THE LAST CADILLAC
a memoir
NANCY NAU SULLIVAN
Walrus Publishing
Saint Louis, MO 63110
Copyright © 2016 Nancy Nau Sullivan
All rights reserved.
For information, contact:
Walrus Publishing
An imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group
4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116
Publisher’s Note: This memoir is a work of imagination and truth.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Garamond Pro
Interior designed by Kristina Blank Makansi
Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935414
ISBN-13: 978-1940442129
Dedicated to
Donald Nicholas “Mike” Nau, and Jim, Mick,
Amos, Miles, and Frances,
without whom, there is no adventure at all
THE LAST CADILLAC
“To thine own self be true…”
– Shakespeare, and my mother, Pat Nau
1
OMG
My father reached for another cigarette, his fingernails scrabbling over the glass-top table. I lit his cigarette and then my own. We both took deep drags as I leaned over and brushed the ashes off the front of his jacket. We sat there on the patio of the condo under the grey Indiana sky. Silent. Smoking.
Time didn’t seem to have an edge to it anymore; it just flowed out around me like dark water. I needed to breathe, so I smoked. It was a bad thing, sitting there smoking with my father, but bad felt normal. Everything was different now. My mind raced. My mother is dead. My marriage is dead. What am I going to do, Dad? What are we going to do?
My mother had only been gone a week. Her apricot roses withered in vases all over the condo, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. I cleaned around them, attacking piles of laundry and bills, getting rid of health-care equipment, pills, and crusty aluminum pans. But it didn’t matter. I could not wash it all away. I kept reliving disaster. Along with losing my mother and facing my distraught father, my marriage was kaput. I had become: a divorced woman.
I had to get out of there, go somewhere—maybe back to Florida. Now.
The kids called it “The Adventure,” and they kept after me about it everywhere I went.
“When are we going?” they demanded. “When?”
I told them, “Soon.”
But that was not entirely true. “Soon” was stretching it. I had a to-do list, and Dad was right there at the top.
I lit another cigarette, then got up and flipped the soggy cushion on my chair. I sat back down. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was sit there. Next to the cool, green golf course, one foot resting on a pot of ivy and petunias. The condo was dark, no one hurrying around, and finally, no more emergencies. The phone had stopped ringing. The front door locked everything out. It was quiet for now, but I didn’t want to go back in there. Back inside, where all the memories, painful, again took over.
The chill did not drive us inside. As I remember that misty afternoon, it was like an Irish day, and I welcomed that. We all loved Ireland. The good memories.… I zipped my jacket to the neck and tucked my wet hair back behind my ears. Dad was snug in his khaki jacket and tweed hat decorated with the pins from Dublin and Killarney. The hat I gave him. Sometimes he was confused since the stroke, but never about whose hat it was and where he put it, along with the whereabouts of his coat and shoes. He was always ready to go, and it was usually me who took him there.
I wrapped my fingers around his and squeezed, but he was off in another world. I left him there. It wouldn’t do any good to bring him into mine where I began to feel the stirrings of dread. I let go of Dad’s hand and slumped in my chair. My siblings were coming over for “a family meeting.” My brother, Jack, a tennis-playing, leather-wearing young millionaire; my sister, Julia, a meddling, nurse-Poppins who had a pill for everything; my sister, Lucy, a svelte, suit-wearing restaurateur who was five-star at getting the latest boy toy. I couldn’t wait to see them and find out what sort of trouble we could get into this time. If there was one thing consistent about our relationship, it’s that we disagreed on family matters. Sometimes we laughed. But mostly we disagreed, especially on any business having to do with Dad.
Even so, I was determined to work out some comfortable arrangement for Dad. We should talk calmly and productively, I told myself. Besides, I was the eldest, and I was responsible. They had to listen to me, and I should listen to them, which was like sticking needles in my eyeballs.
I laughed, but it sounded like a cross between hacking and choking.
Dad smiled. “What is it?”
“Nothing, Dad.”
He patted my hand. “Well, it’s good to hear you laugh.”
Everything will be all right. No. Nothing will be all right. Nothing is right.
Florida. Yes. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted—and needed—to go back.
To the cottage. I dreamed of getting back to the cottage where we went every winter. The annual trip had always been the most glorious part of growing up, and I never grew out of it. I was like a migrating bird.
But if things didn’t work out in Florida—and I could think of a number of reasons why they wouldn’t, Dad’s situation being number one—we’d be right back in Northwest Indiana. I hoped that wouldn’t happen, because I liked sunshine and the beach and the idea of getting away from the Ex. So, until I found our own place, I’d take the kids to Anna Maria Island. To the family cottage.
For the time being, I was stuck in Indiana, juggling a part-time newswriting job, Dad, and the kids. Between the news assignments and feature stories about Russian baseball players and chili recipes, I took care of the bills and medical forms. The accountant and the lawyer helped, but someone needed to be there all the time with Dad.
I was torn. I should probably stay up north, but the idea was killing me.
The mist shifted to a cool drizzle, reducing the cigarette butts in the ashtray to a pile of dead brown minnows. I poked at them idly with a burnt match.
“What are you thinking, Dad?” I’d grown up on his common sense, and now was as good a time as any to hear some of it.
As soon as the words came out, it struck me that I’d hardly asked him how he felt during all the confusion since Mom got sick. I’d coddled him, and, frightfully, he had teetered along on that cane. But I didn’t really talk with him. None of us did. Not during the whole year of misery. For a family that talked so much, we certainly didn’t communicate very well.
“Dad.”
“I’m ruminating.” His short, straight eyelashes were wet with rain, or tears. I couldn’t tell.
“Tell me, Dad.”
“My Patsy, my Patsy. More than fifty years we had together. I never believed it would kill her.”
“Dad, no one believed it.”
“I had faith in the doctors … that they could cure it. But then she went so fast.”
His shoulders began quaking up and down as he rumbled along to the end of his sentence. I put my arm around him and rocked him a little. Sometimes I could get him back on track. Like jiggling a reluctant old machine. But it didn’t work this time. He kept sobbing.
My father, the Navy commander. He shouldn’t be crying.
“It’s all right, all right,” I said.
He covered his face with a handkerchief and held on to me. His grip was strong, but I was losing him, too. My parents. I could not hold onto either of them.
I straightened up, then promptly fell back into my chair, hit hard with memories of that day. The day my mother called.
“Gall bladde
r cancer!” she said.
I’d gripped the phone so hard my fingers cramped while she went on like she was talking about bad weather. “The technician was doing an ultrasound, and, out of the blue, he gasped. I suppose he shouldn’t have done that!” Then, of all things, she laughed. “Gall bladder cancer! It sounds so unfashionable!”
I almost dropped the phone. I didn’t laugh, but at the same time, I didn’t think gall bladder cancer could be all that bad—certainly not terminal. Who needs a gall bladder?
“Mom! This is crazy!”
“I’d say so.”
“Why don’t they just take it out?”
“They can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing they can do. I could go to the moon.”
But we both knew, there was nowhere she could go. Nothing she could do. Nothing anyone could do. She died fourteen months later.
Until she was gone, though, she died little by little, in unexpected steps. One day, or even for a week, she seemed fine. Then she’d take another step down. After she died, I’d have dreams that the wake was inside a dark mahogany room filled with elaborate flowers and many people, but she just got up and walked out. Like nothing ever happened—like she was leaving a cocktail party at the country club. For a long time, when I was not dreaming, I still expected to see her come around the corner. She couldn’t be dead. She was too alive. But then, no one knew what to expect when she came up with gall bladder cancer, least of all the doctors. They’d given her six to eighteen months. They just couldn’t be “sure.”
At first, I was so busy watching Mom, I didn’t notice Dad’s steadily deteriorating condition. It all happened so fast. Jack said Dad needed therapy, and maybe a pill or two. He insisted Dad had “stuck blood,” which meant Dad had to be massaged and coaxed to get up out of his chair. Without physical activity, Jack was afraid we’d have a statue of a dad. Julia agreed with Jack, especially about the pills. The two of them never lost an opportunity to push pills on our parents. Julia shoved horse-size, orange pills on Mom (I still don’t know what was in them). Fortunately, Mom couldn’t swallow them. Jack even ordered shark cartilage and fruit extracts from Mexico.
Their pill pushing had become a creeping disease of its own. And even though I was alarmed, Julia and Jack wouldn’t listen to me. It probably didn’t help that I sounded like a cross between a harpy and a shrew.
Lucy, my sister the restaurant manager, on the other hand, didn’t weigh in on the pill-taking. Most days, she was on duty at the Ritz, decked out in her suit and heels and pearls—one such day, stealthily watching Mel Gibson and his brother drink beer in the Atrium.
All the while, Mom was dying, Dad was going down hill, and my siblings and I were floundering in disagreement.
Except for one thing. I did agree with Jack about the exercise—one of the few things we all agreed on. Dad needed something, just not another pill.
Certainly no pill could cure Mom, and no pill would cure Dad, who was stricken with sadness at seeing his wife slowly die of cancer. With my father’s brain in the condition it was, he needed a miracle, not another pill. Besides, his reaction to the drugs was exactly the opposite of the intended effect, which was to relieve anxiety, enable sleep, and increase appetite—in other words, to find a healthy “normal.” Only, normal didn’t exist. I couldn’t find normal anywhere, and there was no sense in trying to induce it through pills.
As the days ticked on, I became more frustrated, trying to save Dad from my brother and sister, and the pills. Amitriptyline (according to the label), stated, “use in elderly is associated with increased risk, and safer alternatives may be available.” That one added to Dad’s confusion—and mine. The next pill, Prozac, didn’t work. Yet, the doctor put him back on it. Paxil was another loser. It made him more restless than ever. But Melaril was the star of them all. Dad seemed worse than ever on that one.
In desperation, I called my cousin, Chuck, the pharmacist, when I found out Julia had steered Dad to that pill.
“My God, Nancy, why are they giving him Melaril? Is it that bad? That’s what they give them at the end when they want them to sit there and be vegetables.”
The drug made him fall down and wet himself, and he didn’t know his children—except for me, whom he called “the old bitch.” He called me that under the influence of the pills I hated, because I kept after him to remember things and go to the bathroom, and to try. Try, Dad. Try, try, try. I was the cheerleader of my dad. I believed he could do better if he tried harder. I did manage to get him off that pill, for starters, and I forced him to remember things, quizzed him, encouraged him daily.
One day I cornered Julia in the kitchen where she was arranging her mini-pharmacy in a cabinet next to the fridge. She shuffled a frightening array of pills in all colors. Then and there, I wondered, Does baby blue make you feel better than happy yellow?
“You know, Julia, the medication just doesn’t do it for Dad.” I tried to speak evenly, but it was a stretch.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “There are wonderful things being done in research and development …”
“I don’t care what they’re doing in research and development, damn it!” So much for nonchalance. “Dad’s not a mouse in a laboratory.”
She shut the cabinet with a click. Everything she did had that definite, soft click to it. Her remarks. Her kitten heels. Her clipped bureaucratic speech, which was incomprehensible half the time. She huffed away, which had become our way ending every conversation. At one time, we had almost been friends, but the death of our mother was hard on us in all ways, and there were losses at every turn.
I nosed around in the kitchen pharmacy for a clue about the pill experiment, but it all looked like Greek to me—except for the disturbing side effects that were written in English. For some reason, every person who had the remotest connection to the health care industry advised taking a pill, especially when a hint of depression entered the picture.
Dad wasn’t depressed. He was grieving! The pills—those tiny little dots that represented control of Dad—moved around between my sister and me. In my own mind, I was convinced I could get a saner, happier, still-funny Dad without pills. I wanted to find some of the old Dad left in there, but the pills were anesthetizing him out of his mind.
I started weaning him off pills with a flush of the toilet, along with the help of the doctor, whom I finagled to see alone about the pill problem. Fortunately, Julia had a fulltime job in Minneapolis, so I had days on end without her starting Dad on yet another pill.
Eventually, Dad seemed clearer, and better physically, in part, because of the new prescription: a regular diet, less medication, and more exercise, thanks to Stan, the therapist. But I had to face the fact that all of my efforts might fall apart while I went off on “The Adventure.” The thought squashed my excitement for a new start, flat.
Dad had come to rely on me. Sometimes we didn’t even talk. I brought him a coffee, or, fixed the remote for the television, or steered him off to the bathroom, or to a nap. When we were together, we were like two wheels going forward on automatic, and it was becoming clear that it would be difficult to leave him alone up in Indiana.
Besides the worrisome pill-taking, I wondered who would cook for him? Drive him around? Hug him on a regular basis? If left alone, he wouldn’t open a can of soup. The only thing I ever saw him make was oatmeal, and the last time that happened I was about twelve. I asked myself how he could go on living in the condo, near the golf course he could no longer use, while the rain and snow brought on one gloomy day after another? Here it was late June, and it was just as gloomy and grey as February.
To top all, Dad and I were smoking. I looked over at him. He had a large cigarette burn in his jacket near the zipper. His clothes were beginning to look as ventilated as a Swiss cheese, and I wasn’t helping any by bringing him the cigarettes. We had lapsed into this miserable habit together, especially when Mom got sicker and sicker. It was temporary relief, but it made no sense at
all. The smoking had to stop. Change was certainly in order.
I crumpled the empty pack of Marlboro Lights into a wet ball. It was about time to go in and dry off. I resigned myself to the family meeting. Que será. But first I needed fortification, perhaps a vodka tonic, or something of that nature. I checked my watch to see if it was five o’clock. The time, however, was of minor consideration. While I had problems with certain aspects of medication, my self-medication with vodka didn’t bother me at all.
I tried once more. “Dad, talk to me.”
Nothing seemed forthcoming.
I waited. We each grew damper and damper. We couldn’t sit out there much longer. The dampness was actually becoming a health hazard.
“Dad, what do you want to do … you know … now that Mom’s gone? We have to talk about it, Dad, and they will all be over here soon.”
“I don’t know. My heart is broken.” His shoulders shook a little, and he slouched into his chair.
“Yes, I know.” Really, I had no idea what he was going through, as close as we were. In my own marriage, I hadn’t even made it to the halfway mark of his fifty-two years with Mom.
“I’ll just go away,” he said. “Yes. I think I’ll just go away.”
“Go away?”
“What?” He looked as far away as the next planet.
“Where are you going? Dad! What are you talking about?”
The rain started up again, and this time it was relentless—a cold, hard soaker. It made me shiver with a new shade of cold. I was afraid he wanted to lie down and die now that Mom was gone. But that wasn’t it at all.
“I’m going with you.” His voice was strong. “I’m going to Florida with my Nancy.” He sat up straight in his chair and reached for my hand again.
Then, just as quick as lightening, I knew what he’d been ruminating about. His face lit up like the sun on the beach.
I was stunned.
Now what?
The Last Cadillac Page 1
