The next morning we walked with Patsy over to her house. The whole house was different, there was a lot to absorb, but Patsy’s eyes went straight to a picture of Eddie that we’d put up on the wall. She walked over to the picture and said, “Oh, Eddie. He loved this house. He was so excited for me to move in. I always thought he would stay here.” Then she just started weeping. Getting her health back, moving on with her life, fixing up her house—I think all of it meant saying good-bye to Eddie, letting him go. Patsy spent a while there, blind to the changes that were all around her, taking the time she needed to mourn Eddie in that moment.
When she was ready, Patsy walked through the whole house with me. I could see that she loved it. She turned to me and said, “Thank you, I don’t know what to say.”
I said, “You don’t need to thank us. I just want you to be happy.”
• • •
That night all the friends flew home and left us to drive home alone. Dean, the kids, and I stayed an extra night with Patsy. I wanted to cook dinner for her, but we all love her catfish, so she instructed me and I made it for us all. Patsy, her son Chad, Dean, Liam, Stella, and I all had dinner together at her new dining room table. Patsy took only the tiny servings that her surgery would allow. Over the course of our visit she had her real babies and her adopted babies together, and she was on her way to health. It felt right.
Patsy was healing, but as she was rebuilding her life, unbeknownst to me, the life of another beloved family member was coming to an end.
Lost and Found
Toward the end of October my friend Marcel got a call from my mother’s assistant on his cell phone. For reasons nobody can remember anymore, Marcel has my old cell phone number from six years ago. I know that at some point my mother had my correct phone number and Dean’s, but it shows how out of touch we were that this time her assistant called Marcel’s phone. The message she left said that my mother had family news, not about her or Randy, and to please call. I instantly thought, Something’s happened to Uncle Danny.
The children had visited their grandmother, and it had gone well, but that hadn’t yet changed anything between me and my mother. We weren’t exactly what anyone would call chatty. Now, in my typical, nonconfrontational way, I emailed my mother’s assistant saying, “My friend Marcel said that he got a message from you. I wanted to check in and see if it was you, if it was legit.” I added that I couldn’t call right then because I was at a loud party. In fact, the Guncles were over for dinner. It wasn’t exactly a party, but I was too chicken to pick up the phone.
The assistant responded, “Sorry to disrupt your party. It was me, that was the only number we had on file for you. You can reach your mother on her cell.”
We hadn’t talked in a long time. I was nervous to call. I’m not proud of being scared to call, but that’s the truth. So instead I wrote back, “With two children under three, life is all about disruptions. Did something happen to Uncle Danny?”
Later one of the Guncles would say, “You managed to successfully avoid talking to your mother again. Nicely done.” Being nonconfrontational was my habit, but I wasn’t trying to make a point or take a stance. This wasn’t about me and my mother and our relationship, such as it was. It was about Uncle Danny.
A reply popped up from my mother’s assistant. She answered, “Well, your mother didn’t want to tell you over email, but your uncle Danny passed yesterday and we wanted you to know.”
I stood there in the kitchen, processing the email I’d just received. The Guncles were there with me; Dean was on his way to the airport for a motorcycle race in Vegas. Scout said, “Are you okay?”
I said, “I feel nothing. I should feel something, but I don’t.”
Bill said, “People deal with things in different ways.”
Dean canceled his trip and came right back home. In the kitchen he hugged me and I started to cry, but I tried to stop myself. He said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “It’s not all right to cry. It’s a sign of weakness. Crying and being comforted makes this about me. People shouldn’t feel sorry for me.” I felt like I didn’t deserve sympathy or attention, maybe because I’m not used to it. I’ve spent my whole life getting attention, but none of it personal attention, none of it attention to my feelings. So I’m not used to that, or I crave it, or I’m all mixed up about it. But Dean told me to let go, and then, in the kitchen with Dean, I let myself cry. Soon I was bawling. Dean said, “This is good. It’s okay. You loved him.”
My father died before my children were born. It was the order of things and I try not to dwell on it. But after he was gone, Uncle Danny was the closest I could get to my father. Sharing the kids with him was a little like having my dad see them. When Stella turned one, Uncle Danny came to visit. He stayed with us and experienced day-to-day life with the kids. That was the last time we saw him, and it had been a really sweet visit, a memorable good-bye, though I didn’t know it at the time.
The feeling that Uncle Danny and I had said good-bye on a nice note was a change for me. When I lost my father, when I lost Nanny, who raised me, even when I lost my beloved dog Mimi La Rue, I felt guilt and regret for not having spent the time I wanted with them at the end of their lives. But I felt no regret about the relationship I had with Uncle Danny. I emailed him all the time. I kept him in my children’s lives. We’d had a great visit four months earlier. This time, for once, there was no internal conflict—just grief.
A chapter of my life was over. Uncle Danny had been a parent to me. In a way he was like my dad, his brother; he looked just like him, but he was a different kind of father. He filled in gaps that my father left. My father never asked me questions about my personal life. We had a loving but unemotional relationship that mostly came down to chatting about the dogs. Uncle Danny, on the other hand, actually asked about my thoughts and feelings. Back when I was in my twenties and he’d come to town to visit, he’d say, “When are you going to get married? When are you going to have babies?” When he was visiting for Stella’s first birthday, at some point he stared at me, giggling, beaming, and shaking his head. He said, “I just can’t believe it. You’re a hands-on mom. I can’t believe it.” I’d never had anyone show that they were proud of me like that.
Now Uncle Danny was gone. I would never again have someone paternal watch over me with pride. That period of my life was over. Nobody was taking care of me. I’d become the emotional matriarch of my family. From now on it would be me taking care of my children, looking down and being proud of them. It was a moment of sadness and a moment of closure.
• • •
My younger brother Randy and I, who had always been best friends, hadn’t talked for a long time. In our twenties we were inseparable. We had sushi lunches three days a week. We shopped together. I picked out his whole wardrobe at Miu Miu. We spent every weekend together. On Friday nights we’d meet at my apartment with friends and all go out to dinner or a bar. Randy was the one I’d call—before Jenny or Mehran—to give him the blow-by-blow if I went on a date with a new guy. He’d analyze every detail with me. He was my straight Mehran.
Randy stayed neutral while my mom and I were battling it out, first in and around my first wedding and later in the press. I wanted him to take my side. He had always been my best ally. We grew up together. He knew what I was going through, better than anyone else. Amid the public drama, Randy and I had fallen into silence. I had missed Randy, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone. Neither of us did. Once in a while we’d text or email on birthdays or Christmas, but we’d lost our connection.
When Uncle Danny died, Randy wrote me an email. It was the first I’d heard from him in a long time. He said that he knew how much Uncle Danny meant to me and how hard it was for me to lose him. He said that it was so lovely that my kids and I spent time with Uncle Danny. And then he said something like, “It’s nice to see that in spite of everything you have become the mother that you always wanted to be.” I don’t remember the exact
words, but I knew it was his way of saying that he supported me, that he always had, that he knew how I’d struggled, and that he respected the mother I’d become. I knew what had gone wrong between us, but I hadn’t known what I needed from him to fix it. Now, to my surprise, here it was: all I needed was to have my brother back—as the person who knew me and my past so well, and just as himself. I emailed him back to thank him and to share our sadness.
Uncle Danny’s funeral was scheduled for a Friday in Novato, California, where he had lived. It was just after Halloween, and Liam and Stella had been at some parties where crowds of fuzzy, variously costumed kids were coughing all over each other. Since then both kids had been sick with sniffles, coughs, and mild fevers. I myself had a little cough and thought I might be coming down with a cold. Then on Wednesday night, two days before we were scheduled to leave for the funeral, my stomach pain started up again. It hit me hard. I was up all night with a heating pad, feeling achy and uncomfortable.
My first stop in search of a remedy was a holistic doctor. Dean calls her my voodoo doctor, but Jenny had gone to this woman for chronic fatigue with great results. I was impressed. Meanwhile, the regular doctors had never convincingly diagnosed my stomach issues beyond suggesting it might be stress. Maybe this holistic doctor would be able to see a bigger picture.
The first thing the holistic doctor did was test me for the H1N1 virus. She said she was testing all her patients. She handed me a vial to hold in one hand. Then she took my other hand, squeezed my pinkie and thumb together, and tried to pull them apart. If I couldn’t keep them together, I had H1N1. She could test for any illness that way! Who needs modern science? Anyway, she said I tested negative for H1N1, but that I had something called parvovirus. I thought only dogs could get parvo, but she told me this was different. “Oh, okay,” I said. I took her word for it. Anyone who could diagnose disease via finger muscle testing had to know what she was talking about. At least I didn’t have worms. Or ear mites. Now I knew what ailed me. Parvo. She loaded me up with a bag full of herbal supplements and a slumber spray. The total bill for the visit, including the treatments, was nine hundred dollars. Boy, I should have gone to a vet. It would have been cheaper.
On Thursday night I made my shepherd’s pie from scratch to take my mind off feeling sick. I was on the living room couch tweeting about how much I love making shepherd’s pie when Dean came home. I told him my stomach was killing me. It was so bad, I thought I might have to go back to the hospital, but we couldn’t decide what to do. We were supposed to fly to Uncle Danny’s funeral at five thirty the next morning. If I spent all night in the emergency room, how would I make it to San Francisco? But if I didn’t get medicine for the pain, I wasn’t sure I’d survive the flight. Finally, at ten thirty I couldn’t take it anymore. We called the Guncles to take care of the kids. As soon as they arrived, we went to a nearby hospital.
By the time they checked me into the ER, I was achy and coughing, with a sore throat and my stomach problem again. They swabbed me for the flu, and even I could see that it was starting to look a lot like the flu. But as they stuck the swab up my nose, I was deliriously saying, “No, it’s parvo. It’s just parvo. Can you check me for parvo?”
By dawn on Friday all my symptoms had progressed. My stomach pains were dwarfed by what now looked to be a full-blown flu. Except that it was worse than any flu I had ever experienced. I felt like there were golf balls in my throat. It was hard to catch my breath. I clearly wasn’t going to make it to Uncle Danny’s funeral.
• • •
Before I’d gotten sick, I’d been in touch with my mother and my brother about the funeral. My mother wasn’t able to attend, but Randy and I both planned to go. We emailed back and forth to make plans, but I also sent him pictures of Liam and Stella. When he got the picture of Liam, he wrote, “He looks like me when I was little; he looks big.” It was a reminder of how much time had passed since Randy had seen Liam. I knew Randy and I both wanted to rebuild our relationship. I’m so bad at confrontation, and I knew that seeing Randy at Uncle Danny’s funeral would mean that we would talk about what had (and hadn’t) gone on between us. Randy wasn’t the type to sweep matters under the rug. But this was a confrontation that felt right. We were going to support Uncle Danny, and it would have been the right time to reconnect.
The first day in the local hospital, Dean was in touch with Randy to tell him that I wasn’t going to make it to the funeral after all. That evening, when Dean was out getting a bite to eat, my phone rang. I was kind of delirious, but I crawled with my IV over to the table and picked up the phone. It was Randy, calling from L.A. He’d just gotten home from the funeral. He said, “Tor? It’s Rand.” I hadn’t talked to him since Liam was an infant.
Randy and I spoke on the phone for an hour. He talked me through the funeral, telling me who was there and how they remembered Uncle Danny. It was a military funeral with a gun salute. People got up and told stories about how Uncle Danny was a selfless person who had changed their lives. He told me that our cousin Butch, Uncle Danny’s son, had the old metal camping plates Danny had used when he was in the army, in World War II. Butch had given Randy three of them, one for him, one for me, and one for my mother.
At the end of the conversation Randy and I didn’t make plans to get together. We were treading carefully. It had been a long time. Randy just said, “I’ll let you go so you can get some rest.”
I said “I love you” to him.
He said, “I love you too.”
• • •
I was so out of it for most of that day—a day I planned to devote to the memory of my uncle—that it passed in a blur, except for when the doctor came in to say, “Well, they checked the flu swab. You don’t have the flu. You might have a cold.”
When he breezed out, I looked at Dean. “Was he just mean to me?” A cold! I was dying and he didn’t believe me. The doctor had never listened to my chest, looked at my ears, or checked my throat. Did he think I was some nutty celebrity trying to score pain meds? I felt like I was suffocating!
Dean went out to find the doctor and ask him to examine me. A while later they came back together. The doctor listened to my chest. He said, “You have a bit of a wheeze.” He ordered an in-room treatment for me and left again. That doctor definitely thought I was being a big baby. I definitely thought he was being a big jerk.
Soon the nurse in charge came in to administer the breathing treatment. She asked how I was and I told her my symptoms. She took one look at me and said, “You have H1N1. You’re getting worse. I’m calling the doctor. There are tons of false negatives on the test we do here. The doctor needs to do another test and send it to the lab.”
I said, “Are you sure? I think it’s parvo.”
She said, “Isn’t that a canine thing?”
Could I really have the swine flu? I was horrified. Swine flu was still a new phenomenon. The only news reports about it were describing a killer virus, the Big One that was going to take us all down. I didn’t know anyone who had contracted it yet, at least anyone who was admitting it. If they got wind of my diagnosis, the press would have a field day: they already mocked me for being thin and being a bad actress. Would they add this to the checklist? First I had a horse face; now I had the pig flu.
I texted Jenny ASAP about my potential diagnosis, feeling dirty and embarrassed. She was calm, just saying, “Don’t worry, I know plenty of people who have it. You’ll be okay.” Was it me, or did she sound too calm? Did I hear tears behind that text? Was she convincing me . . . or was she convincing herself? I thought of poor Jenny, rushing to put together a photo album of all our best moments together so she’d have something to share with her kids when I was gone. I envisioned her sitting on the couch with all three of her children, flipping through the pages with tears in her eyes. “Aunt Tori was super funny, one of a kind,” she’d tell them . . .
Suddenly a flurry of activity shook me out of my daydream. Three nurses in full protective gear came into th
e room. They drew the curtains closed around my bed. They put a warning sign on the door and (I imagined) yellow police tape out front. The room was sealed. I was in isolation lockdown. Now every single nurse or orderly who came into the room was covered from head to toe, like in E.T. when they’re examining the potentially toxic alien. I was an extraterrestrial. Or The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (my father’s movie). Poor Dean. They figured he’d already been exposed, so they made him put on a mask whenever he left my room.
The doctor followed the nurse’s orders and sent a new flu swab off to the lab, but it would take three more days to get the results.
That night the doctor decided to do a CT scan and a spinal tap. My headache was so severe that he wanted to make sure I didn’t have meningitis. I mentioned the parvo again, but he clearly thought I was crazy. I decided I probably shouldn’t talk about my parvo anymore.
By Sunday morning my headache was so bad that I was crying. The nurses couldn’t reach the doctor, who had taken me off pain medication. Apparently the rule was that on the fourth floor, where I was staying, they were not allowed to administer pain medication by IV. IV pain meds were allowed only on the fifth floor. Dean could only take so much of seeing me suffer. He lost it. “This is bullshit,” he said.
It was straight out of one of my TV movies, minus the glam hair-and-makeup squad swooping in for touch-ups. Dean the hero unhooked my IV, grabbed his wan, frail wife in his arms, and carried me out of the hospital room. He walked through the halls, into the fourth-floor elevator, and down to the ER. He stood in the middle of the ER, holding me in my paper-thin hospital gown, and demanded, “Can anyone do anything for her? She’s in pain and they can’t help her on the fourth floor.”
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