of a venting mechanism. I’m sure some concerned neighbors would walk by our house and hear a burst of profanity-laced yelling flying out our front door. It was our way of dealing with the world and reducing some grief and depression.

  And if I’m really being honest, we just like to offend Mormon people. I know this sounds stupid and petty, but growing up in the Mormon-dominated state that is Utah, we were often made to feel like outsiders, “The Other,” which is an unusual thing for a prosperous white family in America to feel. When you are The Other, you begin to resent the majority and look for ways to piss them off. Swearing did that for us.

 
; My mom and I, in particular, have very foul mouths. I always thought it was hilarious when she swore, so I mimicked her behavior. When I was about ten years old, I was lying on the couch reading—undetected by my parents—and I overheard my dad and mom having a little discussion about one of my dad’s co-workers. My dad was complaining that the co-worker was a bit of a jerk, and my mom said, “Bob, here’s what you do. You look him in the eye and tell him to shut the fuck up.” I thought it was hilarious. After that, I decided that, like my mom, I’d swear all the time.

  When my dad got sick, we all really amped it up. Increase the pain input, increase the swearing output. Makes sense. And because of the stress, we became increasingly blunt with each other.

  * * *

  I wrote this book because I’m just a sad dude with a big heart who really loves his dad. This book, in many ways, is a love letter to him. Jesus, that sounded sappy. But whatever, loving your dad isn’t a crime. I owe him a lot.

  My dream is that our story will give people who are currently caring for a loved one—no matter the age, ailment, or situation—some comfort in knowing that another family of shitheads has ungracefully gone through something similar. You’re not alone. Tragedy has company, as someone aside from me probably said at some point.

  I also hope this book paints me as a tragic hero (of sorts) and makes more people like me, or even love me. That’s what life is all about, right? Being loved, loving others, and feeling good about yourself? I’ve also heard it’s about collecting a bunch of material possessions to fill the void. Maybe I’ll try that one day.

  * * *

  Okay, enough bullshitting. Let’s get this show on the road. As you read, please keep in mind what great friends we are, and remember, through all this intense nonsense, that I’m just a slightly dumpy dude who loves pretzels and his dad.

  THE BOMB

  “I fucking love it here,” I said like a spoiled white asshole as I looked up at the cloudless sky, seeing only palm trees against the perfect blue.

  “I know. I could stay here forever,” said my girlfriend, Abby.

  Abby and I were celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday at the JW Marriott pool in Palm Desert. She had flown into Los Angeles from Berkeley the night before, and then we had driven out to the desert in my shitty Subaru. We were drinking frozen tropical smoothies full of alcohol, the endless sun beating down on us as we read pointless books with entertaining storylines. The pool band played “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and various Beach Boys songs on a loop. We had incredibly important conversations about incredibly important topics, like where we should eat dinner and how much post-dinner sex we should have. Shit, maybe we’d even hit up a late-night hot tub session if we had the energy after all the eating and fucking. The world was ours.

  My parents owned a time-share at this Palm Desert Marriott, and I had grown up vacationing there. It was our family spot. We were from Salt Lake City, Utah, so Palm Desert was one of the closest warm destinations. We liked coming here to get away from our problems and from all the Mormons who lived around us. My mom hated Mormons with a passion. When we first moved to Salt Lake from Pekin, Illinois, our beloved family dog, Basquo, was running around the neighborhood. An evil Mormon kid started throwing rocks at him and pulling his tail, so Basquo bit him. Our Mormon neighbors ganged up on my mom and dad and demanded that we put Basquo under. My mom had disliked Mormons ever since, blaming them for the death of our dog. She trained us to distrust them as well, and made sure we knew there was a normal world outside of Utah. So, as kids, when we’d land at the Palm Springs Airport, my mom was always sure to point out the glowing neon COCKTAILS sign in the terminal bar.

  “See, this is what normal places are like that aren’t run by a Nazi religion,” she would say. “They have bars everywhere.”

  “Okay, great,” we’d say back, not really sure what all that meant.

  We spent several Thanksgivings and Easters in Palm Desert. Fuck, we were so comfortable with the place that my gay brother, Greg, came out of the closet here on a family vacation.

  I brought Abby to Palm Desert to let her in on the Marshall family tradition of relaxing in the sun and getting away from all of our troubles.

  At the time, I didn’t have many troubles to get away from. Things were going great. I was living in Los Angeles working my first real job at a strategic communications and PR firm called Abernathy MacGregor, making my own money for the first time in my life. Though the job was occasionally difficult and consuming, I was still very much in that post-college dicking-around phase. I lived in an apartment right off the Sunset Strip, where my roommate Gabe and I would sit on our balcony cracking jokes while watching beautiful struggling actresses walk by on their way toward chasing their Hollywood dreams.

  Abby was getting her Ph.D. at Berkeley in materials science. We had met sophomore year of college at Berkeley and had been together since—four years now. She was way smarter than most attractive blondes and was amused by my offbeat sense of humor instead of repelled by it. We were madly in love. Even though we were in a long-distance relationship, marriage seemed inevitable.

  Everything with my family was going pretty well, too. Sure, my mom still had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She had first been diagnosed in 1992, when she was only thirty-seven years old. I remember the day. She left for the doctor’s one morning thinking she had a stomach bug and returned a cancer patient. My four siblings and I were all under eleven. We didn’t know what cancer meant. My little sister Chelsea couldn’t even pronounce the word. “What is can-sore?” she asked upon hearing the news.

  “It’s not good,” I said, not really sure what it was myself.

  Terrifying words accompanied my mother’s diagnosis—words like terminal, inoperable, untreatable, and advanced. It was deemed stage four, or “end-stage,” cancer, and she was given only a couple months to live. But, looking her kids in their watery eyes, she vowed to not let cancer leave her children without a mom. She decided to fight it with all her will and strength, no matter how many chemotherapy treatments and surgeries it took. She wasn’t going to let cancer beat her.

  And it didn’t. After nearly seventy rounds of chemotherapy and several surgeries, at age fifty-one she was still standing. The cancer wasn’t gone, but it was under control. She and her trusted oncologist, Dr. Saundra Buys, would keep a watchful eye on it. When her immune system or white blood count would begin to drop, she’d start chemo back up. It was a big part of her life and a constant battle. But right now she was feeling good and wasn’t receiving any chemo. In fact, she had a full head of hair down to her shoulders.

  My dad was doing better than ever. He was fifty-three and cruising along toward retirement. Sure his hair was graying and he was slowly going bald, but life was good. He owned and ran a few weekly newspapers in a variety of small towns across northern Utah, Idaho, and the Pacific Northwest. His business did well and he was financially secure. Plus, he worked for himself, so he was able to manage his hours in a way that allowed for him to have free time to spend with his dipshit family. He’d start every day with a cup of coffee and a dump, and end it with a glass of wine. He was living the dream.

  Things were coasting along so nicely that he had recently picked up a new hobby: marathon running. His best friend, Sam Larkin, had gotten him into it a couple years back. I personally think you have to have some sort of mental disorder to want to torture your body via a marathon, but my dad seemed to love it. He had always been an active person—skiing every weekend in the winter—so I guess it made sense that he got addicted to another form of exercise. He was running at least fifteen miles most days of the week. He had to run no matter where we were. It was his meth, his life. It was how we all knew him now—our dad, the marathon-running health nut.

  He had just finished running the Chicago Marathon on October 20, 2006. It had been his second marathon of the month. The first was St. George, in southern Utah. My dad was working on qualifying for the Boston Marathon, which is like the Super Bowl of mara
thons for these runner nuts. He needed to finish the St. George race in under three hours and thirty-five minutes to qualify for his age bracket. The obsessive training paid off. He qualified for Boston by only a few seconds.

  My older sister, Tiffany, was working at Fidelity Investments in downtown Salt Lake. She had just finished undergrad at the University of Utah, where she majored in international studies. She had ambitions of going to law school next and was taking a class to help her study for the LSAT. She had just bought a house in a trendy Salt Lake neighborhood. She was a snowboarding fanatic, and even though her studies and work didn’t leave her much free time, she’d get up to the mountains a few times a week during the winter season. She was seven years into dating her boyfriend, Derek. Derek was a Park City townie who worked at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory and loved mountain biking. He had a tattoo of a naked lady running along his right arm that he’d let me look at when I was bored at family dinners, so I liked him. He had a giant heart and fit in perfectly with our family. My sister was still trying to figure out all of her career aspirations, but she was happy, settling into a very nice life in Salt Lake close to her beloved mountains.

  My gay brother, Greg, was in his last year at Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois. He was majoring in journalism and fine-tuning his incredible writing skills. He was busy enjoying the freedom that being out and proud brought about, especially now that he lived in a more liberal city than Salt Lake. Greg is a tall, wickedly smart blond, so he had his pick of cock. He was born with cerebral palsy, but after several leg surgeries, he was left with only a slight limp. Oh, and he was uncircumcised. He said that he had a “gimmicky cock that every guy on campus wanted to try out.” If life is about fucking as much as possible, then Greg certainly seemed to be nailing it. After college, he planned on getting a journalism job at a newspaper or radio station in Chicago and living in the city with friends.